All posts by India
Nothing to see here
I don’t have time to keep up with the various ITP discussion lists—yet another reason for my general feeling of not being a part of this program, no doubt—but I do try to glance at them now and then, especially the topical ones, such as phys-comp and ICM. I’m never qualified to answer anybody’s questions, and I’m not working on anything ambitious enough that I need to take advantage of the advice that’s given there, but I do think it’s useful to keep an eye on the list, so that when I do have a question, I may have an inkling of how to look for the answer.
So this morning I was skimming the latest phys-comp digest and saw that gracious Tom Igoe had addressed a comment by the tedbot about this, in which he castigated “clueless people” who use flash when taking photographs, as well as tourists in general, who apparently are “consumers of the misery of the past.”
Never mind that the example image in the Core 77 piece is of the Mona Lisa—hardly a picture of misery, unless you want to get all Marxist about it. The money that Francesco del Giocondo wasted on that portrait of his wife should have been in the hands of Florence’s working poor!
Anyway.
Tom’s response was to take the high road of assuming generally good and intelligent intent on the tedbot’s part. He chose to (a) poke at this random lump of spewage by asking if tedbot had never been a tourist, the reply to which included the elaboration “I guess it’s just the sort of thing that strikes me as tasteless… taking crappy snapshots of the remnants of a painful history,” and (b) say something relevant and thoughtful on the matter, citing personal experience and reframing the tension between tourists and locals as an “art opportunity” and matter for consideration by “physical interaction designers in the tourist industry.”
I always admire that kind of graceful and classy redirection. Whereas my response to the tedbot’s comments would have been, “Oh, shut the fuck up, you pretentious git,” Tom’s was more like, “Oh, go make some art, you pretentious young interaction designer.” Kind advice, assuming you’re not already drowning in phys-comp wretchedness.
But I’m still not satisfied with sidestepping the basic assumption that tourists and tourism, in general, are bad.
What is a tourist? NOAD says it’s “a person who is traveling or visiting a place for pleasure.” So, isn’t that something we want to encourage? Isn’t a big part of The Problem with this country right now that there are too many people who’ve never ventured outside their native zip code, have no interest in doing so, and think that everyone outside that line is Other? Travel is not always but often broadening.
I think that if you took ten ignorant, isolated/isolationist Americans and dropped them in the middle of, say, Rome, at least five of them would learn something. For example, they might learn that people in other countries don’t just talk differently—a common misconception about foreigners seeming to be that they’re just like us, only they’re doing everything in Italian/French/Chinese/etc. and they’re dumb—but they also dress differently, drive differently, design signs differently, shop differently, build differently, use public space differently, think differently. Some of our hypothetical tourists would undoubtedly go home confirmed in all their ignorant assumptions about people not like themselves, because there are always some people who can see only what they expect to see. Hence all those people who still believe that the 9/11 hijackers were I-raqis, and that Barack Obama is one of them A-rab muslins. But others would realize that some of the assumptions on which they’d based their assumptions were unfounded. It might take them a while, but the experience would make some permanent dent in those people’s ignorance.
Of course, the best thing that could happen to our hypothetical tourists would be for them to have the good fortune to ask for directions from somebody kind and generous, who in addition to pointing out the way would also engage them in conversation. Maybe they’d even have a meal together. Maybe they’d exchange e-mail addresses and stay in touch after the trip—for example, to send a crappy, flashed-out snapshot of our tourist standing in front of the Colosseum with his or her arm around the friendly Italian. Tell me you’ve never seen this kind of photo.
That kind of exchange—random and rudimentary as it is—humanizes both sides of the relationship. The funny-talking Italian becomes a specific funny-talking Italian; the stupid American tourist becomes a specific stupid American tourist. And forever after, those two people will probably think of each other, whenever they’re tempted to generalize about the other’s country, linguistic group, race, whatever. And that kind of thinking is what makes people less stupid, right?
