Category Archives: New Media

Performance

Performance
What about performance objects in AS 2 or 3? What defines or helps to define performance? Would this involve an seemingly intelligent animal or agent, dancing lights, or elements of behavior that appear rational or emotional? A weblog can be an adaptive or reactive space and we can still have the dog chase things and pant in MS Word (but this is non-adaptive). Is it enough to throw an object against Stage.width?

Performance
Spazeboy threatens to weblog during the next New Media course, which I guess would be a variant on backchanneling or perhaps a form or learning performance. Go for it, dude, we encourage that sort of thing in the course. I wonder, however, if this might form added benefit for other students who would read responses or additions afterwards, or if such practice could feed back into a new media weblog or wiki via rss. Something to think about.

Blending
On another note, Susan Gibb is going to have to start getting us up on Blender, which will be a must show for many of the students currently in new media.

Remembering the Size of the Universe

Sometimes I worry about the direction we’re taking at the college. But then I remember how big things are–I think remember is the right word–out in the real world (see title) and calm down a little. The direction we’re taking shifts things fundamentally and I think for the better when it comes to the learning experience, the approach being to focus on creating opportunities to do, learn, and practice things and to offer people a chance to keep up the learning process in whatever way they may find profitable.

New Media has done a lot for this effort since many years ago J, B, and I began a program idea built around what we thought people should be able to do after completing a series of courses. Out of this effort came four courses that draw from growing abilities in several areas and put them to work on a common, team-based product. This semester we’ve been able to run New Media Perspectives to, thus far, interesting results since we have the first go around to learn from. Hm, there’s that word learning again. The first four weeks have lead to a synthesis of major foundational issues we think are important, as well as a means of assessing students’ growing awareness of aesthetics, connection, interconnection, analysis, and dynamics. Vagueness can easily enter in here, but not when Velázquez relates to Alan Moore and Harold begins to rear his slick head in the tool bar of Flash 8. With Flash, it’s easy to make sweeping generalizations about the power of computation and graphics. It’s just as easy, however, to illustrate why and how computation and graphics function affectively.

The students will have presentations already that illustrate their ability to express and explore a possible reaction from a usable object, control perception, and build a dynamic experience with media . These are “abilities.”

Immersion and Touch

Most people who have encountered interactive experiences have felt the power of immersion, a feeling you get when you suddenly remember where you’ve been or when you hear someone say, “She’s really into that, isn’t she.” When you’re under water you’re under water and when you’re under water you must pace yourself or grow gills. On the one hand, would immersion involve actions in other places, such as turning a stone under water. This is why they say that immersive experiences must require concentration. On several other palms, would immersion simply be a state of new remembering.

But we are, after all, immersed in life and one immersive experience happens within another, as in a Flash infinite symbol structure.

_root is what I wake to in the morning.

Story and Carpentry

Okay, so it’s damned hot, even now at about 9 on a Monday. Yet it’s been a little cool here at the weblog. The kitchen remodel has, of course, expanded to include the removal of two floors underneath the existing laminate, and some rethinking because of hidden pipes in the wall where I was going to add a stud and a 32 inch wall cabinet. The vent pipe from the basement curls out from the wall about five inches from the ceiling and was hidden by the old span of cabinets. But that’s the way things go with a house you didn’t build yourself. In addition, the old cabinets had to be removed with a reciprocating saw because they had been tightly framed around and attached to adjoining wallboard and studding from the other side of the wall. I have to carefully refit those cabinets in the garage. Anyway, drawers have been built, doors, and everything’s mostly square. The doityourselfer job I’ve clocked at about 70 dollars a cabinet (6 cabs in all plus a red oak floor and a new wall) minus the extra dollars for installation by a pro.

In addition to this, the kids are doing a bangup job on their digital stories, catching on quickly to the software’s keyframe concept and timeline, but the more important concept of the storyboard, I find, is the critical concept: having an idea of an entire project from its parts and the hands-on control of paper, pencil, and sequence. Again, back to planning, preparation, and simple sketches (pedagogically and logically, this is where the good stuff works itself out). People love to dig into the cool tools, but it’s the simple expression of visual planning that will make the timeline easier to deal with. Lots of server space for video is helpful too. We’re working with smart and creative highschoolers and liking it a lot.

