Response to Final Project(s)

I absolutely love the variety of projects that people came up with for this final assignment (and for the entire class in general).  From interactive genealogies, to educational trivia games, to remixed wiki entries, remixed classic novels reset in the computer age, video game maps enriched with background information, a browser effectively transformed into an audio mixing board, and of course, the classic choose your own adventure stories… there was no shortage of ideas. The projects were all wonderful in their own way, and I’m so happy I decided to take this class so that I was able to see some of the types of cutting edge mediums possible that future generations will no doubt be utilizing to convey art, literature, and information.

Brian’s project stood out to me because it is something that I would love to be able to do myself. I really like the idea of having a map that is able to, not only document the places that I have been, but also able to include hyperlinks to  pictures that I might have taken whilst visiting various locations. Adding the quotes about the locations is cool too because people can see how historical figures perceived the locations and compare those reactions to their own experiences. This project inspired me to want to travel more, but I think it also evokes a sense of nostalgia as well. I actually think that this project, or at least the idea for this project, is quite marketable. Its like an all-encompassing scrapbook that people can go to not only keep track of  the places they’ve visited, and reactions that people have had to those places, but also to help plan their next vacation. The creator can keep track of places in the world that he or she hasn’t visited yet, and plan their next vacation accordingly. Or people planning a vacation can look at other people’s pictures of places and read their reactions, and then they can plan their vacations accordingly. Its truly an awesome thing and I honesty think if someone were to take the time to turn the idea of this project into a simple user-friendly program, it would turn into a popular product/profitable endeavor. They could then take whatever money they made and use it to travel so that they could make their own “Super Scrapbook” even more extensive…at least that’s what I would do: )

Some possible names for such a product…

Globe Plotter
Worlds View
Super Scrapbook
Map Happy
Happy Scrap
MyWorld
Earth Book
i-Move

Some possible places I’d visit first after cashing in…

Brazil, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, India, Indonesia, Alaska…

Cheers to Brian and everyone else who did such  creative and original projects… (everyone). Cheers to you professor for providing us with the atmosphere and the liberty to explore and create these types of new media. Thanks for a great semester.

Final Project Link

I plan on giving some more time to looking over the final projects and writing about them, however I thought I would post  the link to our final projected before it slipped my mind.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rsooren1/344/final/

Project Stingray Part 2

For the final project Rose and I are, once again,  constructing a super awesome online choose-your-own adventure story. This project will have a similar format to our group project “Best of Both Worlds” however this new project is textually unrelated to the text of “Best of Both Worlds” and it is much more elaborate. There are more characters to choose from and more options, and just a lot more to do in general. I’m excited to see how it will all work out.

The original idea for this project was to have an opening page where the reader has to choose from a handful of animals, and then the adventure begins once they choose their animal, but the catch is, once whatever animal you choose gets eaten, you assume the consciousness of your predator. Ideally, everything will just keep recycling itself like the “circle of life” (working tittle) and the reader will be able to explore several perspectives that help paint a bigger picture of a rudimentary ecosystem.

Its a little tricky trying to work out how everything is going to weave in and out of each other’s consciousness, but so far its been fun trying to figure it out.

Universal intellectual property in Universities?

I never even thought about a lecture being protected by copy write laws before, but I guess in many ways a lecture is actually intellectual property. It just seems like someone who is interested in becoming a professor would want their ideas, and the information that sprouts those ideas, to be available to the for the general public. I can see why this professor might get upset about people profiting off of basically cheating in his class, but I doubt his lawsuit will stand. I’m on the side of the free information for all people, but I can certainly understand why Moulton might be a little frustrated.

I checked out the list of MIT’s most visited courses, and I hate to generalize but, it seems like the list of courses that were most visited were subjects that are generally associated with the left-brain, if that makes any sense. That is to say that the courses that are most frequently visited on MIT’s website are classes such as math and science and computer science. There is an intro to psychology class (the only social science that made the list), and there is also one economics class, and one language class (Chinese), but other than that everything seems to be related directly to computers, math, or science. There could be several reasons for this apparent trend, including the school’s reputation of being technologically savvy, the difficulty of  the particular courses listed, or even the personality types of the people who excel in these type of left brain oriented subjects. Of course there is always the possibility that I am seeing a pattern where there isn’t even really one.

