Proposal (Second Draft)

I want to create a "virtual fish tank" for my final project. Exactly how it would work I'm not entirely sure yet but I want to have participants either knowingly or even unknowingly create entities by having their faces recognized by a camera. The entities would be various pieces of marine life that would stat to populate a fish tank that is displayed via a monitor. As more participants begin to have their personas collected, the fish tank will become more and more populated.

Each person will have their own unique fish tank entity, but to what extent they will be able to influence that entity I have no idea. I think that the most straight forward way of doing this would be to have simple facial recognition influence the entity, however, this may not be possible. I don't know how accurate the Processing facial recognition is or whether it can recognize simple emotions like frowns or smiles. So the participants could influence their fish by also using some sort of audio input.

Once this fish are collected, they will swim around in a predictable path or a random one. Something that is somewhat interesting to look at. Now it would be really cool if the fish behaved like actual fish and followed peoples fingers and reacted to people tapping on the glass but I don't believe that will be possible. Instead, I would like to have the fish "freak out" when people make a loud clapping noise. The fish would scatter around then calm down after a few seconds.

Proposal for final project

Having just started using video in our projects, I would definitely like to incoorporate video interaction in my final project. I've been interested in having a camera recognize facial expressions that can be used as part of some sort of game. Perhaps not quite a game in the usual sense, but some sort of interactive landscape that responds to body language and basic facial recognition such as angry or happy. Either emotion could affect how the image on a screen looks, going from desolate badlands to plush paradise. In addition to the landscape, a simple character can be controlled by the user, nothing complicated, maybe just a bouncing ball that responds to basic hand movements or sound input.

I have no idea how to do any of that, but that's why it should be a great challenge.

Another idea I would like to try is somehow using facial recognition to create entities that could interact with each other related to the emotions of the participants. So one example I might like to try is to have participants stand in front of a camera, have their image captured, and then turned into an entity such as fish in a tank. A bunch of people would all create their own fish avatar... a fishatar if you will. And don't know.. they could eat each other or something.

Industrial Design Stuff (for Laura)

AME Homwork Week 7

Curves

Using color in processing than finger painting. Colors cant simply be "more blue" or "more red". In processing, as in many programs, each and every color has a specific code. What may appear as inconvenient as first will eventually, with practice, become as intuitive as finger painting. New user will find the color palette tool very useful, since it can show the resulting color and can be easier than punching in random numbers looking for the right color. Gray scale is controlled with numbers between 0 and 250 but color scale is using all RGB colors, each ranging up to 250. A fourth number controls opacity. In addition to colors, the outlines can also be controlled or there can simply be no color at all by choosing to use nofill().

Curves

When it comes to bending lines there are simple curves which is the most basic form of a curve. It is a single bend that can be very difficult to use in large quantities. When wanting to make a series of curves, spline curves are more effective because they are easier to put into a series, forming a continuous bend. This can be useful when one wants to create more than one arc. Then one disadvantage to spline curves, however, is that they are not as swooping or fluid looking as arcs. For this, bezier curves are the more appropriate choice, since they can be put into a series but still retain their smoothness.

Flower... sort of

House of Mouse (Audio Homework)

The beginning is the actual Mickey Mouse Clubhouse intro by the rodent himself with the Full Metal Jacket acting as the choir. The drill sergeant sounding guy is from a video game.

Processing Circles

Concentric circles through processing although they are not interactive.

AME Homwork Week 6

Computer Vision for Artists and Designers

Computers cannot think as humans do, at least not yet. Computers simply gather input and process it. So as long as computers can gather visual data and process it, then there's no reason it can be used to create artwork. Have a video capture of anything, paintings, faces, water bottles, then a computer could gather the digital input and basically regurgitate it into a completely new image. What the new image would look like is entirely up to the programmer. It could either an altered version of the original image or something abstract.

Top 15 Criteria That Define Interactive or New Media Art

As predictable as computers are in the way that information, humans actually have some of the same tendencies, especially when it comes to approaching a new, unfamiliar technology. When interactive media is shown to people, they have an almost specific response, following a very predictable pattern of first recognizing the way the input is gathered to trying to undermine it to then belittling it (sometimes). It has a comedic

Interactive Art

The top 15 criteria already sort of defined what interactive art is, but this wikipedia basically states that interactive is anything that an audience can participate in influencing. The Mona Lisa for instance is not interactive because the audience cannot alter the image short of actually throwing paint on it. However, a program that changed the intensity of the Mona Lisa's smile based on the audience's own smile could be called interactive.

