Sarah Jenny

In this week’s lab, I was very confused. Luckily, Kody and I worked together on the floor with the multimeter and setting up circuits and so forth. Tragically, I also struggled with the Xacti cam. It was a rough week for me. You can watch all the awkwardness below and read our assignment here.

How depressing a world without nature, without human touch and interaction. I can barely fathom such a world. A world devoid of warm, dense and pugent earth, of soft skin and rough hands. Maybe we are already living in a world not entirely unlike the one Forster portrays. This dystopian fantasy addresses classical human dynamics in an absurdly [post]modern world.

Our integration with technology has already started: “…she did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears.” (p. 5) I wonder what the effects are of the toys children play with today– all buzzing buttons and flashing lights, digitized voices reciting the alphabet back to them. The nuances and inflections of live human communication lost to monotone recordings conveniently priced as 29.95 and available to digitally entertain and babysit while parents care on their own buzzing boxes, checking their email after work at home. Will these new playthings be inconsequential in today’s child development? Will children today ever really comprehend the simple past times of past generations or comprehend and appreciate silence — a silence unknown by Vashti in “O Machine!” ?

The end, while tragic is also hopeful. Vashti and Kuno reconnect, or rather truly connect sans machine. We learn that in their world can confront the fear of the unknown, the past, the world beyond the humming of electricity to know organic touch – even if it may cost them their lives.

Last weekend I went up to the Bronx for the first time in years. I made my way up to the Grand Concourse, a beautiful roadway that used to house largely Jews and other Eastern European immigrants in immense tudor style apartment buildings. I chose a stretch of the museum around a small park off the concourse. Initially i had difficulty finding the trees. The placards were small and on the ground and not particularly intuitive to find. Even though I had a map on my phone, I spent a good twenty minutes searching for the first tree.

I dialed in and selected the extension and on my rickety speaker phone, I heard the story of a boy who went to the high school across the street and his relationship with this tree he had passed. I heard other stories, stories of how their used to be few trees here, of local politicians and immigrants. I wanted the stories to be more personal about specific trees but they seemed to be sort of arbitrary. “I pass this tree on the way to work.”

I liked the premise of the interaction but I didn’t feel as moved as I wanted to feel. I felt like the phone in aspect didn’t make the most of the interactive capacity of mobile phone technology. Also, it made it less accessible to folks without mobile phones. I think tech savvy folks privileged to have these gadgets can take for granted that plenty of people still can not afford the luxury of a cell phone. I did, however, encounter non-ITP students moving through the exhibition. I also spoke to people in the park when they inquired as to what I was doing. My friend and I were listening to the narratives on speaker phone and I explained that each tree had a story and you could all in and listen. They certainly seemed inquisitive. The premise had a lot of potential but I think building in sound systems or selecting more complex, relevant narratives would have been more appealing. Granted, a sound system for each tree would have been immensely expensive but perhaps the costs could have been shuffled around by using less trees, for example.

Check out my videos from the Tree Museum:

Molly and I worked together to combine her skyscape with my abstract birds and created a skyscape with moving clouds and birds.

To view our work, please click here.

Assignment
Fantasy Device. Think of a fantasy device you’ve always wanted. Doesn’t have to be physically possible, but it has to have a physical interface. Design what the physical interface was. Document your design on your blog, and bring it in for the class. Your mock-up doesn’t have to work, and it can be made out of any materials you’re comfortable with. Make this a quick sketch, just enough so that your classmates have a sense of what they would do to use your device.

The Antiquidator is a device that essentially brings Antique Road Show into your own home. You place the object on the sensor pad which also has a sensor above it, scanning the object, the weight, texture, and color to determine it’s age and provenance. You can record the information on a CD by inserting it into the CDdrive on the front or retrieve a print out on the top of the device.

The switch on the front is the on and off button and the three yellow LEDs will flicker when the device is scanning. The potentiometer on the far right changes the magnification of the sensors which is convenient for particularly small or detailed objects.

In Week 2 of Physical Computing, I learned how to use a potentiometer!

Assignment:

In this lab, you’ll learn how to connect a variable resistor to a microcontroller and read it as an analog input. You’ll be able to read changing conditions from the physical world and convert them to changing variables in a program.

Work:

In our second week of Comm Lab, we were asked to create a narrative video in 30 minutes with an additional 15 minutes of editing time. Below is what my group collectively created:

Click to play

It is not very clear to me how to respond to Walter Ong’s “Orality and Literacy.” Should the response be analytical? Should it reflect the medium we are sharing it through?

My initial thoughts are as follows:

I disagree with the analysis that formulary writing is counterproductive, even in modern society with an (obvious) emphasis on the written word. Theoretically, I agree the argument that it allows the mind to be “freed …. for more original, more abstract thought.” (p. 23) However, I think this statement fails to acknowledge the value of [primary] oral cultures, even oral cultures today. It is indeed difficult for me to even imagine a culture untouched by the written word, entirely unaware of language on paper – beyond the sound of our voice, the nuances of speech, the importance of memory, and community as one’s sounding board. The privilege of literacy is an important concept to reflect on as we address issues of accessibility at ITP and in Ong’s own analysis, assessed through a lens ingrained in the privilege of literacy.

Reflecting on oral tradition and culture could prove to be of tremendous value in tech- and mobile- focused information sharing. Early in Ong’s piece, he notes the formulaic nature of early poetics in the oral tradition. Writing for technology is also very formulaic in structure. The specific mechanisms and formulations used in writing for technology tends to flow in easily scanned, digestible short pieces such as tweets, texts, and bulleted lists on blogs.

Rediscovering the lost “magic” of oral tradition would add tremendous value in modern communication methods. I think it would be interesting to hear the breadth of language and interactions captured in StoryCorps audio collection. The basic format of StoryCorps has one individual interview another subject who typically has an established relationship with the former: sibling, partner, etc. How would these histories change if this technology were accessible in areas where the literacy rate is abysmally sub par compared to first world standards? Ong left me with many questions about the current and future states of communications and modernity in relation to issues of accessibility and privilege.

I can’t believe it. Time is already flying! I am two weeks into graduate school and already learning quite a bit as well as feeling overwhelmed orienting myself and absorbing all the new information and skills. This feeling shouldn’t necessarily be perceived as negative, however. I am thinking about projects I want to work on while here. I am remembering Kara Lynch, the co-chair of my Division III, at Hampshire suggesting I create light boxes for the mixed media pieces in my thesis (Division III) project and feeling like it was out of reach at that time. I feel pretty confident that I am going to be able to create light boxes now at ITP — but even more exciting, to make them interactive.

So much to look forward to and so much to reflect on.

Next week I am working with a classmate on creating a dynamic processing project of a skyscape with birds.

Assignment: Sensor walk. Take a walk around your neighborhood, or a different one. Take a count of every interaction with a sensor you see. These might include:

• Pushbuttons on an ATM
• motion sensors on doors, faucets, etc.
• Floor mats
• Cameras

Take pictures or video as appropriate, of the most interesting ones.