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Jan 23, 2012
Weeknotesandlinks 1
I’ve always wanted to keep weeknotes like Berg London. Snarkmarket once posted about why they’re so great. I guess I am late to writing this, my first weeknote, not just because it’s the 4th week of the year, but it’s also a Monday, not a Friday. However my schedule is a little kooky this semester: Mondays and Fridays off(!!!) so I’m disoriented about what constitutes a “week” or the end of one.
Monday was MLK day, so we had no school. Aaron and I came across two apartments in the same glass building projecting blond ladies on their wall:
And watched a talk by Lawrence Lessig:
Tuesday was rescheduled to have Monday classes for some reason so I was off again. Went to school and felt butterflies and excitement. Ate at Japadog (finally open on St. Marks!) which was a lifechanging experience. Later we bought mousetraps for our house mouse. There were a few different brands at the dollar store, each with their own morose cartoon of a crying mouse.
On second thought, buying the cheapest traps (4 for $1!) might’ve been a stupid idea because no mouse has been stupid enough to step into them yet and I failed to think about what happens after the mouse gets stuck. Kelli informs me that you can just put some vegetable oil on the adhesive to release the poor thing…once you figure out how to take it outside. In all likelihood this will end up going down like the David Sedaris story where he drowns a rat in his bathtub with a spray bottle of Windex.
Wednesday I went to the SOPA/PIPA protest with Alex. My phone was dead which felt so wrong at an internet rally. Joel Spolsky said it best:
The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us… then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, “OK, compromise,” and gets half of what they want. That’s not the way to win… that’s the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online. The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It’s time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we’ve got. Let’s force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have. Here are some ideas we should be pushing for: * Elimination of software patents * Legal fees paid by the loser in patent cases; non-practicing entities must post bond before they can file fishing expedition lawsuits * Roll back length of copyright protection to the minimum necessary “to promote the useful arts.” Maybe 10 years? * Create a legal doctrine that merely linking is protected free speech * And ponies. We want ponies. We don’t have to get all this stuff. We merely have to tie them up fighting it, and re-center the “compromise” position.
My art issues class was cancelled because the teacher was unexpectedly out of the country(?). It wasn’t so bad because we all hung out for an hour and ate free cake that was auspiciously available in the building. The class was supposed to be taught by Litia Perta, of Why Cooper Matters fame, but she (understandably) backed out after this administrative bullshit happened:
I was hired to teach at Cooper in 2006 when I was a doctoral candidate and my semester’s fee for 14 weeks was $4,500. Sometime later, after completing my Ph.D. and spending a year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, I returned to Cooper Union. It was the fall of 2009 and I was re-hired by the college’s dean of the humanities at the exact same rate I was paid in 2006. I was told at the time that the budget could not accommodate any fee increase for having received my Ph.D., nor could it afford paying any increase for the standard annual rates of inflation. That same year, the dean who hired me received a compensation package valued at $239,724.
Instead I sat in on a performance class with Emily Roysdon which was fun. We listed all sorts of words that relate to performance: presence, time, etc…I said that I like how HOKEY performance is but it didn’t even make the board. Hokey is in fact a real word, according to the OED:
And not only is it a word, it is the PERFECT WORD. This reading was given to us from Peformance: a critical introduction by Marvin Carlson:
As it turns out, I can’t even be in this performance class anyway because it conflicts with art issues.
Wednesday night I had a short introduction to my Publication Design class, where I learned we would be dealing exclusively with print. Working on assignments based on designing coffee table books and commercial magazines feels like barking up a dying tree, but the class is supposed to be amazing and I know there’s a lot of skills to be developed in working with printed matter that aren’t necessarily locked in to the collapse of that industry.
Thursday had an excellent art history class, which will actually be about Western Theories of Art. Meta! Sculpture in the evening with Niki was great as always.
Friday was a makeup class for art issues, which was alright. Too much theory makes Jack a dull boy.
On Saturday I was served this suspiciously well-targeted ad while watching a Beyonce video…
…and read this amazing article by Matthew Battles on the fallacy of Apple’s iPad textbooks actually reinventing education.
As Schiller ticked down the list, for feature after feature — portability, durability, interactivity, searchability, and currency — the book earned a big red X.
but!
Interactivity doesn’t exist. More properly, everything is interactive. We use the catch-all term “interactivity” to brand as novel the qualities exhibited by digital objects striving to be like real-world objects. But chairs, raindrops, sandwiches, and envelopes are also interactive — in their own evolved ways. Books in fact exhibit rich interactive habits, evolved to engage us in peculiar ways (and increasingly, these very features are counted as bugs).