Group Project response…

I though the group project titled Media Consolidation was interesting and informative, and it is a subject that people need to know more about, including myself. The media truly does try to control the thoughts of the general public (I know that sounds paranoid), and the sooner people realize that the better. I can’t count the number of times I have heard someone regurgitate narratives or “ideas” about political candidates or political issues or America, or even general world views that are completely created and proliferated by media conglomerates. Our information sources are responsible for helping us shape our perceptions of the world, and with the way American “journalism” operates today, its no wonder we can all be tricked into thinking Saddam was working with Al Qaeda to help plan 9/11. Its no wonder narratives like Barack Obama is inexperienced are so easily spread, its because people just blindly believe what they hear on the “news“. This project reaffirmed my belief that there are essentially a handful of people who decide what they want the public to think, and then public believes or doesn’t believe something because of it. Its not the public’s fault that they only know a world like this, but it is our fault that we don’t pursue other sources of information or even question our sources to begin with. Personally, I think that the conglomerates that control the media have become way too powerful, and the average citizen has become way too compliant and naïve. We need to care less about Paris Hilton and more about Valery Plame. This project reminded me of Al Gore’s book An Assault on Reason which basically says that the media controls public opinion and that people are way too compliant. Al Gore basically explains that this is ruining our democracy, and our only hope is the internet. This project would not have been possible without the internet, and therefore I think Gore might be on to something. I commend this group for doing a project that brings attention to an important relevant issue in our society.

Group Project

For our project, Rose and I have decided to do an online, illustrated choose-your-own-adventure about a character named Cyrus. I will be writing the different options to the story, (complete with different outcomes, however also cyclical) and Rose will be putting the story online and adding illustrations. We have mapped out a legend that details the choices one might make while reading the story, and we have written the first scene and one of the possible last scenes that in fact will end up starting the reader at the beginning of the story. The outcome of the story will roughly depend on whether or not the “reader” makes the morally right decision versus a bad decision.

What is Narrative ?

“But no matter how hard I try to describe these texts to you, the reader, their essential difference will remain a mystery until they are experienced firsthand.”
-This quote comes from the Aarseth article, and it is referring to the subjectivity of the reading experience and the necessity for the individual to experience something first-hand in order for them to be able to distinguish the nuances of particular genre. I brought up this quote because, after some deliberation I’ve decided to cop out and say that the definition of  a narrative is (drum roll please)… subjective. It might be true that there are common elements found throughout everybody’s personal definition of a narrative, but when we try and split hairs and say “well a narrative has to have a setting” somebody else will come along and disagree, or somebody will say “a narrative always has an action” and then someone will come along and challenge that supposedly common element and more often than not, no consensus is met. That is why I have come to my conclusion that the definition of what a narrative is is subjective. Before I reached this conclusion, before I struggled in my own mind to figure out what was meant by “narrative“, before I considered that this might be a trick question, before all of this, I would have given an answer such as “ a narrative is a story” and I would have been perfectly happy with that answer. Narrative = Story, simple as that! …I should be so lucky.

What constitutes a story to one person does not necessarily constitute a story to another. “ I am”… is that a story?…perhaps to some. To me it is not, yet I must acknowledge that there are those who believe it is,  and if they except that, then good for them for having such low standards and being so easy to get along with. Others’ standards for a narrative can be much higher, I know from personal experience. I had a class where the assignment was to write a personal narrative. I wrote about an experience I had ditching school and going for a walk with my dog along the Potomac and then coming home and getting busted for missing class. Sounds like its got enough going on to be a narrative, right? I mean, that synopsis alone could be a narrative in my book, but then again, I‘m relatively easy. My professor at the time was not as casual in his definition, and I had to write an entirely new narrative because the paper that I turned in apparently didn’t have a climax. I will speculate that in the minds of many college English professors, a climax is perhaps the most integral part of a narrative, and without one, whatever one has written is not a narrative, it is simply a waste of time, or perhaps the rudimentary beginnings of a narrative. With college professors pointing one way, and avid video gamers, electronic literature authors, and abstract avant-garde writers pointing the another direction, I can only break ranks with both sides of the argument and say that they are ALL right. ‘How can that be?’ one might ask. Well, it can only be if the definition of a narrative itself is subjective, because ultimately everything depends on the individual’s experience or non-experience while doing something or nothing at a particular time or beyond of time. You be the judge.

I hope my rambling about narratives has served to further increase the confusion that exists in its definition, and I hope  my little narrative about my experience with an English professor fits into your definition of a narrative. The nuances of the narrative might only be comprehensible if “they are experienced first hand”.