So maybe instead of trying to fuck with the clueless, tasteless tourists by sneaking stupid messages into their crappy snapshots, we should fuck with them by talking to them. Fuck with them by trying to belie the stereotypes about the people in the place that they’re visiting, wherever it may be—such as that New Yorkers will probably run off with your camera if you ask them to take a photo of you standing in front of the whatever. Or that, if they don’t do something outright illegal like that, they’ll probably fuck up your snapshots by projecting crap into them, and then deliberately give you wrong directions.
Being kind is a little more work than simply sneering at people, but it might also be a tad more constructive.
Photo: Mona Lisa by See Wah Cheng; some rights reserved.
Dude.
I think Marshall McLuhan makes a lot more sense if you add the direct address “Dude,” followed by a comma, to the beginning of each paragraph or pithy sentence. As in,
Dude, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace,
or
Dude, the essence of automation technology is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.
or
Dude, the past mechanical time was hot, and we of the TV age are cool.
or
Dude, we are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally.
Yeah, like, totally, dude. But please, sir, do not bogart that joint.
McLuhan’s writing is more comprehensible than the Walter Benjamin piece, which still deflects every attempt at comprehension, but this is likely because it’s easier to dismiss as simply incoherent nonsense. As with the Benjamin, I feel like we are entering the discussion in medias res.
Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.
What in the Sam Hill is he talking about? Is there an antecedent missing somewhere? How does electricity extend “our” central nervous system? And who you calling “we,” white man? Apparently it doesn’t include me, because two pages later there’s
It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.
I’m sorry, but “the Negro” has always been involved in my life, thank you very much.
I know, I know, he was writing in a different era. But still, presumably we are being asked to read this because it has something relevant to say to our current studies. Okay, what could that be?
It’s got to be something more profound than the simple “Wow! It’s like he wrote this yesterday!” section on page 30, where we learn that (a) violent movies and video games engender real-world violence, and (b) living in Orange Alert all the time is completely meaningless. It’s also got to be something more germane than the assertion that
A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets and hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind. . . . Similarly, a very much greater speed-up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tencing to happen as a result of TV in America.
which is expressed more clearly and concretely in Here Comes Everybody.
Is it the litany of hot and cold items, which is exactly as useful as (though significantly less amusing than) the game of dividing everything and everyone into “punk” or “goth”?
| waltz | courtly and choral dance styles |
| radio | telephone |
| movies | TV |
| photographs | cartoons |
| ballet | speech |
| phonetic alphabet | hieroglyphs |
| paper | stone tablets |
| lecture | seminar |
| book | dialogue |
| steel axes | stone axes |
etc.
How does any of this relate to what we are doing? Is this a connection that’s obvious to everyone else in the program—are they all, like, Dude, that’s so profound? Am I alone in having a block against finding anything useful in this kind of free-floating jive? Is it simply meant to be provoking? If so, then it’s not working—every week, we seem to have less and less discussion about the reading.
I read steadily, if slowly. Mostly nonfiction, and novels from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I don’t think I’m a lazy reader; the kind of book I like best is one that helps you see things from a different perspective. But this kind of writing makes me want to pitch the book across the room. Every article we’ve had to read for this class is of the sort that causes my brain to completely shut down. These readings bring out in me what one of my friends calls “Republican moments”: they make me want to start hollering about those elitist, arugula-eating people who always have to go and use those ten-cent words.
It is, as I said weeks ago, precisely the kind of writing that made me decide, after suffering through plenty of it in college, not to apply to graduate school in English. Yet here I find myself, again. Is this merely the result of sleep deprivation?
In any case, since you asked, here’s my response: This is bullshit.
The one thing I did get out of this reading is a list of other—and, I hope, better—books to read that may be more illuminating. These include,
- John Betjeman, Slick But Not Steamlined
- Kenneth Boulding, The Image
- J.C. Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease
- Douglas Cater, The Forth Branch of Government
- Alexis de Toqueville, Exploring Democracy in America
- Leonard Doob, Communication in Africa
- E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
- E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion
- Bernard Lam, The Art of Speaking
- Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass
- A.J. Liebling, The Press
- Lewis Mumford, The City in History
- J.U. Nef, War and Human Progress
- Constance Rourke, American Humor
- A.L. Rowse, Appeasement
- G.B. Sansom, Japan
- Wilbur Schramm, Television in the Lives of Our Children
- J.M. Synge, Playboy of the Western World
- Robert Theobald, The Rich and the Poor
MC Squared
Get it now! Detailed, full-color documentation of the famed MC Squared midterm project!
