Charlie Kam does Gilbert and Sullivan, in a three minute presentation that should hopefully awaken the Transhumanist in you.

Just remembered this music video directed by Michel Gondry, which relates to the Interactive DVD project we’re about to start in the second year. One video runs in reverse, the other moves forward – but the two stories still relate to each other, and the focus of the screens switches in the middle of the video. It’s a brilliant idea marvellously executed.

Here’s something covering what Marcus has mentioned on a few occasions recently – the manipulation of photographs through history. The first is an infamous example of the Soviet Union’s propaganda department under Stalin’s rule removing people from images, showing at least four people cut out of a picture, but there are plenty more examples. What’s especially interesting is the amount of work and detail the Soviet Union put into their photo manipulation, whereas some of the other examples, especially “Smudged Away“, are pretty awful examples of manipulation.

It also shows us that many people have few qualms when it comes to manipulating the truth in order to further dramatise events if it means more attention and greater draw/sales – but then again, that has to be obvious to anyone who has ever seen an image of a suspected paedophile in a newspaper. It never fails to amaze me that criminals have never had a good, high quality image of them ever taken in their life.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredphotos54/

I’m looking to do something next year that incorporates a lot of my interests. I’ve told a few people about this already, to get some of their thoughts, but I’d like more feedback on the idea. If you read my MSN space at all, you would have read most of this already, buuut… what I’m thinking of doing is making something that is part music album, part film piece. What I want to do is break up, say, an hour’s worth of music that I will have written and performed into segments, and the music is made from cutting the film together, as opposed to writing music and producing videos to go with it.

As for what kind of music this is, it will be me collecting a bunch of metal implements, pipes, wiring, broken computers, other electrical goods, and making the noises by either just constructing makeshift instruments or simply by banging two things together. Most of this can be filmed while still, so for much of the project I wouldn’t need anyone helping me set up cameras and sound, but I would need to practice cutting techniques and sound levels before I set about doing the project.

I want this to be completely unique. I’ve seen music made by cutting video, such as the Coldcut stuff Garrett put up a few months back, I’ve listened to music of which much is made by just banging stuff together, such as Moekestra, but I don’t want it to ape any of these things completely. It’s going to be part experimental video, part performance art, part industrial, but in total I want it to be a whole album’s length of music/film that is cold, stark and repetitive on the themes of industry production and augmentation, current and future societies, and perhaps even outright machine totalitarianism.

That’s subject to change of course, and I’m developing many of the ideas through reading up on the stuff we cover in Alan’s lessons, so the more I get to know about augmentation, technological determinism etc, and the more I cover through doing essays on similar topics, like the one I’m doing at the moment which is covering past predictions on current day technology, current day predictions of future technology, theories on the change in human lifestyles, how it applies to neural Darwinism, how Neural Darwinism fits in with Transhumanist views, opposition and supporters of those ideas, and as much as I can fit in around that.

Okelydokely, so here’s a few things to look at to kind of emphasise what I’m talking about here.

Amateur – Lasse Gjertsen

Hyperactive – Lasse Gjertsen

Lasse Gjertsen has found a huge fanbase in his simple looking videos where the emphasis is hugely on editing. The timing of each edit is perfection, and he cuts the sounds he makes to make the music, right down to the millisecond. It is a great example of not needing to be a talented performer to be a talented musician. If you have a sense for timing, then you can achieve a great deal, with a little bit of imagination. While the style I want to achieve isn’t as corny, my emphasis on using the edit to create the music would be exactly the same. Only my idea isn’t to make the whole film into this style, only partially. I would also probably take the sound out and edit it in a music program to get the ideal sound, and then take the track and cut the video to it afterwards, rather than simply cutting the video and sound together to make the piece.

PIECE NO. 5 EXCERPT – MOE!KESTRA!

Death of a Piano – Moe!kestra!

Moe Staiano is a strange fellow. The mp3 is an example of how I like to think about music. Music is not simply about traditional instruments. An improvised percussion kit made up of a set of pipes is no less an instrument than a glockenspiel. If it makes a sound, it can make music. In the first piece, Excerpt No. 5, he combines an orchestra with his own made-up instruments, a lot of which is banging on drainpipes and similar things. Below that is an edited down 45 minutes piece called “Death of a Piano”, unfortunately not with great sound quality – The last two minutes of this video explain pretty much why it was called that. But towards the end especially, the annihilation of the piano with sledgehammers is as much a part of the music as the rest of the piece, and on top of that, it is just fascinating to watch.

So that’s it, I’m just at the beginning of the planning stage for now. Tell me what I should be looking at, reading, listening to, and I will love you forever.

Or else.

