narrativeunlimited

Authentic Experiences and Amanuensis

As we start to tease apart the components of Presence, we find ourselves looking at real life as one end of the Presence spectrum. We discuss authentic experiences as compared to those that are mediated by technology, or manufactured for our consumption.

Are Authentic Experiences necessary in this time and place? What is the essence of experience and how important is it to have unmediated, unmanufactured ones?

We start to dig into these ideas in this week's Narritive Unlimited notes. Please download the pdf file to read the meeting notes.Download nu_90806.pdf

From the Sienna Choir Books to Interactive Webbitry

The final session of our series on The Future of the Book was incredibly exciting!
We discussed book as:
Transport
Edifice
Recording Device and
Living Repository
and Soooo M U C H MORE!

Read on for a mind-bending journey.

And for those who did not get to attend the field trip for this series, here's a group of NU-ers at The Getty museum where they saw up close and personal an exhibit of artists' books.
Download nu_91605.pdf

The Future of the Book -coming soon.

We had an amazing session last Friday for our wrap up discussion on the Furture of the Book. I hope to have those notes written up in the next few days. Wsih you all could have been there.
Here's a snapshot, courtesy of Martin, of all those present discssuing the ultimate fate of books as we know them.

Assigments: Future of the Book

In the future, due to advances in nano-technology it is possible to grow just about anything out of constituent atoms. Humanity's basic needs are thus pretty much cared for, but there are still privileged sections of society and not so privileged sections. Someone in one of the privileged sections decides that his children were brought up a bit too mundanely and so commissions a "Young Girl's Primer" for his granddaughter. This interactive, artificially intelligent book falls into the hands of a little girl from a not so privileged section of society and stuff happens.

Our next meetings will revolve around this topic. You are each encouraged to bring ideas, readings, etc. to the meeting or post as comments in this BLOG!

Here is some fodder for our next discussion on Friday, August 19th, 2005.

http://www.futureofthebook.org/
http://www.honco.net/9809/roundtable.html#TOPICS1
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html
http://www.thisspartanlife.com

Doodles and the Future of the BOOK August 11, 2005 Notes

Feynman’s doodles … His diagrams have enabled people to understand complex concepts. Originally scorned, these images have since become much valued for their simplicity with ideas reduced to essence.

Sixty years ago the Shell Oil Company commissioned some videos, called Transfer of Power. Artists explored levers and pullies. These are still some of the best there are, even though they are primarily triangles and circles.

Jim Blinn at SIGGRAPH, was showing his newest images that are scientific concepts in a simple, easy to use visualization. Jim has a history of simplifying complicated concepts through simple animations, for example in the Mechanical Universe.

People in the British “commonwealth” English speakers have no issues with artists addressing scientific communities. Unlike Americans, where There is an element of discomfort. Artists are held in a more respected light in other cultures.
Alex and Judy have been invited on 26th September to attend a National Academies on New technologies and on creating an appropriate database and time line for future science. Alex is not invited as either a scientist OR an artist. But he belongs in the group. Not in the categories, but he is not afraid of them either. It has to do with not being afraid to appear to be foolish.

Human creativity, Alex has come to realize, has nothing to do with education, time or place. It is enhanced by or supported by systems…but it doesn’t exist BECAUSE of these systems. Martin maintains that some of these systems actually hamper creativity. Alex agrees that he actually found that to be true of his formal high school education. The museums in NYC were more inspiring.

Getty as a contributor to and informer of world culture... The Getty doesn’t see itself this way. They are more than a museum, but they don’t have the vision to define themselves in this larger way.

NEXT TOPIC for Narrative Unlimited: The Future of the Book.

The Young Girl’s Primer (from Stephanson’s The Diamond Age) is perhaps one such future.
The following readings are pertinent to this topic.
Participants should also do their own searches on this topic to bring resources to the group.

“Is it wrong to say the book is dead?” Judy asks. There are arguments to that point, but perhaps it is just being redefined. The book was redefined from the time it was hand done and chained to a monastery lectern. With Guttenberg it became small and able to fit in a saddlebag, so it could be carried about. What is the saddlebag that a book needs to be today to be useful? A scroll required a degree of interaction. So does turning the pages of a book. What interaction is next? What participation

The book The Secret Archives of the Vatican discusses the entire history of books as keepers of information.

The Incas recorded stories on knotted strings called quipus. When the book was a string….

Isn’t a book just a way to package information so that it is transferable? Why is it even external?
Making facts tangible... in other words getting the ideas out of one’s head (which is not an immutable storage space). Doesn’t each new methodology of a book mean we just have to do it all over again?

