AMY E MARTIN // Blog

In class lately, we've been analyzing this and diagramming that, none of it "real" per se. Lest I fall behind, here is a slew of my recent projects.

This first one is for a class called Mythology and Meaning. We were tasked with watching a film and breaking it down for its mythic qualities. I got Man on Wire and rather than explain everything, I'm linking to my documents about it. We also made infographics and images to represent the myths we found most prominent in the stories. Look! It's blue!

For my presearch class we have done a few things. One is a sample abstract for a conference but I feel funny posting that assignment since, although it explains and refines my thesis topic, it also presumes I'm going to do something amazing and worthwhile with my thesis topic. I'm not convinced of that yet (though I imagine it will be a good experience for me) so I'm not posting it. But our last assignment involved taking an object that related to our thesis topic, breaking it down and redesigning it. My object was Google Reader and my redesign was fairly shallow. I like the photos of the puppies, however, and the breakdown of its functions and the new opportunity space created by aggregating the aggregates is interesting, if a little redundant. I think, perhaps, the next step in organization of information is a sideways or diagonal step instead of a straight forward step.

Here's the pdf of that presentation, though. Puppies! They're in there.

The last project I've been working on is for a class called Futurism. It's fun. I am projecting an image of a cat onto a cardboard cut out of a cat which spins on a lazy Susan. I also took goofy pictures of myself depicting six basic emotions and have been talking with people doing some really interesting work in the texture of emotion and a kind of digital synesthesia (I mentioned it before - Synesketch).

I don't know how well I explain it in the presentation papers but essentially my idea is a textural manifestation of emotion as a stepping stone into volumetric display. So I called it Volumetric Tactile Display but who knows what that means anyway. Essentially I wanted to make invisible things physical by giving them a physical feeling. I kept pushing and pushing though and of course I ended up with shared emotional experiences (in a NON creepy way). Future thoughts always lead to a certain level of creepiness. I wonder if we are permanently hovering over the edge of the uncanny valley.

I should also say that I am exhausted and haven't had much sleep lately hence the lack of posts and the rather stochastic (can I even say that?) tone of this post. I'm home now and I'm so going to eat an ice cream sandwich and watch Star Trek. It's on.

Monday, September 28, 2009 // 0 Comments

It's fairly quiet at 3am on a Wednesday night/Thursday morning. The refrigerator makes strange sounds but there's no downstairs-neighbor-bird or question cat (the one whose meows end in question marks) yakking about their days. Although I generally post most of my work to the CCA grad design site, I would rather keep a record of it on my own sites and so here's a big ass post of some of the other strange stuff I've been doing.

To finish up on the previous post about a physical extrusion of a digital existence, after creating the flow of IM (in my head anyway), I wrote out the functions of IM. Then I listed analog analogues (der) with the same primary functionality (communication and record) and THEN I listed why those things were different. I was basically trying to figure out what was unique to IM other than its digital nature. I then started thinking about a tangible system that would replicate IM's uniqueness. Like, whee.

I don't have anything visual to show for those parts. Or I do, but it's ugly. So, instead, enjoy this simplistic representation of networks, systems and applications. (Network is the lines, systems are the circles and applications are the boxes).

Next is a quick presentation on digital and physical convergence in gaming trends, minus my spastic and awkward commentary. I am no gaming expert and it isn't a field I know intimately but I still like to blow sh*t up (or eat tacos as in Time Donkey).

The last thing I'm going to talk about before my brain coagulates is a mind mapping exercise in which I express extreme laziness. In class we created several sets of words and we were supposed to combine those to generate new ideas for things. I took the words and phrases, wrote a program to randomize them and spit them back out at me and then, like, ran it. Here is a small snippet of illegible results.

So I ended up with shit like "platform skin" and "worm hole tech is novelty in food service." It was quite entertaining and I think my brain wants to concept some kind of collective skin device. I don't know what that means really but that's where I'm going, except for the fact that the phrase sounds like collective soul... entirely unacceptable. Maybe it's collective synesthesia. Maybe I really need to sleep.