Response to ‘Senses’

I was impressed with the creativity and diversity of all of the remix projects, and I thought this was a really sweet assignment in general. In fact, one of the hardest parts about it was figuring out which idea to pursue because there are so many different products one can come up with. In fact, one of the hardest parts about writing a blog about these projects is deciding which one to focus on…

 

I decided on Alyse Jones’ Senses projects, because I was reminded of it when attempting to describe it to a friend after I saw the presentation. It was relevant because we were discussing the fact that some concepts can not be translated from one culture to another. Understanding that some concepts and words can not be translated from one language to another can be enlightening, in that, it reminds people that their way of thinking, and particularly, whole cultures’ ways of thinking are not ubiquitous. Struggling to express one’s self can be difficult enough when the communicators involved have been conditioned to think and speak in the same language, but this project really helps point out how difficult it can be to express one’s meaning in other languages. This speaks to the nature of expression and meaning. It made me ask myself questions such as ‘are some languages more efficient at expressing one’s meaning than others?’ and ‘does knowing more than one language broaden one’s understanding of the world?’ I enjoyed pondering these questions, and so that is why I chose to write about this particular project.

 

It is quite funny going through and comparing the poems line-by-line to their remixed translations. There really are some absolutely ridiculous things that the generator comes up with. One of my personal favorites is the line from the poem Visual that gets remixed from “Shelter for My Love” into “The circus it makes”

I have no idea how that is supposed to mean the same thing at all, hints the ridiculous nature of on-line translators and the general idea that so much of what we try to say is lost in translation.

Remix Religion

My idea for the remix project is to take ether the first line or the first phrase from a plethora of major Holy Scriptures, and splice those sentences/phrases together with ether the last line or last phrase of each respective holy book. I want to then take those spliced sentences/lines and arrange them chronologically in accordance with the formation of the religion that they come from, going from oldest to most recent. After that I plan on using a picture of the Earth taken from space as a background for all the text. I’m thinking that the picture of the Earth taken from the moon (the one where Earth looks like a gibbous moon itself) will be perfect for what I’m going for. I’ve heard that a lot of NASA’s images are available for the public, but I need to do more research in that area before finding the exact image I want to (and can) use.

 
Having the sacred words of many different religions together should make a statement in itself. Splicing the first and last sentences could also be interpreted as a symbolic representation for the nature of religion, being a mechanism that often attempts to answer the questions “where did we come from?” (first sentence) and “where do we end up?” (final sentence). Having all of these religions’ attempts to answer those questions juxtaposed with a picture of the Earth should convey the message that we are all one, and yet we are also pretty diverse… but also pretty similar.

 

I’m expecting to get a lot of bold statements that make a kind of ambiguous sense from the re-mixed text. By merging the texts of all of these Holy Scriptures and putting them over a picture of the Earth, I want to make a statement about humanity’s diversity/unity.

Seeing pictures of the Earth from far away should be quite humbling for humanity. On the other had, many religions seem to reflect mankind’s self-absorbed nature, but I don’t intend on elaborating on what I mean by that. A sense of a duality between religion and science should be evoked, and if all goes well this project should inspire thought and perhaps discourse concerning humanity’s nature, and life’s origins.

Electronic Literature

The Possession of  Christian Shaw…
Although I was able to completely immerse myself in the game-like interaction of this electronic “text”, I would not go so far as to call it literature. It, to me, seems more like a video game without a plot. One might even say that some video games are more like literature than this particular program, in that games often have plots woven in between the action of the game play. “The Possession of  Christian Shaw” just seems like a type of media where the viewer points, clicks, drags the courser around a little bit, and then clicks some more. If you are lucky (or perhaps clever?) you might get some type of  reward/response in the form of a half-second clip of flash animation. Perhaps there is some type of poetic interpretation one might derive from this “electronic literature“, but this “reader” was left unimpressed by whatever this media is trying to accomplish. This bitter review might have something to do with the fact that I spent a good bit of time messing around with all the items on the screen, thinking all along that I was making some type of “progress”, only to be sent back to the beginning of the sequence after clicking on god-knows-what. Yes, I see the potential symbolism in that. No, I don’t think it constitutes literature. Art…maybe. Literature…No.

Self Portraits…
I enjoyed this electronic literature. I thought it was an interesting way to learn about traditional artists whom I should probably already know about. I wished that there was a link provided on each artist’s paragraph that would take you to images of some of the best known works of these artists, but that might take away from the whole “self portrait“ part of the idea.. If I were teaching Art History, I might tell my students to go to this sight to study.  Obviously I’m not teaching Art History, but as a regular person, I might find this site useful if I ever decide I want to learn more about artists.

Inanimate Alice…
I thought this was really cool. I like the way the text/story, the images/animation, the music/sound effects, and the interactivity all played a role in this piece. This really utilizes a lot of media forms that are presently available to the contemporary artist, and yet not typically combined in such a way.  I think that this is the best example I have seen of someone telling a story utilizing digital media in such a way that supplements the drama effectively.

It will be interesting to see the natural divisions that arise out of the growing body of electronic literature we are developing. The idea of electronic literature almost certainly will be sectioned into different genres.  I base that assumption on my observation of the wide variety of electronic literature on this page alone.