a game

This is maybe a side project — a paper-based game that is loosely based on interviews done with San Francisco residents about space and neighborhood.

Invisible Bike Race Game
Sample Communique Cards

I am not sure… what it is, exactly, in terms of visual research?   If anything.

It’s derived from research but it’s not an academic report obviously.  It has a made-up narrative that I think relates to mental maps, but is also kind of silly.  It’s not an especially visual thing in itself, but hopefully can be used by other people to create their own visual narratives and explore how they think about San Francisco.

Creative Photography

I saw this link on FB and thought that it raised some interesting questions about metadata. None of these include data so therefor it is up to the viewer to interpret what is presented. Yet when we consider the purpose behind the presentation other than to show off one’s cute children we can consider that a lot more is invested in the creation of this project. As we later read the rationale for the pics at the end of the photos this becomes even more evident.

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/a-father-who-creatively

Power of Video Editing and Distorting the Truth

Great article on NPR about Ron Shiller, the NPR executive who resigned left after an embarrassing undercover video came out about him last week. This story talks about exactly how the video editing manipulated what was said through simple non truths or withholding information.

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/14/134525412/Segments-Of-NPR-Gotcha-Video-Taken-Out-Of-Context?ft=1&f=3&sc=17

In class, over the past couple of weeks, we’ve talked about the ethics and privacy issues of showing people in photographs and the various workarounds that people have come up with.

Yesterday, I was reminded about something that I saw on the Cooper website. I can’t find the detail that I was looking for, but this is similar (http://www.cooper.com/#approach:scenarios).

It looks like they take a photograph (with the person in it), and then draw over the person.  I believe that one of the reasons that they do it to make the image more generic for prototyping purposes, but I think it’s a great way to show a person within an environment without making that person identifiable.

Of course, this technique depends on your drawing skills, but I wanted to put it out there as an option.

researcher as romantic

Two items from the readings were particularly inspiring. The first comes from Murch’s article on sound. Particularly, I appreciate his warning to not let sound become the obvious accompaniment; instead, to force sound to cause tension and play against the expected. Other articles provide interesting background on the diagetic/nondiagetic contrast, etc, but Murch’s comment stands on its own as a design principle.
The second appears in the Steiner article (2/23), where the author writes “We may spend half an hour in front of a titian but the aesthetic effect is as if we were taking in the whole painting at a glance. In narratives, on the other hand, the dual time orders function independently.” The burden of the narrative is to be both kinetic and interpretive at once – moving the story forward, while endowing it with meaning. However, what if the narrative were less chained to these dual duties? Can it be purely kinetic at times, and at others lapse into the life of a painting? Terrence Mallick’s movie do a pretty awesome job of this. I also love Raymond Carver’s short stories for this – painting a moment that seems almost devoid of kinetic plot elements, but full of tension.
I will be working with still shots and sound to chronicle my engineering research project. The working title is “The Researcher as Romantic” and I hope to delve into both sound and narrative and their interrelationships.
Explanation for the below: in a single frame, one petri dish full of bacteria colonies doesn’t seem like much. A fascination, perhaps. But in the incubator, where there are hundreds of these trays, it looks tedious, maybe ominous. Just between these two photos, a narrative of the project emerges, whereas independently, these photos would mean something else entirely. I got carried away and included my reflection. Finally, this is a sound of the autoclave running, which I hope to edit and use as a source of terror. It’s a scary machine, man.
autoclaving, setting 2