I was paired with Charles to read each other’s context&work plan paper and discuss about them. Due to delayed process much behind the class flow, I had to show him my abstract and personal statement only. Although my current concept about building an iPhone application to help people to be aware of the ’stuff’ that they have, furthermore to educate them how to deal with, to make a good decision is about to be banned, I did get several valuable feedback from Charles, especially about ‘narrowing down targeted user’. Knowing that my concept presentation was too vague for everyone in the class, I appreciated Charles’ accurate analysis.
In short, Charles wondered :
Is graphic interface of the application going to ‘reflect’ real space that a user lives by?
How do I define ‘user’? Does ‘user’ mean someone who is (exactly) like ‘me - Aram’ ?
I think second question is more important, and I need be clear about it immediately otherwise the whole direction of my thesis could be too wide and hazy. Dave also asked similar question about the targeted users whether they’d be ‘hoarders’ or ’shopaholic’.
You’re looking through your closet and come to realize that the bulk of your clothes either don’t fit, are embarrassingly outdated, or are just too many.It’s time to weed out the unnecessary elements of your wardrobe.But you don’t feel right about just tossing those in the garbage, now you are mentally stuck in between two decisions: simply throwing them out or sell them.
eBay would be one option if you want to make profit out of pre-worn clothes, but it requires several steps which could be cumbersome and even painful, moreover, it takes ‘time’ that is equal to money. ‘craigslist’ is also commonly known method to deal with ’stuff’ you don’t want to keep any more. Normally it doesn’t charge you listing fees and has more ‘immediacy’ nature when selling locally, however, like eBay does, craigslist also requires
Every day I open the closet, choose what to wear, and close it. This space, ‘closet’ requires my interaction in a very similar way of dealing with ‘folder’ in computer operating system, metaphorically.
Like any folder can include sub-categories underneath it, the spaces in the closet are separated by smaller piece of space where items are organized and categorized. They are gradually filled by clothes, fashion items, and some other things, although not as fast as files in the folder, therefore need to be ‘emptied’ when over-filled.
Noticeable difference is that in digital world, there are ‘signs’ that tell you when to empty the trash bin, however, in analog world, we can simply ignore the closet door that won’t close. This will not be the case if a user can dispose no-longer-needed clothes routinely, people who can throw things out may need a help to be aware of clutter.
Advertisement of new storage option does not make sense to me, nor save my mind any effort - in fact, it may produce a greater tax than throwing things out.
In this thesis I question what real solution is to live with ‘reasonable’ amount of belongings in our every day lives, focusing on people’s closet and develop a way to stay alerted at any time (immediacy), anywhere (location).
For mobile media class, I’d like to collect pictures of ‘computer screen’ from all senders via MMS. Reason why I think this is ‘interesting’ is, first, it’s easy. Taking picture of your laptop or lcd screen in front of you is something you can do right away without too much thoughts or efforts. Secondly, I thought it’ll be interesting to see many screen(shots)s in grid view because they probably give ‘different’ feeling to audiences than just bunches of screens. For example, I can imagine them look similar to eBay’s ‘Today’s Deal’ grid thumbnails view if you’re to browse ‘laptop’ as search word. Also, I’d like to explore people’s different behavior of using flash.
Virtual closet is an interactive tool for people to organize an ‘imaginary’ closet space where users can add or remove things. By exploring Virtual closet, users can measure how efficiently they have been using physical space, as well as learn how-to plan buying, organizing and throwing things out when needed.
This project aims to educate people who believe they are ‘hoarding’ or buying things impulsively often, resulting insufficient space in their house.
The interface consists of both physical device and screen-based graphic. Multiple storage bins with RFID reader attached and tagging device which can embed RFID inside represent physical form. On a graphic interface, users should be able to track what kind of items are stored in each bin, as well as ‘traffic’ of in & out of closet contents.
Later on, Virtual closet can also include more portable, mobile version of graphic interface which can be an iPhone application because of the importance of ‘immediacy’ for users to acquire the ‘data’ when they need. For example, taking pictures of things in closet could be easily done by mobile phone’s embedded camera, rather than using typical digital camera and usb cable combination.
In this thesis, I develop a way to maintain a good perspective for people who seriously takes their real-life frustration, that is a ever-growing unnecessary belongings more than the actual needs.
Data always tags me along the word ‘collect’, because that’s how I studied English matching proper words sets, and repeating the words together as ‘collect the data’. This way, I may not forget the words, but could also have a prejudice of the word - data is mean to be collected?
I created three data base sets: things that I collect ‘actively’ and thing that I collect ‘passively’. Although I’ve already showed my collections of Nike sneakers for the first assignment - Weathermap, creating my own database of Nike seemed an expansion version of weathermap, not recycling, so I included it. Second database is collections of ‘Paper sleeve vinyl replica CDs’, also known as ‘Kami-jyake CD’ (in Japanese, Kami means paper and Jyake is pronunciation of jacket which means ’sleeve’ to be exact) And third database is stacks of receipts that I ‘had to’ collect for some use such as tracking money flow.
Technically, I benefitted a lot from ‘Preview’ and ‘Dash Board’ that come with mac osx. Preview was used to show all data, so with Preview, I can ‘access’ the data. Dash Board (F9 key lets you do this function) contributes the randomness, because I can’t precisely layout which images to go where before Dash Board is launching. Images spread out in a second and they stay with desktop darkened.
