I've always had a difficult time concentrating on any subject. I'd always blamed it on my ADD, but why isn't it just me that's having difficulty concentrating? Why do all the people my age hate reading books? Why have the articles on the internet gotten so much shorter than they used to be?
You can never be truly bored with a computer and an internet connection. You can always find some sort of new information that will stimulate your mind, making you somewhat content. But that's the problem. Most of us can only get somewhat content. We are always bombarded with links and millions, even billions of search results, how can we possibly be content with the surface when we know we are looking into a bottomless pit of information.
I think the problem arises with the internet because we are accustomed to having instant information to things but at the same time there is so much information that we just don't know what information we want. I realize that if I were reading a magazine, I would probably read most of the articles, though online, I just skim and glance over and over look things, later I can't even remember what I was looking at. So the problem is that we are addicted to instant information but we are just too confused on how to get it.
We are like lightning. If your swimming in a swimming pool during a thunderstorm and there is plenty of metal around you then you are safer than you might think because when lighting strikes it is drawn to metal objects but because there is so much metal around you, the lightning get's confused and so it is more likely to strike in the middle of an open field than at one of the metal objects. Our minds become fast and rapid like lighting and we get confused because of the massive amount of choice and we end up most of the time making the wrong decision.
I have a lot of other worries about digital media, but this one is by far the most prominent and powerful worry that I have. I can see a world in which our memories are gone and we have to rely on computers to help us, maybe with computer chips in our heads. It just seems like this technology has brought a dead end to evolution and we will never evolve any further in a positive direction but only a negative and we will just keep changing our environment to cater to our needs instead of changing ourselves. This is also true in the digital environment. Such as how Twitter has replaced Blogging for the most part. People just don't have the attention to read blogs so instead of adapting and dealing with this problem they have, they just moved onto Twitter instead.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Video Collage
My video collage emphasizes the rapid speed of interception and publishing of the Wikileaks documents. I parallel the wikileaks story with a scene from the Final Flight of the Osiris in the Animatrix in which a woman gracefully runs and jumps over rooftops and buildings to make her way to a postbox to deliver what looks like a VHS tape. She is inside the Matrix which is a digital world and she is also a digital creation(both literally digitally animated and she is a digital avatar inside the matrix) in my story she represents the process of carrying the leaked documents to their destination over the internet.
There is a conversation at the end of the video in which an older lady says to her, "I hope it gets to where it's supposed to go, these days you never know". The woman responds and says "no, you never do". This represents the irony that the documents are not really going where they were supposed to go.
I learned just how powerful it can be to place an image and a word together. The part in my video when the woman breaks through the window and the glass falls, I always connect the glass to the documents because the narration at this time is "a vast leak of thousands of documents". There is a part where the narration says "drops 70,000 documents on the website in July" and after he says this the woman smashes to the ground as if she represents the 70,000 documents. I didn't plan these things but again, I was reminded of the power that you have when making experimental film like this collage, that if you take a random image and a word and put them together, then the human mind will connect the dots, usually in surprising ways.
There is a conversation at the end of the video in which an older lady says to her, "I hope it gets to where it's supposed to go, these days you never know". The woman responds and says "no, you never do". This represents the irony that the documents are not really going where they were supposed to go.
I learned just how powerful it can be to place an image and a word together. The part in my video when the woman breaks through the window and the glass falls, I always connect the glass to the documents because the narration at this time is "a vast leak of thousands of documents". There is a part where the narration says "drops 70,000 documents on the website in July" and after he says this the woman smashes to the ground as if she represents the 70,000 documents. I didn't plan these things but again, I was reminded of the power that you have when making experimental film like this collage, that if you take a random image and a word and put them together, then the human mind will connect the dots, usually in surprising ways.
Why is Digital Media Important?
It's interesting look at digital media as a fractal. But many things can be seen as fractals also. Analog video tape can also be broken into fractals because it also uses frames.