The whole Niemanlab site is awesome, never really poked around there before, but their projects like Fuego (a twitter link aggregator) and Encyclo (a wiki for the future of journalism) are great resources.
Sunday was an amazing food day. Had lunch at The Meatball Shop and dinner at Daisy’s BBQ, with coffee at Blue Bottle in between over which I met Louis Doulas IRL and we talked about redesigning Pool. Read a great article about Danah Boyd that makes me want to finish Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (a little over halfway through). I can’t shake this one particular interview from my head of some teens who call adolescence “the years of profile writing.” So freaky.
I watched a lot of weird robot videos this week. Incredibly creepy and kind of funny. They’re getting so much better but also not at all.
I want to see this movie, Robot and Frank:
From the director:
I suppose it’s possible that some actors might have had trouble working against a robot, but to some degree all those ideas are built into the script. We purposefully designed the robot to be faceless, so that it could appear either creepy or cute, depending on what point we were at in the film. Any discomfort Frank might have felt could only help that early awkward part of their relationship. Getting the emotional connection that develops to feel honest is probably a lot harder, and something that very few other actors could pull off.
Can’t wait until this is a thing:
A good interview with Zoe Strauss, who is keeping office hours at her show in Philadelphia. The people she photographs can’t afford to see her work, though.
Despite all the good that comes out of it, I have a morbid obsession with failed Kickstarter projects and the limitations of the site’s populism. Matt Haughey has a good writeup of one such horror story. Marco Arment, another.
Best/worst article title of the week award goes to The Rattomorphism of Gamification. In plainspeak, gamification turns users into rats. Interesting psychological take on why gamification will eventually fail:
the logic of gamification is the logic of corrosion…over the long run operant conditioning saps and undermines any intrinsic motivation a person has. It is this intrinsic motivation that gamification seeks to engage (or exploit) and which operant conditioning seems to activate in the short term, but this game apparently doesn’t end well….the design techniques that are appropriated by gamification will become objects of resentment given their omnipresence in the new media ecology. Game designers would be forced innovate, rejecting the rattomorphism they inadvertently inspired.
Brent Simmons wrote a great thing on gamification and Lukas Mathis reponds:
There are many problems with «gamification», but I don’t think [manipulation] is one of them. Essentially, all UI design is about manipulating users, whether you’re coming up with the most easily understood button labels that will get people to click on the correct button, the most readable typeface that will get people to read your essay, or design ideas taken from videogames. The goal of UI design is to get people to use our products successfully. That’s «manipulating people». I suspect that «gamification» makes people uncomfortable because it’s associated with Skinner box type games like FarmVille and World of Warcraft, games that can be actively harmful to their players, and manipulate them into doing things that go against their own best interests. But the idea of taking design hints from games itself is value-neutral.
Enjoyed Ben Jackson’s excerpt from his upcoming essay of game ethics in Distance. And of course there’s the great Wired piece on Ian Bogost and Cow Clicker. “It is very interesting, clicking nothing. We were clicking nothing the whole time. It just looked like cows.”
Three best things about MegaUpload (I didn’t even know the site by name before it was taken down):
1 — KIM KARDASHIAN?
2 — Kim Dotcom’s lifestyle:
“Kim Dotcom has a car with the license plate: “GUILTY”. He also had a Rolls Royce with the license plate: “GOD”. Other luxury cars have plates that say: “MAFIA,” “EVIL,” and “STONED.”“
3 — The landing page that the U.S. district court replaced MegaUpload.com with:
Finally, my first post for Rhizome hit the internet today! So excited to be writing for them. I reviewed Wendy Chun’s mindboggling book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory.
On deck this week? Fixing bugs and moving things around on the Girl Walk site before they hit the road for a massive west coast dance tour. Thinking about systems (binary, genetics, the city) for some projects I failed to get done last semester and still have to turn in!! Readings lots of theory. Doing research for a coffee table book on the Hudson Valley. Thinking about sculptures. Mocking up ideas for Pool. Sending New Years cards that I letterpressed, wrote, and completely failed to send at the start of 2011.
Jan 22, 2012
Anne Trubek on how Twitter works as a new literary form (Associative, not narrative. Helps resist the curse of paragraphism.):
Twitter may have some odd analogy to a compositor’s stick. Compositors would select type and put letters in their stick, upside down and backwards, before laying them on a galley. The average length of the type in a stick before laying down (or “publishing”) is not too far from 140 characters.