Feedback:
What is the relation between each database? I certainly expected someone would be asking if those receipts are the results of above two categories purchase. (and someone did.) My answer is ‘no’. I wanted each database exist independently, …..
When they are shown, why some parts of display don’t really match to the others? I didn’t do my perfection to make all three screens look same when presenting. For example, I did not modify ‘dock’ from mac osx to automatically disappear (following pictures show the installation at the hallway at the presentation time), whereas some were hiding it.
Funny Game is Austrian horror film from 1997 directed by Michael Haneke, who also did a remake version of same title in U.S. The movie is full of horrifying scenes based on what two psycotic young men are constantly terrorizing an well-off family. The second U.S. version was a shot-for-shot remake of its predecessor with different actors and language.
When I watched the first one almost ten years ago, because of many disturbing visuals and context, this movie remained so strongly in my memory, then U.S remake version caught my attention again. My expectation grew with fairly ’strong’ actors like Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. I thought, as the title itself, ‘funny’ because same director did remake(or remix?) in U.S. I watched it and disappointed mainly from what I have seen from Michael Pitt’s performance. I would be more lenient if this was a play in theater of the original movie.
This disappointment made me think of making my own version of ‘remix’ that shows supremacy of the original version, and it requires the sacrifice of U.S. version. Technically, I wanted to put the original one on top layer implying it’s better, and ghosted-out(by lower opacity) U.S. version should be the bottom layer.
I did series of overlapped-footages that shows two opaque layers of different version of movies. First I extracted four important episodes from the whole movie (a young man borrowing four eggs, two men imposing the family end up breaking the husband’s knee, the lady being forced to find her dead dog, and the lady being forced to say a prayer), then play them at the same time.
While first remix shows almost matching position of different movie’s actors in frames, in this ‘dead-dog’ remix I found that two ladies are in different space creates more interesting, playful view-point especially when two are not overlapped, but in different scale - one looks tall while the other looks like a midget. Except very last scene with the dead dog found from the car, two ladie’s wandering around (by each villain’s ‘cold - hot’ sign) seems (to me) very ‘funny’.
Viewing these series of remix in effective way was more challenging for me, than the remix itself. Like I did last week for Character assignment, I could have used multiple LCD screens available on hallway, but I wanted to explore further to give proper feeling to the audiences - delivering disturbing (because the movies are meant to be disturbing) and spooky atmosphere. Therfore, I ended up installing projectors in the dark corner of Japanese room. Was this successful… I doubt that. Showing former version of remix at the same time only created more confusion, despite my pure intension to providing more perspective.
Why couldn’t I simply come up with something like this? I believe this is a great remix …
Some articles and stories about animal’s mental disorder intrigued me to look back when I painfully decided to fix (castration) my cat several years ago. Back then, I was worried what will happen to my cat knowing that castration could be a cruel thing to him, erasing his ‘identity’ so there will be no more territorial pissing or any hostile behavior which means convenient for people, not for his sake. And after he was castrated, I realized that it should have been done earlier if I wanted him to be a complete ‘indoor type’ cat, not a wild one. He still moans a lot in night time, and does recognize a cat doll that my wife bought for him implying it’s his wife. Only thing that has been changed ever since is no more territorial pissing at every corner to corner.
I believe that he’s still a cat, but his identity has been blurred now he’s ‘disturbed’ cat, not fixed-one.
What if he thinks himself a human-being? This seems possible for me because my cat and I have been living together for several years and main ‘character’ he has seen in his limited world is me (or my wife).
So, I experimented that what it feels like a being a cat, wearing a mask that I created, and socks on both hands.
I did a comic that consists of three stories crossing to show more than one ending sequence to the audience. The subject was ‘Tony Montana‘ from the movie Scarface, who is becoming almost insane in the particular scene that I chose to use. Since this isn’t about re-creating or ‘just’ cartooning one of my favorite movies, I decided to tweak the story by grabbing one famous(very!) line - “Say hello to my little friend!” where the story begins.
Intended flow was that the audience to read
left vertical story line first, move onto right side one following by
the ‘bridge’ strip which consists of two identical ‘pause’s in center, then
view the third story.
And each strip should tell you following stories
Left vertical line: Tony gets angry (for what happened before) then yells at the cuban mobs (outside of the door), there’s no response but a cat’s moan.
The bridge line: An intended ‘pause’ by cloning same cuts of Tony pointing his gun at the door. Finally he hears ‘Hola’ from the cuban mob outside and feels embarrassed by.
Right vertical line: Cuban mobs waiting for the right moment to burst in, gathering more crew around the door area. Then they hear loud “Say hello!” from inside and respond saying ‘hola’. The door blasts out by angry Tony’s gunshot, casualties, and there’s Tony looking down them and saying ” I said ‘Hello’(not any other languages?)”.
Feedback from class: I knew that the first one would be ‘why not ‘z’ axis’? which means, this comic lacks of three dimensional aspect. I started off thinking about making comics in 3D form even before brainstorming about the story, however, creating comic itself(in rather conventional way such as drawing and putting it in the square cell box) seemed priority that I should spend more time. And… I ended up respecting all reference comics from online and spending my lifetime to mimic them as I could. I think it was a good practice to understand, or at least experience comic drawing skill.
Besides this, more powerful and unexpected one was that many of class didn’t quite undestand how story goes. And some details such as sweating with darkened face wasn’t comprehensible.
