research presentations 08-02-2003 [in memoriam to freddie the ferret who died during the course of this session]
present: cocky, nat, lina, rob, jehan, nik, maja
anti-gravity, zero-gravity, 10+g force
- chinese movies about flying (started 2 years ago - crouching tiger, hidden dragon…)
- the movements are exactly what cocky is trying to do
- old chinese movies — you still see the ropes + fake effects
- images from flying birds + movie - the travelling birds
- birds in water - flocking and swarming
- cape horn - ship around 1900 - sailing artound - good images in the storm
- looking for the feeling of movement
- 'the hopping feeling'
- scene in the trees - bending of the tree
- losing gravity + refinding it again
- 'i want flocks of people to move like that'
- rhythms in it - slow / speeding up of things
- tempo of a mosquito being born
- stilts with springs
- anti gravity parabolic flight
- kitzou dubois - art in space
- underwater choreograpy, choreography on trampolines
- isabel rocamora
- mainly research about the system on the bungees, ropes, harnesses
- wall gmes –> rock climbing clubs
- different air densities - desert, madagaskar, mountains, city walls
- easy to experience so you dont have to train for months – you can develop a skill if you want
- ladders
- la guarra
- harnesses that are safe enough, painless, but with enough freedom of movement
- inflatable structures (rewana)
- establishing movement from her childhood dreams, for both untrained + trained people
- tools - general, later context based
alchemy and tarot in RPGs
- p~lot rpg – personal transoformation
- alchemy - mandala, unity of oposites, separation/purification/recombination
- adam mclean - animal symbolism in alchemy
- visual mantras for chemical changes
- cycle of colour changes
- quintessence
- animal shapes representation of whats going on in the flasks
- unity of opposits - as above so below… cyclical processes
- animals and colours from the essey - to show the stages of transformation
- card game about personal transformation - tarot- randomness a-causality
- we all create our own realities + there is synchronicity to link it to the events in you life + tarot
- projecting charatceristics of ourselves on environment
- tarot - reflection of your own reality
- two events - psychic + physical - interlinked
- acausal opening between events
- scientifically – why do we have the impression of causality?
- jung synchronicity to explain acausality
- natural randomness – can cause divinity -
- tarot in an alchemical context – scientific context – idea of progress - always a step away
- tarot history
- 15-18 ct – game cards from egypt, islam, china –> linked with card games
- 1420 in norhtern italy - from islamic culture
- gypsies brought tarot from egypt
- 'god and birds'
- trumpf - game characters based on dante's cosmos
- french - ignored the rules of the italian game
- from the 19th ct it became a secret game
- the church pursuing heretics- incorporating secret knowledge into a game
- church - learning cosmology through game???????? what happened to it when it became as a secret game?
- minor arcana - cards today from the 14th ct - made for an italian king
- major arcana - where do the symbols come from?
- 'ganzenbord' - numerology – path through them – dices to add randomness
- game - players participate in the tarot + rpg –> synchronicity
- rpg+tarot → integrate it through personal transformation
- need a certain belief into the system
- corporeal/digital – situated rpg
- creation of new symbols? –> gnomic
- 2 sides of cards - 1 with lina's drawings, one blank, for the players to fill in
- 2 goals - 1 linear narrative, one personal transformation
- 1 side - the character with a global goal, one with a less explicit which one
- find the 'opposite' to unify with — how do you find balance between your character and the opposites
- people make their own stages by the connections that players make with the symbols
- history of tarot
- card games
- myth of how the tarot came about - dante's cosmos
- nummerology – looking at 7 - moon, death, disease * about 100 different styles
- how is the game built? - structure of the games + analyse the cards
- game structure for the p~lot game
- luminescent installation - with a game - you as a card/character are going on a path
- responsive floor - the process of walking, physical game
- go more back than 15th century - china, japan
- playing cards
- museum of games - in UK
- 3d live games in physical spaces based on 2d cards
- material research with small materials - linking with card-games
- using printing techniques to print symbols and attributes with the cards in an rpg
- material experiments - luminescence, conductivity, mechanical changes.
