AMY E MARTIN // Blog

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