Labels: futurism, school work

Thursday, September 17, 2009 // 0 Comments

Actually the assignment was weird but what I came up with was not. I wish the pieces were weirder. I want to work the weird, man. Anyway, the assignment was to analyze some kind of thing that exists digitally and extrude it into physical space. Now that I look back on the work it seems a form study of a digital thing. Also now that I don't have to do it anymore, my mind is semi-filled with abstract forms that have nothing to do with the functionality of the thing that I chose and mostly to do with its structure. Unfortunately when I was doing the assignment I stuck with functional ideas. So here it is:

The digital thing that I chose to analyze was instant messaging (no particular carrier). I wrote down the process by which one person creates an instant message and sends it to another person who reads it. The flip process would be the response. I then drew visual representations of each of the steps (thoughts - units (as I have always physically felt my thoughts as blocks of stuff but that metaphor probably only works for me), words - sentence diagram, fingers - neurons, keyboard - keys, computer - computer chip, modem - a digital signal via an analog wave (not an exact representation but whatevs, I'm sleepy), ISP - network, IM - globs of information traded from one side to another then back through ISP, modem, computer, screen now instead of keyboard, eyes - cones and rods, words and thoughts.

I hoped by going through the process of both verbally and visually defining the thing that I'd have a better understanding of it. I don't know if that's true or not but it was a fun exercise. There are about 7 more pdfs of this assignment but I'll have to wait until later to document them. Too much work left and too sleepy.

Labels: futurism, school work, weirdness

Wednesday, September 9, 2009 // 0 Comments

I don't know when this happened but it is now much easier and faster for me to create certain kinds of complex illustrations with Processing than with Illustrator. Weird.

So a network in the context of the assignment I'm working on (go school!) is basically just interconnected units. This needn't have any hierarchy but for whatever reason I chose hierarchy (and now that I type that, I'm going to have to do a non-hierarchical sketch. I kinda can't stand unexplored rocks). So, right now a subunit connects to a main unit which then connects to another main unit which can connect back down to a subunit. I sketched this in my sketchbook, then immediately went to Illustrator and started putting together the sketch.

To be fair, I am quite solid with Illustrator but I don't know the nuances of it the way I know Photoshop and Indesign. There may be a macro-ish function that would allow me to use Illustrator to generate a random number of random beziers which emanate from a single point and then to interconnect each single point with x number of other sets of bezier "flowers." I don't know how to do this, however, and so I would've done the entire sketch by hand and it would've taken me a significantly longer amount of time than it took me to write a Processing program that did the same thing. (That, I wrote in 30 minutes).

And when sketching other parts of the assignment, I can take the same Processing sketch, add two lines of code and have a new sketch. Working with Eclipse lately has definitely shown me how specific (and simple) Processing is in comparison. I am certainly no expert and probably never will be and it's taken 9 months of near daily stammering and cursing to even be vaguely proficient but compare that to the years of study it takes to become a good programmer and I feel like I've found a very pleasant middle ground.

Labels: processing, programming, school work

Friday, September 4, 2009 // 0 Comments

Synesketch is a Java library that translates text into visual representations of emotion. To implement this, I had to move from the Processing development environment to Eclipse. I've heard it's easy to transition, but apparently I've only heard LIES!

What the hell is "Ant" and why does it keep popping up when I try to run something? Why did it take 15 minutes to figure out how to turn on line numbers? What's a package and why is Eclipse hollering at me for using the default? What the hell is try and why do I keep having to use it to catch exceptions? Processing is fairly easy for designers with no programming background at all. Eclipse is probably easier to work in if you're a programmer but most designers I know will look at this program and its infinite buttons and unfamiliar words, go "wah" and move on.

That being said, I really, really, really wanted to play with this library so I managed to get it working, sort of. It broke when I tried to add text fields since I'm not sure how/where fonts need to be stored.

Above are the patterns for the six basic emotions (originally defined by Paul Ekman) included in the Synesketch package. I spent some time this morning inputting text to test the patterns to make sure they worked. Then I decided to "analyze" the home pages of a couple of news sites. I use analyze in quotes because I have no idea what kinds of algorithms are used and even if I did know I probably would not understand. That being said, look what came up with the below news sites!

Fox is angry as hell. Msnbc is a little bit scared, a little bit disgusted and a little bit saaaaad. It would be fantastic fun to create some kind of standalone or web app using this library. I'd like to run something that analyzed some set of websites every day and collected that data over time. Although now that I write that, it'd be possible to hook the library through the NYTimes api so we wouldn't have to wait to accumulate that data. Oh, internet, how much joy you bring.

Labels: data visualization, processing, programming

Wednesday, September 2, 2009 // 0 Comments

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