ART 343-Mini-Golf Hole Declaration and Pepakura Figure

For this assignment I want to create a mini-golf hole that the user would make a hole-in-one every time. I would do this by creating my hole at an angle to ensure the ball, once hit, continues to roll until it is in the hole. I would like to design the hole with several interlacing paths that all end right at the hole. I think it would interesting to make the hole look like it is impossible, yet when the user tries it finds that they will make a hole-in-one every time they try. Pictures of my progress to come.

Picture of my Pepakura Andy Warhol

ART 350-Second Project Declaration

I would like to use the EyeCon to create an interactive musical painting for the second project of the semester. I have stumbled upon various websites like this one, where the user can create their own music simply by pressing a corresponding key on their keyboard. I want to take that idea to painting, but instead of pressing a key, the beats and synthesized sounds will be activated by painting on a canvas. I intend to have Eyecon focused on a canvas where people will be invited to paint on a blank canvas. I will create areas on the canvas that Eyecon will trigger to play a certain sound (either once or looped) if it notices a change, such as paint being applied. Hopefully, each song created will be unique just as each painting will be unique.

ART 350-Arduino Final Installation

We have finally finished installing our jellyfish in the 208A Gallery in the Church of Fine Arts at UNR. I have learned a lot from this project, both about the possibilities of Pepakura and of Arduino. I feel as if we have only scratched the surface of the potentials with both of these programs, and look forward to delving deeper into each of them as my work with digital art progresses. Although we originally planned to have more jellyfish, I think that only having three works well for the small gallery space. Each jellyfish is equipped with it's own Arduino along with six LED's programmed to blink in sequence. All in all, I am satisfied with how this project turned out.

ART 350-Update 3

We've managed to nearly complete our first jellyfish. When we proposed to make 10 of these jellyfish, we immensely underestimated how much time each one would take to create. Thus, with only two weeks remaining before this assignment is due, we've decided to downsize the scale and only create a few, 5 at most. We have a lot of work ahead of us, not only with building the jellyfish, but also with the Arduino and it's programming. We have had some progress with getting lights working and some other basic codes, but no luck yet with having it detect movement to activate the lights. We plan to spend a lot of time the rest of the week and over spring break in the digital media lab working with Clint and researching online to get this whole thing completed.

ART 343-Machinima

Our group, Jett Chapman, Max Simone, and myself, decided on reenacting a portion of the very intense documentary "The Bridge" by Eric Steele. We chose to focus on one particular man, Gene Sprague, who took his life on the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004. We found a beautifully rendered replica of the bridge in Second Life and created an avatar that looked similar to Gene Sprague. We used audio and some video from the documentary along with scenes filmed in Second Life to create our machinima. Over all, I am pleased with how the machinima turned out. It is an interested concept in my mind of creating a documentary, which is supposed to be all about capturing something that is real, but doing so in a virtual environment. I think the actual documentary footage we used is very powerful, but after watching in class and seeing the other students reaction feel it would have been more powerful had we just used the footage of Mr. Sprague jumping from the bridge. We could have created the entire rest of the machinima in Second Life and left the part he jumps off as real footage, just to remind the viewer that it in not all fantasy.

ART 343-Digital Nation Analysis

I found this documentary to be very insightful and brought many pressing issues in our "digital nation" to light. Many of the issues and subjects they cover throughout this documentary are relevant not only to myself, but to others around the world. The first point in the documentary that really got me thinking was the notion that people are being introduced to media and digital technology at younger and younger ages, well before their brains are done fully developing. How might this effect the future generations? What kind of advantages and/or disadvantages might this have on future generations? I recall the kinds of digital technology I had available to me as a child, and am amazed at the progression it's made in the short period of time since then. How will this rapidly changing world effect generations young and old, and will it, or has it already come to pass that technology is progressing too quickly for some to keep up with?
The documentary also pointed out that when print was introduced it inhibited the use of our memory because we no longer were required to memorize things, we had a way to document them. It seems with the introduction of digital media, at this point, to be inhibiting our attention span. As pointed out by the students at Stanford and MIT, we are constantly pulled into hundreds of directions by different forms of technology. Our generation like to believe that we are master multi-taskers, but as the studies showed, and as I can relate from experiences, we are not. We are masters of being distracted by the most insignificant and meager things. How, as technology continues to progress and new and more interesting ones emerge, will it effect us?
Since new technologies are constantly pulling is in so many directions, it appears the way we ave responded is by alienating ourselves from other people and the world around us. I've had numerous situations where people will nearly walk right into me because they are too busy looking down at their cell phones or engulfed in their music that's coursing through their ear-buds. So how do we reconnect with people, with society? Virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft seem to be the way we are heading. Unlike the real world, these virtual worlds actually encourage people to interact, to team up and accomplish something. Will it come to a point where the only way we socialize or interact is through virtual worlds like these?
A final question that was raised by correspondent Douglas Rushkoff that I found intriguing was:
"We're all together out on the Internet, alone; or alone out on the Internet together. Does this virtual world really bring us together with others? Or does it just make being utterly alone a little more bearable?"
It's a sobering thought to really consider, and one that I'm sure will be answered here in the near future.