Two Panoramics from ASU

This first one's from the bridge on University



The second's from the Life Sciences Research facility (top floor)

AME Homwork Week 5

The Birth of Loop

Humans first learned how to create music from nature, listening to wild animal calls, so it's only natural that like bird songs, many songs created by man exhibit a certain repetitiveness. There's a pleasing quality to repetitive songs, and eventually, after the rise of contemporary music, looping became a common technique. First possible in the sixties, looping is now very easy to do for almost anyone with a computer, and digital looping is as ubiquitous as it is pleasing to the ear.

The Five Principles of New Media

Numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding are the five principles. They are the basic pillars of how a computer functions and processes logic. The five different principles provide an interesting perspective on how human innovation and computer logic create a very powerful synergy for creativity. Each principle discusses how humans and computers interact, determining how things are created by each entity.

Avant Garde as Software

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Scott Snibbe

A graphical artist that grew up in a seventies plastic work shop that learned to create things for his own entertainment. Very cool. His work is very impressive and very fun. Showcased at the Berkley art museum, students can actually participate in Snibbe's pieces, posing for video cameras that capture volunteers' movements, adding them to the piece in real time. The whole thing is displayed masterfully through a visually entrancing video. Snibbe has a very interesting background, and it's cool to see someone use such a wide array of degrees that seemingly have no connection do something very impressive.

{Software} Structures

There are some very ingenuous things that can be pulled off using processing and similar languages. It's both very impressive and very intimidating to see the different types of artwork that can be made just using simple idea and having it executed through a series of code. It definitely broadens my view of what processing can actually do.

Anger through Processing

this was a lot easier than I thought it would be

AME Homwork Week 4

Faked Rumsfeld

I love these videos. They're so simple yet so clever at the same time. It's a pretty successful demonstration of how video editing can be done believable, even if it's a bit ridiculous.


Between You and Me

I could not get this video to play.


The Way of All Flesh

This photo series is interesting to look at, but it's not because the person is aging, it's because the culture is changing. With each consecutive photo, you can see how the woman is influenced by the style of each period, completely altering her hair style, clothes and in some cases, her expression.


Daily Photo Projects

These are really fun to watch. It almost inspires me to do one of my own but I feel like if I did, it would come out looking more or less like the #3 video. I don't think I have the patience for this kind of thing, but for the people that do, it really pays off. I still think there's some unexplored areas with this, it doesn't just have to be the face, it could be an entire body sort of thing like: 2 years of eating McDonalds every day or maybe 2 years of not cutting your finger nails. Come to think of it, it's probably already been done.


Oscar Fishinger

Maybe this stuff was a lot more provocative back in it's day, but right now it just seems kind of boring. Sort of a cross between Mr. Holland's Opus and Monty Python, except half as good as either. Fifty years ago this was probably a step in the right direction, but I feel as though it doesn't have the same effect on a contemporary audience.


Norm McLaren

It's impressive that this was done with a pen and some ink but like Fishinger's stuff, McLaren's work has not aged well. The shorts get pretty repetitive and almost look like they're using the same exact animations for parts of it. I'm sure that back in it's day, it was the coolest thing out there, but in 2010, it's just not that good...


Star Guitar

I'm not sure if I watched the right video, but what I so was complete nonsense juxtaposed with... more nonsense. It had no continuity and was impossible to follow. Most parts of it were very creepy visually.


Rules for Youtube: Make Art not Bore

This whole article is entirely contradicting what youtube is. Youtube is popular because it's a way of public expression without rules, the minute people have to follow rules or guidelines for making stuff is the same minute that something is lost. It's not always about artistic expression, and half of the stuff that's good on there is good because it's so random and chaotic. If you just want art, then go to Vimeo or something.


What is Art For?