MC_Squared(fin).pdf (14.68 MB; sorry, it contains a couple of embedded videos)
We gave our presentation today, the thing mostly worked, and it wasn’t too embarrassing. And, unlike some people in the class, my group actually got two or three hours of precious, golden sleep the night—well, morning—before. (We closed down the floor at about 3:30 a.m., but a few of our classmates relocated to the library or some such place to keep working. Everybody seemed pretty crispy by 9:30 this morning.)
Rice Dance
So, . . .
I didn’t have a partner because apparently everybody else was already working with someone. This meant I could work on the video at home. BUT I don’t have a tripod or copy stand at home, I couldn’t find the data cable for either of my cameras, and I didn’t feel like blowing $50 on an iStopMotion license. So I shot each frame by hand, aligned them in Photoshop, tweened more frames in between some of them, and strung them together in both the demo of iStopMotion (which leaves a watermark—hence the slight letterboxing) and iMovie HD. The last chunk of frames are not aligned—it’s amazingly laborious to do so—which is why they wobble all over the place.
In a word, it sucks.
But, hey! I learned so much.
PhysComp midterm project, week 2: Rough prototype, sexed up
Our project is now all dressed up, NYC-style:
Diego and/or Filippo cut all the squares out of black foamcore and set two of the infrared sensors into the sides. Then, when I rolled in after dinner, I taped the pieces together into a flat pattern and made velcro hinges to pull it together into a box:
And then—my crowning achievement of the day—I devised a neat little latch for it.
While Diego and Filippo were figuring out more deluxe ways to use Minim than what I had hashed together the day before, I set about making my breadboard setup a little more robust, so that it could stand being sloshed around a bit in the box. Because the wires that came with the IR sensors are multistranded and very fine, they’re difficult to poke into the holes in a breadboard, and then they don’t want to stay in once they’re there. So it seemed to me that they ought to be soldered to header pins, as shown in the soldering lab.
This is, of course, much more difficult than it looks—for me, at least. I present to you what I believe to be my ugliest soldering job yet:
Hideous. Pathetic. Heartbreaking.
But soldered they were, and they were, in fact, slightly easier to plug into the breadboard. Once I, you know, straightened the pins out with pliers.
How are you supposed to do this? Is there some trick to soldering multistrand wire to a header pin? Was I just doing it all wrong, wrong, wrong? Is it a mess because (a) I can’t see in the shitty light of the lab, and (b) I can’t hold my hands steady? I hate this. Help!
PhysComp, week 6: Bride of Serial Out
This week’s lab was mostly uneventful, although it took me something like six hours to do—I started after our CommLab make-up class ended, around 4 pm, and stayed until nine or ten.
First I thought I’d use one of these nifty sensors I got from SparkFun,
but then I realized I have no idea how you’re supposed to hook them up. Stick the pins straight into the breadboard? Solder wires on? How long should the wires be? So instead I used the stupid knob again, plus one of the IRs I bought for our midterm project.
The thrill of the knob has totally worn off. Then I saw Jorge soldering wires to an ultrasonic range finder just like the one I have, and I thought maybe it was a good time to try out my own. Ha! Thus began one of my more frustrating soldering bouts so far.
It must have taken me forty-five minutes to solder three freaking wires onto this cookie . . . and then it took me another hour to realize that the reason it wasn’t working was that I’d soldered the yellow wire to the wrong hole. And then I couldn’t get it unsoldered to save my life, so I just attached a fourth wire.
Finally I got them all hooked up:
And then, there was serial output:
- “Now you get a range of garbage characters.”