Okay, I’m posting a belated entry to the Web 2.0 thing, just so you don’t think I’m a slacker. I am a slacker, but I don’t want you guys to know that. So here’s my entry – Audiostreet. I’ve told various people on the course about it over the last year or so, so you should be sick to death of hearing it by now, but I feel its worth an explanation as its relevent to what we were talking about on Wednesday, and its another excuse to link to my page yet again…

(I know…)

This is a service for various people to upload their music, allowing simple and easy access of it for others through streaming, or allowing the availability to download their work in mp3 format if they so wish to. There are similar services to this out there, such as GarageBand and Myspace Music – but these services tend to get used in very different ways. My main reason for using Audiostreet is not only to allow people very simply and quickly to listen to music, but also because the type of people who frequent Audiostreet are more inclined to be specifically interested in listening to new music in their favoured genres, whereas a place like Myspace music is very much centred around being a popularity contest – bands will quite commonly have thousands of ‘friends’ who have never listened to them, just as long as they increase the number in that friends list.

Also, comments and ratings on Audiostreet tend to be posted by other musicians mainly, and visiting an individual’s profile will allow you to see what genres they have visited, what artists they like, a playlist of their favoured songs. Its not a place to be ‘discovered’ as such, but good for giving examples of what you do, and getting feedback from fellow music lovers and writers…

…and best of all, NO SPAM!

This is going to be a rather long post I’m afraid, so be warned – or just don’t read it. Rather than just showing you what I’ve researched, I’m covering process too. I think the development of the idea is as important as the idea itself, so to have a thorough understanding of what you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it. Far from just wanting to learn things, I’m very much an advocate of critical thought, as I think knowledge in itself is almost worthless without application, and to thrash out yet again an age-old saying that I use/plagiarise quite a lot: “Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit, Wisdom is knowing not to put it in fruit salad.”

So, pretentiousness aside, I have to admit I didn’t really have a clue to begin with what this assignment was about, so I trawled the recommended links, and read through a bunch of articles until I came to these on the ‘We make money not art’ site.

Emotional Clothing

Wearables for a Distant Society

Wearable Instrument Shirt

These three particularly grabbed my attention, I think because they make the mundane, the static and unchanging into changeable, dynamic items. Clothes that change their mood in response to your own, fashion for a future society, and interactive clothing that, although seemingly little more than an amusement in this example, show how convergence of different forms, in this case electronics and textiles, changes the experience of wearing clothing. That may sound ridiculous, but scientific development along with innovation and application, proper marketing and development, leads to an eventual but inevitable change in the lifestyles of humans. I began to wonder how we will ‘think’ about clothes if clothes become more than simple fashion or necessary requirement, but are amalgamated with technology. Not only that, but it lead me to wonder about what areas are already amalgamated, and where has that intrigue and desire for change and progress and innovation not been successfully applied.

That got me to thinking about what areas of interactive design I would most like to see developed. I’m very much a person into the development of space for interactive use, as I don’t think space in itself has any utility if not put to use. This got me thinking back to the Marketing assignment I did at the beginning of the second year, where rather than using posters to market an idea, I stuck post-it notes with messages around Thanet as an idea for making our immediate environment more interactive.

I very much dislike journeys from A to B, because of the lack of productivity, the lack of things to do and achieve, knowing that you go from A to B to achieve something at B that you couldn’t at A. All the time in between is wasted, unless you really enjoy morning strolls and listening to the birds, but those are events beyond your control and subject to varying tastes. So when I walk around my home town of Sandwich, my journeys are short but they’re a bore to me. There’s nothing to do in between where I’ve come from and where I’m going to.

I’m a fairly big science fiction fan, and I think one of the problems that science fiction writers tend to have is that while they develop future technologies, man’s life rarely changes itself. The goals are usually the same, except in some unique examples. Some science fiction writers understand that the course of life changes with scientific development of an environment, for example, in Dan Simmons’ “Hyperion”, rooms in houses exist on different worlds, implants aid memory and mobile devices give constant access to information and political decision making for people on the move. Living, movement, information gathering and processing all change, so the human way of life itself is developed as it is augmented with technology, which we have covered quite extensively in Alan’s lessons regarding technophobia and technophilia.

While all that sounds like a wonderful future to me, apart from exhibits I think actual development of areas in terms of interactivity has been fairly slow. When I move around a town, I want to constantly be able to make and do things, so that being between A and B is not a useless exercise. I believe this is down to a kind of mental inertia on the part of the majority of people – which is nobody’s fault as such, it’s just like having to break before turning a corner. So for this project, I’ve had a few thoughts on what I want to achieve.