To be perfectly honest, I don't quite understand this article. I don't understand what Hyde is trying to prove and I don't understand hat this article is saying about Hyde's accomplishments, if you can even call them that. It's seems as though he was just trying to preserve some sort of freedom of thought.

Fred Astaire painted in acrylic on a 24x16 canvas.

Caught one!

Cool, I want one!
Yep, he has my jaw alright.... freaky

AME Homework 3

I was there, just ask Photoshop

Image altering has become so easy to do and so ubiquitous in the last decade that it finally has been accepted in to contemporary family ideals. Poor "photoshopping" jobs are still frowned upon or even laughed at by some blogs, but most people just accept that photoshop and other image editing software has been fully integrated into our society. People have adapted to photoshop, taking every celebrity photograph with a grain of salt, fully knowing that the model or actor has been digitally slimmed down and toned. With even non-famous people using photoshop for their own altercation needs, it's only a matter of time until people will start judging photos on how well they looked but how good of a job the retoucher did.


Photography as a Weapon

Humans use up to fifty percent of their brain just processing visual information and a large amount of that is very emotional to us. A single image can provoke more rage, more nostalgia than any single sentence or any single paragraph can. Long passages of time are condensed into just a few images: an entire childhood summarized by a photograph of a naive toddler on a bike or an entire war symbolized by one image of a napalmed scarred bystander. With photoshop becoming common place in just about any digital image nowadays, it's becoming harder to identify what truly is fake, with nothing to compare fake images to except other fake images. Now the photoshop battlefield has become more dangerous to societies, where almost anything can be forged and set upon entire countries. Any emotion can be elicit with just a deft hand a cloning stamp.

The Ethics of Digital Manipulation

Just the phrase digital manipulation sounds malicious to most people, but the manipulation of photographs is not a recent discovery and is not always an unethical practice. Photo manipulation started almost immediately with photography and is only unethical in certain circumstances. When used for artwork, any all artwork is fair game as long as it's for the purpose of making something look more aesthetically appealing but as soon as something is not supposed to be known as manipulated, then the shades of gray start to creep up around the ethics of manipulation. If a magazine cover model is made to look more attractive, is it wrong when it's used to sell more copies? Photo manipulation is only wrong when the audience feels maliciously deceived. The creator can never decide when the manipulation is wrong, only the audience can.

No Time to Think

This entire video was just a little too slow. It really only has one point to make and it takes too long to get there. What I got from this is that people have been able to creatively think in times of crises, the limiting factor has always been technology and how effectively people can record their creativity, but up until recently, technology has finally become accessible and smart enough so that the only limiting factor now is our own imaginations. In this age, people can now let creativity find themselves and not have to worry about making their dreams a reality.

Reboot

Let me start of by saying that I was barely able to finish this. Sterling seems capable of only talking in metaphor and fails to make his point clear. In addition to only eluding to vague new ideas that we currently have no way of imagining, Sterling is a complete cynic. This is honestly very depressing. All I can gather from this is that technology is not so much as advancing the human race, but pulling in back into a technological darkness where humanity is destroyed by it's own innovativeness, which makes no sense to me seeing as how technology has only helped in the past hundred years. Sterling, practice speeches.

Homework Week 2

Making College "Relevant"

In the past decade college has become more focused on what majors produce what careers. With some colleges even going as far as to advertise the fact that they will guarantee jobs, schools are losing perspective on the basic skill sets that students are supposed to obtain through their degrees. Instead of those abilities that most professions actually look for, students have developed a narrow minded focus on majors, putting too much emphasis their majors and not enough emphasis on developing a broad range of experience that can be easily accessed based on career. There are a few exceptions to this, such as engineering, which keeps students on a strict track, not valuing exploratory classes. As long as students are too frightened over not getting a job immediately after their four years, colleges will keep producing the same student.

Tinkering to the Future

Technology has become increasingly dynamic recently and cannot always be approached with a formulaic attitude. It's become more common for people to work from the bottom up rather than to have a specific goal in mind. Sometimes it's more productive to just "see what happens". With technology becoming more ubiquitous in the modern world, it's likely that someone will do something interesting.