- “List all the available serial ports.”
// print out the values you got:
for (int sensorNum = 0; sensorNum < sensors.length; sensorNum++) { print("Sensor " + sensorNum + ": " + sensors[sensorNum] + "\t"); } // add a linefeed after all the sensor values are printed: println();
Et cetera.
After all that hair-pulling, the ultrasonic sensor was giving me really erratic readings (then again, so was the push-button switch: its value didn't change when I pushed the button, but it did when I touched the button). So I switched to two IR sensors, since I had so many lying around.
Then I got to the part about the handshake. Handshaking? Was not happening for me. I think it may have had something to do with this:
The Processing application was looking for the word "hello," but the Arduino didn't seem to be able to say the word without stuttering horribly. I tried for more than an hour, I think, to get them to talk to each other, but finally I had to just give up.
PhysComp midterm project, week 2: Rough prototype
Part 2 in the saga that began last week.
After spending about an hour playing with the Minim library in Processing, I went into the lab to see if I could get it to work with actual input from our IR sensors. This was basically a repeat of this week’s homework, which I’d done, for once, before the morning it was due, so the wiring part was uncharacteristically easy. I need to get some header pins, though; the stranded wire on the IR sensors is a pain to plug into a breadboard.
So our project—which I realize I didn’t explain last week—is going to be a cubeoid musical (or, at least, noisy) instrument with an infrared sensor set into each side, mounted corner-up (as demonstrated by Diego) on a camera tripod. One or more players can then use their hands or other body parts or utensils or pets to trigger different sounds from each side. We were thinking that for Phase One, i.e., this week, we’d have the sounds be synthesized tones, and that for Phase Two, the final version, we’d make it play various different loops.
It turned out, however, that it’s far easier—for me, at least—to get Minim to play loops than to synthesize sounds. And there are a lot of free sound clips out there in the world. I got mine from CanadianMusicArtists.com. This pre-prototype, therefore, has only two sensors, both of which trigger audio loops. It also has the beginnings of a lame-ass bouncing ball animation, but it doesn’t do what I want it to do, mostly because the signal’s changing too rapidly. Graphics were a tentative feature for Phase Two, so I’m not going to fuss with that part any more this week.
Here’s some crappy video of Filippo (left) and Diego (right) making the sensors generate noise. You can barely hear it, unfortunately—listen for the annoying rapid clicking sound, which I think is the hi-hat sound.
The beauty part? This doubles as my ICM homework.
Here’s the Arduino code:
/* Reads data from two analog sensors (IR sensors, in this specific example)
and outputs the values in a format that can be easily parsed in Processing.
*/int ledPin = 7;
int irSensor0 = 0;
int irSensor1 = 1;
int sensorValue = 0;void setup()
{
// Flash the LED three times to announce the start of program.
pinMode( 7, OUTPUT );
digitalWrite( 7, LOW );
delay( 300 );
digitalWrite( 7, HIGH );
delay( 300 );
digitalWrite( 7, LOW );
delay( 300 );
digitalWrite( 7, HIGH );
delay( 300 );
digitalWrite( 7, LOW );
delay( 300 );
digitalWrite( 7, HIGH );
delay( 300 );
digitalWrite( 7, LOW );// Start serial port at 9600 bps:
Serial.begin( 9600 );
}void loop()
{
if (Serial.available() > 0)
{
// Read the first (0) sensor:
sensorValue = analogRead( irSensor1 );// print the results:
Serial.print( sensorValue, DEC );
Serial.print( "\t" );// read the second (1) sensor:
sensorValue = analogRead( irSensor0 );
// print the results:
Serial.println( sensorValue, DEC );// Follow the last sensor value with a println() so that
// each set of four readings prints on a line by itself:
Serial.println( sensorValue, DEC );
// delay ( 100 );
}
}
And here’s the Processing code, where most of the excitement takes place.
Snooze
The homework assignment for CommLab week 4 was, “In teams of two, tell a story in 4–10 sequential images. Upload to your blog.”
Brien and I made this comic.