Around my town, like many others, we have notice boards which are locked and only a few people can access and contribute to, whenever they get round to doing it. We have boards where people write on cards advertising things for sale, employees or employer required, and other various wants. We put legal notices in local papers and on the library well. You limit your audience in doing this, you limit the effectiveness of your statement, you limit the service provided to the public and you limit your potential returns.

My idea then is to take these elements, public notice boards, advertising boards, message boards, street maps, billboards, and combine them to be accessed in your environment.

I had two thoughts of how to achieve this – firstly through specified “big-screen” areas, which replace the old town board areas, that you access through a terminal in front of the big screen. The terminal has two card entry points. The first is for the upcoming ID cards. I believe ID cards can be useful in society, and in this case, the chip on the ID card is read and your personal details are accessed from the database. Secondly through a built in projector as part of a handset which you can carry around with you and project to any wall. The trouble with the two ideas being that in the first, you still have to be in the right place to use the terminal and in the second, projecting from a handset could leave the projection so shaky that unless you’re absolutely still, you may not be able to see what you’re doing, and anyway, it becomes very much like a phone or a personal organiser, only possibly more tedious. Still, I’m open to the idea of altering either idea.

In terms of the prototype we’re to create in Director, to represent this, I would be doing something along the lines of converting the cursor into a hand, which picks up the image of a card, and places it into a virtual slot. I could make an administrator’s program seperately, though I’m not sure this is a terribly good idea in that it would be fairly time consuming. However I do it, the details of the card are read if I use the terminal, and a password or PIN is required to access the use the terminal’s facilities. The big screen, or projection, would be represented as a second movie, responding (if possible) to the use of the terminal or handset, in this case the first movie.

I think that perhaps adding an administration element to this project would be for the best, in terms of adding public service messages and advertising local events. I find that around my town, I have to be at a place to find out that an event is actually happening there, which doesn’t attract new custom, it only keeps old custom. Our town’s biggest event was advertised with just flyers door-to-door, which many people never even received.

Later on, referring to my proposal, I stated this:

“Much of my current research has been on future technologies so far – looking into such things as Panasonic’s interactive table, drawing on the idea of interactivity within our surroundings as in David Kousemaker’s “Touch Me” installation, which allows individuals to “create and contribute a personal image to an otherwise impersonal public space” through physical interaction with a glass surface, and influenced by ideas like Graffiti Research Lab’s “Interactive Architecture”, involving projecting graffiti onto a tower block.

My prototype aims to reflect a technological device that would amalgamate these three differing pieces with the communications we already see in our environments that would be a device more productive and useful than any current technology that possesses the ability to do some of these things as a mobile device – laptop computers and mobile phones for example – and to do this would require the technology offering either a more efficient service, more diverse use, or more specifically relevent use depending on its technological rival.”

Here are the three examples I stated in that section of the proposal. I had been spending a fair amount of time raping Garrett’s favourites list on YouTube, and these were the three that struck me the most, because simply put, these are the technologies and ideas I want to combine for my assignment – projection, portability, the outside environment between points A and B, practicality, all wrapped in a package that is not only informative and useful, but creative.

Panasonic Interactive Table

David Kousemaker – Touch me

Graffiti Research Lab – Interactive Architecture

I know this seems a lot to be taking on, but I’m fairly clear about where I’m going, and how to present and develop this over the coming weeks. We touched on the use of the database before Christmas, and I’m going to get into this further, look at more futuristic designs for aesthetic inspiration. Feel free to comment on what you think of my idea, and pleeeaaaase be as critical as possible, pick holes in everything. I’m not going to learn anything otherwise.

Right, that’s enough for now… comments?

Here’s a fantastic bit of marketing by a company called BlendTec – www.willitblend.com – showing off the ability of their products in quite a funny way by attempting to blend some pretty strange things. There are currently 5 videos out there – Blending marbles, coke & chicken, ice, making a smoothie out of a McDonald’s extra value meal, and this one, blending a rake handle. The question is… will it blend?

Oh, I mustn’t forget this. An insight into your future.

The Executive Colouring Book

I’ve been looking at this site today – http://blogger.xs4all.nl/marcg – which has a whole bunch of interesting and unique advertising ideas. Inevitably I’m going to steal some of this work for future marketing assignments. Here’s a trick I think we missed out on for the Thanet Pride assignment:

There’s more of those posted on that site. It’s the kind of stuff that makes me take notice. Some of the ideas are better than others… but its often different, and unique.

Okay here’s me having a go. I’ll delete the text because obviously I’m an idiot and didn’t read Garrett’s original post properly. But if you’ve got any suggestions on how to alter this, such as stuff to add or different backgrounds or whatnot, then feel free to tear me apart. Or just do your own version.

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