Pixel Perfect

We live in an extremely vane society, one that needs a target image to be constantly reminded of. Even in the professional modeling world, blemishes and imperfections need to be perfected, and with the millions of different outlets there are for this kind of thing, it's only logical that people be trained in making things look "normal" to the consumer's eye. People like Dangin have become pixel correctors, making human nature look more... human.


Transform Education

The American education system, and for that matter, the global education systems are not so much as education their students as they are mining their students' minds as if they were an unlimited resource. Schools are all looking for math and science skills instead of letting their students choose their own skills and abilities that they already have a knack for. There are two different types of education in most peoples' perspective: actual and less respectable. No one ever wants to encourage the kid wanting to be an artist, they only want to qualm his fears of becoming an engineer instead. Schools are producing less diverse students that all were trained for the same thing. The only problem is, only a some are going to be good at it.

Digital Detectives

Using photoshop to edit vanity fare magazine covers is one thing, but it's entirely another when images are doctored in illegal ways. Digitally doctoring videos and pictures has gone beyond smearing some of the blemishes of certain celebrities. In courts of law people will now provide doctored evidence that is almost undetectable. Only with the use of highly advanced algorithms can law enforces actual determine if a picture is fake or not. There are other methods, like using metadata, but that opens up an entirely different debate: how much metadata should be allowed to track our private lives?


Building a Culture of Teaching and Learning

People recall high school, think of the crowded classrooms, recall the boring teachers and say, "that sucked". Throw in even more students and it's called higher education. Students, teachers and parents are collectively letting college become more depersonalized, making college a less effective learning environment. Some colleges are arbitrarily named "good schools" but are still demonstrating the same flaws that even the mediocre schools exhibit. College is what you make of it, but it's becoming surprisingly more difficult with contemporary school teaching formulas.

The Next 5000 Days of the web

The web right now, as versatile as useful as it is, is not intelligent. It cannot think for itself and cannot become unified because it is unable to decide what should be put together. Without giving too much credence to Jame's Cameron's admonitions, the internet will become self aware and will be able to think for itself and there will be full transparency, where everyone can learn anything they want, with nothing withheld.

Week 1 Homework

Faces, Faces Everywhere

The main reason humans are so good at facial recognition is because it's a major evolutionary adaption. Faces convey important messages to each other and it's crucial that humans be able to understand them. One side effect at being so hypersensitive to facial recognition is registering faces in images that are not actually faces. Some are more clear than others but people can generally identify at least some features. This phenomenon is not a miracle or worth buying a piece of old toast over, it's just critical human survival technique.


The Naked Face

Regardless of whether other mammals are just as expressive as humans, humans can convey some pretty subtle things to each other with a slew of different facial expressions. Some people read and transmit these expressions without even knowing and others actively research and practice these messages. Psychoanalysts have found that facial expressions are hundreds of times more complex than angry sad, etc. The human face is an important tool for the most cultural animal on the world, and it's no coincidence.

Confidence game

Faces are useful for communication and they can be helpful the very cultural human world, but faces can also be used for less than honest means. Con men can pull off grandiose lies about themselves, making others believe their phony reputations or their fabricated achievements. Con men take advantage of the fact that people generally believe one another when initial meeting. There are other genetic factors that tie in rather than just the pure skill of lying and that is the genetic factor. Some people will simply appear more trust worthy than other and vice versa. Some faces, even with the slightest variations, can look radically different and produce a different effect when trying to lie. The height of the eyes, the narrowness of the nose, the sharpness of the cheekbones, every aspect of the face yield a different response. In addition to the face, con men also elicit body language, and the best of them, can even make themselves appear to be an aloof millionaire, recluse.

Beauty is in the Processing

On a subconscious level, humans instantly decide who they like and dislike simply based of the initial processing of a face. Average looking faces are generally found to be attractive to most people because the more common the face is, the easier it is to process and whether or not people are aware of it, it pleases them. One related phenomenon is that criminals faces are seen to be average looking and attractive, making them more successful in their crimes because people initially like them more.

How to give and receive criticism

People giving and receiving criticism act as if they always know everything. Critics especially do this, making it seem like they are all powerful in their decision making and can conform any piece of work to one measurable scale. People receiving the criticism act as if they too know everything and instant start to defend their topics, never listening to the critic. Good critics will always talk about the good and the bad equally and good receivers will always just listen before trying to rebuttal.