Community Wireless Networks (problems as paths towards solutions)
- cost effective self sufficient community wireless network connected to the internet
- problems - power, internet connection
- place where it is installed, units talking to other units - local
- outside world - this is where we are, we are dangerous and have TCP IP
- txOom - on the edge of the outside world
- TCP IP protocol explanation….. with milk boxes and conveyor belts for wired networks
- radio - good thing for getting info from one place to another
- how to deal with reassembling info packets wirelessly
- higher frequency - less distance, higher bandwidth and vice versa
- well defined community within 100s of metres, with line of sight
- trees and water are a big stopper to the wirelessly sent info
- high frequency - txOom like - can go up to app 30km
- another problem - transmitting data between the local village and the global centres from 100-2000km away
- electricity and powering problem - solved by solar technology
- most of it is photovoltaic - not very efficient → 17% - research into increasing efficiency - spectrum of visible light Ga instead of Si - increased to 35% efficiency
- other approaches - metal in liquid or gel suspension - problem with reducing chemicals - while the photovoltaic cells can stay out 'forever'
- what technology do you want to put in place in these remote villages to aid the people + what are you going to do with these
- different combinations of technologies to come to an optimal solution
- antennas and lenghts…
Musings on Context
- reading on 'context' in the context of culture
- social contexts - Club Med? what is the problem with it?
- which context is interesting for us, and why is it new?
- culture + cultural analysis Geertz - anthropology written 20-30years ago
- thick and thin description in anthropology
- thin - describing the action
- thick - context, circumstances…
- describing culture - seminal to use thick description
- etnography - manuscript of shaped behaviour
- culture is something public, because meaning is public, –> shared consensus
- human behaviour happens in twitches
- culture is not something symbolic, homogenous
- culture - not a power, but is a context which can be thickly described
- problem with cultural institutions - describe it thinly, which is a problem..?
- common sense as a cultural system:
- 2 extremes of culture: common sense and art –> negotiate the position in between (foam?)
- we need to position ourselves in the continuum between the two?
- innovation is not categorisable
- problem with breaking out of the box
How to Survive being in exile through Flusser's communication theory (the FoAM story
Flusser: Writings, Minnesota University Press
- prag-london-brazil-france-germany
- communication theory
- home, homelessness, what it means to be in exile
- german Mcluhan
- only now his stuff is translated in english
- poetic, clear writing
- creativity
- difference between heim and wohnung
- patriotism is a symptom of an aesthetic disease
- heimat - a habit
- very good quotes to be put in the twiki!
- info structures
- linear sequences diachronic
- surface structurtes synchronic
- spatial structures 3d synchronic
- 2 codes:
- discursive codes - sender - receiver – transmission point a-b
- dialogical - message oscillates between participants - synthetises during the dialog —> emergent code
Some notes on Metaphors
- Material Metaphor: Katherine Hales: Writing Machines
- Posthuman … Cybernetic / Bad Literary Cryticism
- writing machines
- material metaphor - say describing TCP-IP protocol with milk cartons
- –> grounded in the world
- metonym-metaphore debate?
- reading electronic texts - not taking the medium into account → context
foamfood /foamfest
what is a symposium?
- –> orgiastic debate
- - victorian food banquets, instead of sexual acts
- - homosexual conotations
- - foam banquet by december
HCI /User Testing
- evaluating the tgarden system
- txoom user testing
- child play environments - instead of putting them into playgrounds, you put them into playSpaces like tgarden
- research on play and play spaces
- extract the heuristics of playspaces
- psychology, play/learning,
- –> unpredictable behaviour - materials that can be transformed in different ways
- the environment should be changeable (sandcastles better than dead tree trunks)
- free movement, spontaneity, flexibility
- 'hypothetical constructs' that jehan read are too abstract - unable to test it
- subject matter and subject testing - a very fuzzy research method
- this week @ FoAM - made the subject matter is even fuzzyier
- in HCI - u have to know your users - top down approach - building a user model before making a product
- yahoo site design - middle out approach - top down + darwinian approach to selecting what works - everything that doesnt lead to a purchase - iterative process
- design/design forecasting how do designers categorise people not for mentality groups — send info.!
- what is the goal of txoom?
- effectiveness of responsive spaces
- in artistic projects do we have to tailor things to the users or should we tailor for rupture?
- difference in testing effectiveness of design products and artistic spaces
- designing an experiment for just children:
- people with given goals - with games
- people without goals - without games
- project should be done by may - she needs our input in the process