Information changes no matter what the storage device is. Books change. Look at the Bible’s evolution.

Our brain doesn’t store information but the connections between elements. Almost everything that we “know” is a series of guesses or theories about reality and the world. Nothing is static, especially the way we remember. We are always trying to match up the inputs we receive into our brain to some invariant representation (actually a increasingly complex hierarchy of invariant representations) that we know. These representations, the sum knowledge in our mind, are constantly changing or being added to as we continue to live and have experiences. So when we “remember” we are remembering against a somewhat different backdrop of knowledge each time we take a memory and run it through that invariant hierarchy. So memories, like the rest of out knowledge, are ever changing.

Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder is a book about the history of philosophy told via the tale of a young girls mysterious correspondence with a friend who asks the most fundamental questions about living. Is this the best way to package that information? Could we think of a better way? There is also a CD related to the book that is available. We should get it and compare.

Best packaging.... What measurement can be used to determine quality?

Can you use the proportions of human dimensions; and what you are observing at any time… a magic number…
Martin has a great idea for a VR experiment to measure Presence by using the continuum from claustrophobic ←→ agoraphobic space.

How immersive is the HMD as compared to say, The CAVE environment. Jacki sees a big distinction between the HMD and every other form of display. Alex had a life changing experience being in a VR world with another networked participant via Jaron Lanier’s HMD. Though the graphics were primitive, the experience was profound. Jacki wants everyone to try a fully functional VR worked with a stereo HMD. We will schedule this when the HMD in integrated into the cluster.
ALEX will bring JPL HMD to a future NU so we can see the original “real deal”!

Child's Play to Machinima April15 2005 Notes

We played as children, simply and sometimes (it must be admitted) viciously. How do today's games relate to our more dangerous child's play? We close with a promise of Machinima to come next week when Martin vanVelsen will show us his magnum opus for producing machinima (actually an understatement) "Hitchcock".Download narrative_unlimited_april15_2005.doc

Landscape and Affordances April1st 2005 notes

Starting with the attached PDF article on Affordances for GIS, we quickly traversed fertile ground from Greewich Village to Brasilia to the amazing ability of today's kids to learn every stat on all their Yugio cards. And why does this stuff all seem to come out of Japan, anyway?
Download narrative_unlimited_april_1_2005.doc

Download affordancebased_model_of_place1.pdf

Rosemary Comella - Special Guest March 18 2005

We had to wait an extra week for Rosemary's visit due to a bout of flu, but it was worth the wait! It was a gorgeous trip down time travel lane. You really should get a copy of her DVD "Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment". Most of us did and it is a gem to both own and be able to visit. Here is Rosemary's abstract. Thanks so much for sharing Rosemary!!

"Digital City Symphonies: Archives, Rephotography and Time Travel"
 
The Labyrinth Project’s, Digital City Symphonies dramatize and recast the archive within an original interface for the purpose of exploring a particular place or subject in a visual and spatial way. By remixing and re-contextualizing material about a city or place from professional archives and personal collections, we create works that intersect the public and private spheres. In the case of “Tracing the Decay of Fiction”, the main artifact from a private collection is a film depicting the Hotel Ambassador by Pat O”Neill, one of Los Angeles’s most prominent experimental filmmakers. This film is not only an artifact but also serves as a navigation device, allowing one to explore the interior and exterior spaces of the hotel and access archival and fictional material imbedded within it. Another device, found in both “Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles” and “Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment” is that of making a contemporary photograph based on an archival one (rephotography.) This process provides a way to examine a city’s development over time and, with the ability to cross-dissolve between these images, works particularly well in the digital realm. It can be seen as a form of time travel that often raises more questions then it answers. Such questions as why a site has changed so drastically or so little, stimulating us to imagine what has happened in between. Why has one neighborhood been erased and another preserved? To help give us some answers, we interview a wide range of scholars, local residents and aficionados who speak on topics ranging from architecture and geography to ethnicity and culture, giving us multiple views of why this particular place developed the way it did. Additionally, research from history museums and libraries, in the form of archival footage, newspaper clippings and writing is all then accessed through the interface.

Special Guest: Rosemary Comella

On March 11, 2005 Narrative Unlimited will have a special visit by Rosemary Comella, of the Annenberg Center's Labyrinth Project. She will show us her newest work about South Pasadena.

Husserl's Phenomenology

Discussion today was around the topic of Phenomenology, expanding from our Landscape as Narrative theme, into the world as it is inhabited by our bodies.
Download nu_3405.doc