To me digital media is so versatile, it really cannot be called a medium, it is every medium. Before we had painting represented on canvas, photo's represented on film, and music represented on records, they can all be represented on the same medium now. This medium is so flexible that you can pull it apart into it's elements and it can reassemble itself within milliseconds. With the advent of the internet, post a file online and it exists forever in this infinite cyberspace because the internet is backed up so many times that even if you delete the file it will still exist somewhere and you have no restriction to how many times you can copy the file.
Digital media is like a window into a perfect world where there are no rules, things live forever and a person with a basket of fish and bread can share their fish and bread with 100,000 others and still have the exact same amount of fish and bread.
To me digital media is so versatile, it really cannot be called a medium, it is every medium. Before we had painting represented on canvas, photo's represented on film, and music represented on records, they can all be represented on the same medium now. This medium is so flexible that you can pull it apart into it's elements and it can reassemble itself within milliseconds. With the advent of the internet, post a file online and it exists forever in this infinite cyberspace because the internet is backed up so many times that even if you delete the file it will still exist somewhere and you have no restriction to how many times you can copy the file.
Digital media is like a window into a perfect world where there are no rules, things live forever and a person with a basket of fish and bread can share their fish and bread with 100,000 others and still have the exact same amount of fish and bread.
Audio Composition
Making this audio composition was really interesting. I tried to relate Wikileaks with the illegal downloading of music from programs like Napster. I found that audio is a much easier tool to work with when trying to control where the audience places their attention. With audio you can control when someone heres a piece of information. With an image, you can control when the audience sees different things by using contrast shifts, vignettes, and other techniques, but it's just way simpler with audio.
I wanted my audio composition to feel sort of gumbled together representing the way that the internet is in just a super saturated web for most people is much wider than it is deep. In other words you can learn a little about a lot of different subjects online but you can learn a lot about a specific subject if you read a book. For me the internet is so saturated with information that it makes it hard for me to learn things. It's hard to know what you want when there are thousands of links everywhere. Someone once told me that if you sell Jam, sell 3 different choices for the customers, if you sell more than three, you sell less jam because there is too much to choose from that people won't know exactly what to pick. The internet is trying to sell too many choices of jam.
With text you have very sharp control over when an audience gets a piece of information. You also have a very high probability that they will get the message that you want to get out because you can explain it verbatim for them and you don't have to worry about if they may not have heard it clearly. You can play music to give an undertone to your message as well with audio.
I wanted my audio composition to feel sort of gumbled together representing the way that the internet is in just a super saturated web for most people is much wider than it is deep. In other words you can learn a little about a lot of different subjects online but you can learn a lot about a specific subject if you read a book. For me the internet is so saturated with information that it makes it hard for me to learn things. It's hard to know what you want when there are thousands of links everywhere. Someone once told me that if you sell Jam, sell 3 different choices for the customers, if you sell more than three, you sell less jam because there is too much to choose from that people won't know exactly what to pick. The internet is trying to sell too many choices of jam.
With text you have very sharp control over when an audience gets a piece of information. You also have a very high probability that they will get the message that you want to get out because you can explain it verbatim for them and you don't have to worry about if they may not have heard it clearly. You can play music to give an undertone to your message as well with audio.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Wikileaks Collage
This collage I made in Photoshop and Gimp. I have a little knowledge of both programs but not complete knowledge of both programs. Certain things like remove a solid color and make it transparent were very difficult to do in Photoshop and even after I looked at a tutorial online I still couldn't figure out how to make a solid color transparent so every time I had to do this I had to open the file in Gimp. It's a good thing that a Photoshop file can be edited in both Gimp and Photoshop and you can switch between which imaging program very easily.
The tools for translating, rotating, and scaling objects are a lot more complex than they need to be in Gimp and so I used Photoshop for these functions. It was fun to work on this collage and it wasn't too much of a pain switching between the two programs.
I wasn't completely happy with the overall outcome of the picture. I created it in my mind, after I collected a good amount of images, but I really should have collected much more images beforehand and then drawn what I thought the collage would end up looking like on paper.
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