First of all I wanted to say how much I enjoyed being involved in this project. I had a great time working with my team to try and create a project using a type media that is new to me. After going on the other two hunts, I am imagining more that can be done than just what we accomplished. I learned a lot from the other teams.
That said, some of the things I learned that could be improved. For one thing, me and my team didn’t take into account the fact of GPS drift. For the most part this didn’t affect us too negatively, but we were unable to find the final location on a team’s project. We got close, but we never found their marker. As for our project, had we not pointed the team in the right direction of the first point, they may have never found our markers. So…that in mind, I think it is doubly important to make the first marker really easy to find, and the clue to the first marker a bit easier to decipher.
Another little tid bit I noticed is the design of the web pages. One group had a really sleekly done web page…but it didn’t seem to match the rest of the project. Another group had simple yet elegant pages done and they went really well with their markers, but in the light of the day, it was very hard to see the screen. We chose to make our web pages rudimentary because we felt like it would match our markers, tie into our overall message, and with the high contrast be easy to read outside. Although I liked this idea, when I saw how amazing the other team’s web site’s were, I was truly impressed and starting thinking about the other elements we could’ve incorporated to give more visual clues to our markers.
The final thing I took away from this project is that I feel like I had a ton of energy for the first hunt. By the time we got to the last location on their hunt I started getting tired. When we encountered technical difficulties with the second hunt my instinct was to give up. In the future as a designer, I might want to make my hunt fool proof so there would be no chance of technical difficulties. How I would accomplish this is something I have not yet worked out. But what I did enjoy about this media type is the social interaction it brings coupled with interaction with the physical space.
Here is a project that uses community to find the lines between the upper and lower classes as evidenced by the presence of surveillance cameras. Lower classes feel alienated by the security cameras which seem to exist just to keep them under control. People go out into the city and document the locations of any cameras they encounter. There is also an audio component that tells them when they are approaching a previously marked camera.
It is a sort of way of finding public spaces that aren’t really public because they exclude certain types of people and private spaces that aren’t private because they are being watched. It offers people another way to experience and hopefully gain control of public/private spaces.
I watched a pretty cool video in one of my other classes tonight, and I just thought I’d share it with the class just incase there are those of you who are like me and had never seen it. Here is the link:
Did You Know 2.0
This video is all about statistics of the modern world. It focuses on globalization and the question, “where we are going from here.” It was created by a group of teachers in response to the changing needs of education to meet the demands of our technologically based society. I felt this had some significance to this class because it deals with the ever important questions that we are asking ourselves about this newfangled civilization we are a part of. One of the aspects of this presentation I found so moving was the fact that it had no dialog and everything was represented in very simplistic graphic images indicative of what we are being inundated with on a day to day basis.
These images reminded me of an experience I had the other day in a parking garage. I went up to the pay terminal and as soon as I stepped close enough to the machine it sensed me. It began speaking to me, and it told me to insert my parking ticket into the ticket reader, then it began flashing brightly where I was supposed to insert my parking pass. The machine then told me to insert my credit card or cash into the appropriate slots and began flashing again. Of course on the screen was the same message only written out for me. I was a bit perturbed at this machine for treating me as though I was not smart enough to read the instructions and obey them. Instead it talked to me in an automated voice and flashed pretty colors at me. I began to wonder if all of this technology is helping man-kind, or making us lazy and complacent. Supposedly these technologies are freeing us up to do more important things, but what exactly are these important things we are being freed up to do?
Anyway, I thought this video was interesting.
Artist Kota Ezawa will give a free public lecture on Tuesday, February 26,
from noon to 1:00 pm, in the August Coppola Theater.
Kota Ezawa has developed an innovative animated art, drawn from film
imagery. The artist has received many prizes and his work is widely
collected, and is currently on display at NY MoMA, and in the SFSU
exhibition ‘CRIMINAL: Art and Criminal Justice in America’ (his animation of
the O. J. Simpson verdict). He is on the faculty of the California College
of the Arts.
This lecture is supported by the International Center for the Arts at SFSU.
I remember Robert`s cell phone diary, and it makes me feel like I am looking at his railroad. I wonder how his future family and audience would think about his work.
I started to have cell phone since last year, and my flexibility increase a lot. I can always keep inform my situation. I could not afford cell phone because I did not have money nor job. All I could do is borrow phone or dial numbers from 7/11. Cellphone is still less accessible for international poor travelers.
From Media on the Move: “Less tangible, but equally pervasive in the risk discourses, is the alleged danger text-messaging poses to the print literacy of the young ‘thumb tribes’. With its 160 characters, it invites unorthodox forms of spelling that are clearly at odds with the proficiencies taught at school and hence judged deficient by educational standards.”
I first noticed this when I was in China a few years ago. I would hear Chinese students or co-workers asking how to write such-and-such a character. In China texting is the norm for this next generation, and unfortunately many people will substitute equivalent characters for the correct character. I.E. Characters that phonetically sound similar, but are easier to recognize (however with a completely different meaning.)
So the effects of this are two fold, the ability to write Chinese is becoming more difficult for these texters, and the ability to write grammatically correct may become more difficult. It isn’t just the introduction of textual slang, but it is a dumbing down in literacy and writing.
In the vast technological world we live in, we find ourselves continually in contact through our technology. Because of the texting capabilities of the cell phone people can be constanlty informed with the latest news, sports, and gosip. Texting can also be a means for political change. As seen in the Philippines, texting was able to usurp a corrupt politican and bring the promise of change, with a simple device that everyone uses. Cell phones have the power to make everyone’s voice heard in a society. If people in the United States were as charged as the people in the Philippines, then we could elicit stronger changes as our previous generations did in the civil charges of the 1960’s.
The implication of the Media on The Move:Public Discourses, article is that mobile phones are more than just a vehicle for communication. They have become physcological and social symobols.
I thought it was very interesting to look back ten years ago and see how mobile phone use in public spaces were open to criticism. Is it because the dominant population of mobile users where young males using them as status symbols? When someone takes a private conversation into a public place the cell phone might be a way of projecting there importance, e.g. Someone carrying on a business conversation in front of others coming off full of confidence and in charge. It is amazing to me that the cell phone that was once created to improve the communication technology has come developed its own culture. Your relationship to your cell phone , and how and when you use it, contributes to the making of the image you project to others.
