Movement 1: Questions / Disorientation

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Movement 2:  Investigatory Framework / Thinking Through Making

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Movement 3: Critical Analysis / Dissemination

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Download all 3 tracks as MP3s

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Track Artwork: Movement 1

Track Artwork: Movement 2

Track Artwork: Movement 3

Project Statement

Alhazen: The 10th century scientist considered to be the pioneer of the scientific method and the “father of modern optics.” [Source]

Cycle: In musical organization, a cycle is considered to be the grandest level of organization. it concerns the arrangement of several more or less self-contained pieces into a large-scale composition. [Source]

The scientific method is one valuable model for designers to look to when assessing useful methods for process, exploration and the development of new ways of thinking or working. On September 18th, 2009, as part of the Design Dialog Series at the Graduate Media Design Program (MDP) of Art Center, Seth Ruffins, Ph.D. presented the work that he and his group have been doing in the development of atlases that visually map embryonic development. Along with the work of his group, he also laid the foundations for where his interests developed from as well as where his group’s work could potentially go in the future. His interests and the creative output of his group show us as designers that the analytical approach of scientific processes can integrate with aesthetically stunning representations in ways that create new relationships between people from a variety of backgrounds and dense sets of information.

The scientific method traditionally contains 6 steps. These 6 steps were divided into groupings of 2 in order to inspire and inform the formal, structural, and material decisions made in the creation of of a compositional cycle containing 3 movements with 2 parts each. Each movement is composed using only the audio documentation of the spoken lecture as material. The outcome provides the listener with a sequence of 3 different views of the lecture given by slicing and composing the presentation in 3 very particular ways.

Movement 1: Wandering, amorphous, unsure, undefined, potential, lacking structure, theory
Movement 2: Experimentation, exploration, discord, unsettling, hands-on
Movement 3: Refined, resolute, towards definition, communication, concrete, reproducible

Lecture EP Packaging: Front with CD

Lecture EP Packaging: Back - Track titles as Process

The original process begin by investigating the manipulation, scanning and slicing of time visually in a manor influenced by the embryo visuals developed by SethRuffins. With the early introduction of audio manipulation to extract succinct and isolated meanings from the lecture, the visuals become less relevant to the sequence being explored.

In the final form, the visual exploration process was utilized to design the packaging of the audio compositions. The case as well as the disc contain sequenced frames of all of the visual time manipulations and audio visualization studies explored during the process.

Project Statement

On Friday October 19th, 2009 during the NOWCASTING conference at UCLA, Warren Sack proposed that computational languages should be studied not from within the sciences, but as language from within the digital humanities. This idea is intriguing and the development of new programming languages would benefit a great deal from this mode of thinking. Contemporary models for the majority of computational language development is still very much rooted in what should be considered “the original” ways of communicating with computers. Sure, some portions of logic and naming conventions are set in the traditions by which we understand thought processes. However, at a certain level, there tends to be a wide range of barriers unintentionally integrated into the various systems that prevent different types of thinkers with different aptitudes from being able to understand the constructs considered to be “inherent” within the incredibly short historical contexts of these “language” environments. At times these are the strengths of the systems for the initiated but this also is the aspect that prevents these structures from being fully integrated and understood as proper language. The presentation proposes that by studying programming structures in this way, those who develop programming languages and those who utilize them in order to create should be considered to be writers, essayists and storytellers. By embracing this model of studying programming languages as language to look at the past and evaluate in the future, new systems for the creation of the media through the exploration of computational process can become more accessible to a wider range of thinkers and makers.

As a non-programmer (or more accurately a “folk coder”) and someone who has played around with generative processes in a variety of media (see: www.formalplay.com) this also raises the question “how much emphasis should be placed on how something is built?” In written language, literature for example, the way in which a piece is written, the language used, is an integral part of a critique. But in this case the relationship of language and experience is much more clear. Once the system of “writing” is such that the “writing” and the “result” or 2 very separate elements, should how something was made be included, even in a small way, in the value or perception of what was made? This piece poses this question directly through the development of an audio and visual system in which the full meaning is most accessible when both the code that has created the piece and the piece itself are viewed. Information about the audio and visuals being displayed have been carefully crafted into the function names, variable names and comments for development of and integration into the final display.

In its original form, this piece is displayed full-screen on a large monitor with wireless headphones.

Science, Not Magic

Science, Not Magic

In an effort to explode an existing text and reorganize the text content as information to present in a new way, I developed a system this system to read and show the text from the book Flatland. The first thing the system does is parse the words from each section of novel and arrange the words for that section in alphabetical order. This creates the text that the system reads to the viewer. Visually, the system displays the text in the original context and highlights the words as they are read aloud while also plotting its location within the original source.

The formal decision for pacing and which voice to use are based on my own difficulty with following the fake inflection and “forced-natural” pacing  that occurs when a long text is read.

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Using videos from the various angles of the presentation, I wanted to explore the dissonence of chopping and cutting between all of these different angles in relation to the ways in which Seth Ruffins slices through and views animal embryos, quails in this case.

The vertical slice that is moving across the image is a slice of the video itself created in the same manor as this and this using a variation on the video pixel scan/slicing app I wrote. I also used a motion capture of the app that created this image while it was drawing out the new time shifted image. The typography was created using words printed on regular paper held in front of a lamp and video recorded. I was engaged by the effect created when light was used to reveal and obscure the type depending on how the paper was curved and folded.

This image represents all the frames of the edited video assets used for the next phase of my critique. Below is one line per frame stacked vertically and blended using “overlay.”

Still from Processing sketch to generate noise assets.

The goal of my eventual piece is to look at ways in which time can be visually modified to bring a different understanding of the event (Seth Ruffins’ Quail Atlas presentation). The basis for this first exploration is the MRI scanning and subsequent visuals created for use in the atlas used for documenting the development of quail embryos.

A still from Processing sketch analyzing video. Represented here is 3.5 minutes of the presentation cropped to focus only on the presenter's movements.

Still form presentation documentation video - unaffected camera

Still from presentaiton documentation video - infrared camera

See also: Modified WebCam for Infrared Capture

Seth Ruffins, Ph.D. of CalTech will be presenting the Quail Atlas, a research project that he and his team have created to allow biologists to better understand the embryonic development process. When tasked with documenting the presentation as a group [group members: Hae Jin, Manny, Sarah, Jae, Yuin, myself], I was interested in figuring out a way to capture the presentation using a method that in some way reflected what I was able to learn about the Quail Atlas research project in the days leading up to the presentation. The image data that is used in the project is MRI data which means that with this data, Ruffins as well as the users of the Atlases created are able to look at objects and see things that can’t be seen without an aid. With this as the inspiration, I was able to hack apart a normal webcam and modify it to only see infrared light which can’t be seen with the naked eye.

Cracking the case open

“If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” – Make’s Owner’s Manifesto by Mister Jalopy

Removing the IR removal filter

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