Bruce Mao's Manifesto for Growth

Experiments should be seen as living things and have to be let to go their own way. People conducting them should do nothing more that try to guide the experiment in the right direction, only stepping in when things can go deeper and become more useful and meaningful. Even mistakes made in experiments are not necessarily bad, because everything is learned from.

Ted Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity

After watching this video, Mr. Robinson makes some very good points. He points out how the current education system is formed around an ill-advised hierarchy system that places the math and sciences departments at the top. Robinson points out how this completely neglects other talents that students possess, and forces them to discard their creativity in the areas that they could flourish. The educational system sees the human brain like it does any other landscape and haphazardly mines for two resources, math and science skills. Any other talents are belittled, never truly accepted as "respectable" abilities. No one encourages people to be an artist or a dancer, instead it's always mathematics talents that are reinforced, trying to shape everyone into a university professor even when the mold doesn't fit. This is an enlightening video and makes some fairly disturbing predictions about a kind of bleak future where college degrees in math and sciences are completely common and while more people are out of a job, the human arts slowly dwindles away. I can say that I was moved by it, but then again, I'm not on an education board.

A Vision of Students Today

I really didn't like this video. It seems like it's trying to be more shocking than informative. I'm pretty sure the creators of the video would be much more pleased with themselves if their audience pissed themselves instead of actually taking into account that statistics shown via quick cuts and edits of gloomy students holding sheets of paper. This video tells us what we already know: college is a lot of bullshit in many aspects, people are studying for jobs that don't exist yet, the teaching systems are largely ineffective for most people. Why was this video created? Because someone thought that scratching statistics into the wall was clever. Informative, but really annoying.

Matt Webb Scope

Webb's speech was very inspiring and I've never quite realized just how easy it can be to become "good" at something. The 100 hours that he claims is all that's required is a very cool idea. For this class specifically, I want to spend my 100 hours becoming "good" at programing. If Webb is right, then in 10,000 hours, I can become a master. I think I'll even apply this concept to my other classes and hobbies.

Henry Jenkins et al, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for he 21st Century"

Technology has exploded to such an extent of the last thirty years that it encompasses every aspect of modern life. Where curmudgeons could hold their ground in the past, ignoring such advances while still being able to live normally, nowadays, avoiding how ubiquitous electronics has become and refusing to learn about them is cultural suicide. Anyone who decides simply to not use computers or not watch youtube cannot be considered normal. Maybe ten years ago that might have still been okay, but it's become too apparent that technology is here to stay. And just like people needed to learn how to drive cars once they made their niche in society, people are going to have to start learning how to use computers and all of the road signs and turning singles of the virtual world as well. Programming is not a novelty talent, but a means to survive a future where not knowing how to program would be as fatal as not knowing how to put on a seatbelt.


I Use This

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm a student at Arizona State University. I'm majoring in design studies.

My Laptop: An HP Pavilion with an 11.5 inch screen. As far the hardware, I was only really concerned with the video card, which is an ATI Radeon 3600 Mobile. It's not that great, but it can handle most of the old school stuff that I'll play and occasionally some of the new stuff. In retrospect, I should've gotten a netbook and opted for more battery life.

My Phone: an LG VX9400. It has no redeeming qualities other than it being in the Iron Man movie. Also there's a huge hidden antenna on the back that looks pretty funny.

Software

Phone: Nothing. Not even tetris

Laptop: A version of photoshop that someone handed me a while back, a bunch of different emulators and a very buggy version of microsoft word.

Other than that I use gmail, google reader and google docs when my word isn't working correctly.

Gortsky, eat your heart out

This is very cool trick for photoshop. I didn't have time to crop it perfectly, so the edges of the photograph are still a little sloppy, but the main image is pretty crisp. There's two others, but this is definitely the most interesting one I did.

World Peace

These are ten of the major participants of World War II: United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Hungary, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland. In other words, this is what the flag of world peace looks like. Caution, this is very edgy.

10 Dorm Room Faces

This is 10 People from my dorm. The shadow around the head is someone's hair. Cool.

The Face of AME 294

This is 1/3 of the faces of my AME 294 class averaged together... neat!