Jan 17, 2012
Iranian State radio stated on Tuesday that it will send a model of the Beast of Kandahar that dropped into their lap last month. They will also create 70,000 copies of the model to be sold in Iran for around $4 or 70,000 rials. The miniature of the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone will be sent to the Obama administration in response to a formal request from Washington last month asking Tehran to return the aircraft that went down over Iran in December.
Oof.
(via new-aesthetic, sUAS News)
Jan 14, 2012
Caterina.net » Blog Archive » ZugzwangZugzwang (German for “compulsion to move”, pronounced [ˈtsuːktsvaŋ]) is a term usually used in chess which also applies to various other games. The term finds its formal definition in combinatorial game theory, and it describes a situation where one player is put at a disadvantage because he has to make a move when he would prefer to pass and make no move. The fact that the player must make a move means that his position will be significantly weaker than the hypothetical one in which it was his opponent’s turn to move.
In game theory, it specifically means that it directly changes the outcome of the game from a win to a loss. The term is used less precisely in games such as chess; i.e., the game theory definition is not necessarily used in chess. For instance, it may be defined loosely as “a player to move cannot do anything without making an important concession”. Putting the opponent in zugzwang is a common way to help the superior side win a game. In some cases it is necessary to make the win possible.
Jan 9, 2012
The present becomes intelligible as it is aligned with a past moment with which it has a secret affinity. There is a simultaneity not only across space, but across time as well. The Roman Republic and the French Revolution, though nearly two millennia apart, are more closely linked than 1788 and 1789, separated by only a year…History works not in a solely linear way but by being arranged into various constellations.
John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air (pg. 3)
Reblogging this from a year ago because history works not in a solely linear way but by being arranged into various constellations.
(Source: caseyagollan)
Dec 10, 2011
YouHaveDownloaded is a new Russian-based service that claims to track about 20 percent of all public BitTorrent downloads. However, they go a step further than just collecting IP-addresses and file-names by exposing all the harvested information to the public on their website…The Russian developers created the site partly as a wake-up call. Those who don’t want this kind of information to be public should take steps to anonymize their traffic, and do that right. This message is also reflected in the site’s ‘privacy policy‘.
“Baby, this is the Internet. There is no such thing as privacy around here. You are sitting in the privacy of your own house, clicking links, reading stuff, watching movies. It may seem like you are pretty much alone, but smart nerds are watching you. They watch your every move. You are not human to them. You are a target — a consumer,” it reads.
Dec 10, 2011
Andy Baio, No Copyright IntendedOn YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.
…
Here’s a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote.
What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office? (Maybe “I downloaded but didn’t share” will be the new “I smoked, but didn’t inhale.”)
Dec 5, 2011
Mike Davidson, You Aren’t Who You Hang Out WithThe taste correlation between friends may be greater than between two random strangers, but it’s still not very high in most cases.
There’s a better way to expose people to new experiences and I think we’ll start to see more of it in the future. It may already have a name, but I’ll call it “phantom friending”.
…
the phantom friend doesn’t represent someone you like to socialize with — as your real friends do — but rather someone who watches movies the same way you do. They have your same tolerance for violence, same appreciation for special effects, and same patience for heavy dialogue. In other words, they may be unlike you in every other way, but their brain consumes movies the same way yours does.
…
I don’t want a computer telling me what people similar to me like. I want a computer matching me up with someone and then letting me know what else they like. There is a difference there.
Dec 5, 2011
I went all the way to Foam in Amsterdam for this:
“Erik Kessels (KesselsKramer, Amsterdam) | Photography in abundance: “Through the digitalisation of photography and the rise of sites such as Flickr and Facebook, everyone now takes photos, and distributes and shares them with the world - the result is countless photos at our disposal. Kessels visualises ‘drowning in pictures of the experiences of others’, by printing all the images that were posted on Flickr during a 24-hour period and dumping them in the exhibition space. The end result is an overwhelming presentation of a million prints.”
And those mounds are fake: there are built mounds underneath them, and the photos are stuck to them, a thin layer that is nowhere near a million photos. This is sad. We don’t know how many photos are actually uploaded each day, and this is a totally unreliable visualisation, undermining its entire point.
Filed under: sculptures made for the internet.
Dec 5, 2011
CooperUnion.biz is the new Cooper.edu
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Notes + Links on art, design, & technology by Casey A. Gollan.
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