Digital Story and Language

John and I completed our first session with the students enrolled in the Tunxis China Institute. Mornings they work on Mandarin. Afternoons they’re with us, developing short digital stories on the themes “Who am I” and “Who are We” for counterparts in China. I can see wonderful connections here for learning language, since in our version of digital storytelling much of the concentration is on the interpretation of the personal and spatial. Some of this will deal with the basics: sport, music, lost objects. These will also have meaning in Chinese. Loads of interesting possibilities here for teaching, learning, and making relationships.

What are those things in that photograph? Now what are they in Chinese?

Storytron

I’ve been watching the Storytron development for some time now. But Susan Gibb is actually doing brainwork in the building environment, SWAT. She’s developing some fine ideas for approaching the Crawford vision of interactive storytelling. Following her into this and playing with Storytron, I imagine, will be an electric process. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with and look forward to working with the environment, as well.

The questions I have are all conceptual, such as what happens when story doesn’t develop.

Tuned stay.

This snip from the website is of particular interest

You also want these choices to amount to a satisfying story, with a beginning, middle and end, albeit which specific beginning, middle and end those will be depends on the player’s decisions. You have several tools that let you do just that – making sure, for example, that the pace stays right, that the story doesn’t end before all the threads are resolved or continue after they are, that certain key events happen at designated times and so forth.

Politics and Interactivity

Interactivity is an interesting and volatile issue. I’m excited because Chris Crawford’s Storytronics seems close to realization and hopefully some revelations along with it. My connection to the idea of an interactive story–where resolutions may be affected by reader protagonists–is spatial in the sense that people can arrange their world at small and large scales. We interact with the world at several levels: psychologically, cognitively, emotively, and kinetically. Some experiences are passive, others more agressive in terms of imprinting ourselves onto surfaces. I consider building a wall as an intensely un-interactive, whereas building a conversation, exchanging gifts, or sharing an experience are highly interactive because in these three cases I am in the presence of agency with which I must negociate.

If the stones fall, they don’t laugh at my broken fingers. How about being chased by hornets? They have minds of their own, right? Obviously a person can’t stand their ground and reason with them. These are really passive or reactive situations in a context of interactivity as a means of describing the affective quality of experience. But this may also be a distinction among technologies. A book-based novel can be manipulated, but it’s protagonist, Arthur, for example, cannot be undone from the book. In the book, we experience the story by exploring it, and that’s exactly what we should be doing with it. The right novel can change the reader. In this case, the meaning of the book or its interpretive depth (our cognitive interactions) has nothing to do with its proportional interactivity. Does interpretative depth depend upon the apparatus?

I wonder if this has anything to do with systems of politics and governing. Democracy, broadly speaking, would appear to have a high degreee of interactivity since people can directly shape its outcome, whereas a totalitarian system would have low degree if confined to the definition offered above.

3ks and Goals

Susan Gibb informs me of her three thousandth post on Spinning. That’s lots of writing. We are a writing culture. I love her sidebar lists, too.

By the way, Mexico’s goals today against Iran were positiviely surgical, from Bravo’s first ankle slide to Zinha’s head shot.

Beautiful to watch.

Scripting Space

A space, perhaps a corner of a room, is significant for what you can do with it or in it. For example, you might think of any activity as a degree of freedom.

Let’s say it’s making rice. First you need water and something to put it into and something to heat it with. You need a pan, rice, water, and heat. Two cups of water per cup of rice. Fill a pan with a little less that two cups of water. Fill a cup with a little more rice. If the rice is parboiled you can go about twenty minutes. I do mine with a small palm of salt, a dash of pepper, and a couple of sprays of olive oil. Jasmine rice. Nutty, fluffy, and dry.

The directions on a bag of rice never work well because conditions matter and change. Gas heats differently, for example, and the pan–thin or thick bottomed–affects the outcome.

In IF, as John will attest to, cooking rice or tea makes for interesting thinking about degrees of freedom that require method, as in putting together a film. Even the lightest footprint of work demands a plan, plot, purpose, and nuanced adjustments.

Let’s make some tea. It’s not really that easy.

In any physical space, such as a game or digital adventure, it seems to me that options must be physical–you can’t think an option or wish a way out. The way out is a physical entity. But you could think about an option of programming and development that initiates as a reaction, like a cell kicked into action with an electric jump.

You could start with a hall. If you move down the hall, a language could react to that action, a language behind that monitoring the potentials, a listener and a builder. If one moves down a hall, allowed as a starting point, perhaps a few doors may be in order. The prescripted “you,” touches the door and the program builds something from libraries. “You” open the door. What’s there?