w00t! I finally got around to moving this blog onto my new domain dpwolf.net!
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
I found this on Flickr. Just testing the ‘post to blog’ feature.
This is the most bizzare spam comment I have found so far:
For those of you who have been unfortunate enough to never have tasted the
‘Great Chieftain O’ the Pudden Race’ (i.e. haggis) here is an easy to follow
recipe which results in a dish remarkably similar to the above mentioned
protected species.
Ingredients:
1 Sheep’s Pluck (heart, lungs, liver) and bag
2 teacupsful toasted oatmeal
1 teaspoonful salt
8 oz. shredded suet
2 small onions
1/2 teaspoonful black pepper
Scrape and clean bag in cold, then warm, water. Soak in salt water
overnight. Wash pluck, then boil for 2 hours with windpipe draining over
the side of pot. Retain 1 pint of stock. Cut off windpipe, remove surplus
gristle, chop or mince heart and lungs, and grate best part of liver (about
half only). Parboil and chop onions, mix all together with oatmeal, suet,
salt, pepper and stock to moisten. Pack the mixture into bag, allowing for
swelling. Boil for three hours, pricking regularly all over. If bag not
available, steam in greased basin covered by greaseproof paper and cloth for
four to five hours.
[Link to website deleted]
Office Voodoo is a great example of an interactive video project that uses a cinematic/televisual aesthetic with real life actors whilst maintaining meaningful real time user interaction. It is rare to a project which achieves all these aims at once.
Office Voodoo features footage of two bored workers as they sit in an office. By physically manipulating ‘voodoo’ dolls with red flashing eyes, two users may control the characters’ emotional states. Depending on the combination of the two characters’ moods a real time editing engine cuts together shots which form a kind of ‘algorithmic sitcom’, as the site says. The editing engine respects the conventions of shot / reverse shot and continuity editing, making for a fairly seamless TV like program.
While I haven’t played with it myself, the About Office Voodoo movie on the site shows examples of people using the system and the effects of their actions on the characters. It reminds me of being a director holding casting auditions where I would get actors to act out a scene in a couple of different ways. My favourite was when I asked an actor to rap a David WIlliamson play.
From the site:
“With advances in compression standards and faster, larger hard disks, the film form is finally freeing itself from the inherent linearity of the celluloid or tape substrate, as it becomes chunks of data that can be retrieved instantaneously. This explosion of the film medium is redefining our approach to narrative filmmaking and over the viewer’s control of the time flow and the plot. In the attempt to carry on the tradition of mimetic storytelling with real actors, this piece brings together the craft of cinema with automated editing techniques, trying to replicate in new media semiotics what 1920s soviet filmmakers like Kuleshov did to film with montage. Here, the knowledge of the editor is represented in the machine, and the rules are scripted according to user interaction. As a filmmaker and a programmer, the author is telling a story not only with audiovisual media but also with computer code.” [my emphasis]
More Links:
Michael Lew
Media Lab Europe
QuickTime – Tutorials – QuickTime Active X Plugin
This site contains instructions for embedding Quicktime movies in html documents so that they are compatible with Windows.
Very handy reference for checking the HTML Codes for various ASCII symbols:
OK, apologies for the recent lack of action on the blog front. I’ve been busy with a million other things but I’m back on track now (hopefully). Actually, I have a couple of months worth of links and ideas and things that I have stored as drafts with no comments so I’ll start by sorting through them. Some may be backdated so have a browse and check the categories if you are interested.
I have some pictures and things from my trip to Newcastle and Sydney for the Electrofringe Festival and Plaything conference as well as hilights from an experimental music / video night I organised recently so stay tuned (or reload frequently?).
COSIGN: Computational Semiotics in Games and New Media looks like an interesting annual conference situated somewhere in between the overlapping fields of computer science, art and new media in general.
Note to self: check this out when they put papers up mmkay: COSIGN 2003
Also check out:
2002 papers and 2001 papers.
Bevan, R. and T. Wright (2000). Online Caroline, XPT. 2003. http://www.onlinecaroline.com/
1. Ergodic Literature
“The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organisation of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange” (Aarseth, 1997: 1)
“In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (Aarseth, 1997: 1)
Aarseth argues that while reader-resonse theorists would note that the reader/user/consumer is central to the exchange, the concepts of the cybertexts and ergodic literature take this idea further as the reader must assemble or negotiate the text in the physical space as well as the conceptual in order to create meaning.
The distinction between linear and nonlinear texts is an important one in the definition of the cybertext as distinct from regular texts. For Aarseth the difference lies in the text itself rather than its reading. It could be argued that any reading is linear since it takes place in a certain order in time but it is the text that is being read from which is crucial to Aarseth’s distinction. He writes that “A cybertext is a machine for the production of variety of expression” and that “… when you read from a cybertext you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard.” (1997: 3).
“Why is the variable expression of the nonlinear text so easily mistaken for the semantic ambiguity of the linear text? The answer, or at least one answer, can be found in a certain rhetorical model used by literary theory. I refer to the idea of a narrative text as a labyrinth, a game, or an imaginary world, in which ther reader can explore at will, get lost, discover secret paths, play around, follow the rules, and so on. The problem with these powerful metaphors, when they begin to affect the critic’s perspective and judgement, is that they enable a systematic misrepresentation of the relationship between narrative text and reader; a spatiodynamic fallacy where the narrative is not perceived as a presentation of a world but rather as that world itself.”. “In other words, there is a short circuit between the signifier and the signified, a suspension of diff?rance that projects an objective layer beyond the text, a primary metaphysical structure that generates both textual sign and our understanding of it, rather than the other way around.” (1997:3-4)
Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
A woman walking down the street arguing with a man who was driving in a BMW very slowy so as to follow her and keep up. As she passed my parked car she shouted across and for a second we were right in the middle of the argument. She changed direction and he drove off. Next a large man in a kingswood parked his car and followed her down a laneway. She walked quicky away but he caught up with her down the lane. About a minute later they both emerged from the laneway, he led as she reluctantly followed. They both got in the car and left.
A man wearing a singlet and with a crazy look in his eyes, blinded by my high beam lights carring a giant Lassie style dog over his shoulder walking up my street.
I don’t know why, but every couple of years I seem to get some kind of virus which results in me feeling like crap and being covered in spots of some sort. In the past it has been Rubella, Chicken Pox, something like Rubella and now ?. The doctor says it looks like something called Kawasaki, which sounds cool but it’s not likely to be that because it only usually effects kids under the age of 5. Who knows what it is, but I’m feeling a bit better now.
