Thesis: Final Concept and Installation

Concept:
Poetical Crisis is a screen based art installation that uses live online news feeds, data processing, and typographic visual imagery to combine Fine Arts with computation in a gallery piece focused on crisis news media.

I have created a real time art piece that can be portable for a gallery or exhibition space. It lives on internet connection to RSS data feeds which it scrapes to display changing visuals. It will reveal contemporary society’s complex manifestation of crisis, as it stands at the forefront of our consciousness, due to the immediacy of news and prevalence of media sensationalism and hype.

Abstract:
Poetical Crisis speaks to contemporary society and the conditions we live in. The complex manifestation of crisis is revealed as it stands at the forefront of our consciousness due to the immediacy of news and the prevalence of media sensationalism and hype. Over time, the media’s exposure of crisis of seen through the production of salient and contextual words resonating with these issues. News media data is searched and processed to unfold the complexity of the crisis phenomenon through art and visual poetry focusing on the power of shortened language and typographic visualization. With the idea that the replication of certain words generates rather than reflects a situation, language is used as a filter through which we perceive and condition the world.

Initial design questions:

• Is there any area of human activity not currently in Crisis?
• How do certain words replicate to such an extent that they generate rather than reflect a situation?
• How do we use language as a filter through which we perceive and condition the world?

A New Precedent: Edward Ruscha

From:

The Works of Edward Ruscha
by Dave Hickey and Peter Plagens, Introduction by Anne Livet with forward by Henry T. Hopkins
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, 1982

• lifts the curtain on the commonplace sights and sound we no longer see or hear and makes us react to them as we never have before or will again
• “reads” words, titles, slogans, and sentences from books on our common character that only exist in his imagination
• often yanks the viewer into canvases to roam about and make our own determination of what we see and sense
• all like to read his roadmaps differently according to own lights: freedom of new perception – art that jiggles and rearranges our mental landscape, quickens and refreshes our native sensibilities.
• made collages of juxtaposed images and words: resonant device – refines tactics of collage, isolating and combining words and images to increasingly subtle ways – personal rhetoric that is literal and literary

Kinetic Type – Inspiration

Beginning of the end: Feedback from Fall Overview

Consider the successful aspects of Listening Post:

1. Multiple viewpoints
a) sequencing
b) phrasing
c) narrative

Rich Expensive
a) complex meaning and understanding of the world
b) sense of multiplicity

Break Listening Post down:
Reflect its strategy and analysis tactics

Break down crisis to its discrete issues (economy, healthcare, etc) to try to create a larger picture of what crisis means = identify this!

Eliciting the overwhelming fear, hype, etc of crisis

Create a taxonomy of different types of crises

Listening Post interview with Ben Rubin:

• Got as many chat rooms as possible to get a broad range of chat rooms
• Adapted the project to monitor the activity
• Very disorganized, misprecise language stream of words, pulls chat rooms apart and puts them together as a form of art
• About where your imagination goes with the project and how you can imagine the context of the disembodied statements
• Word sequences in a rotations of sections: each section has its own logic; there’s randomness to certain parts of it, but there is an underlying logic to it
• “I am” was the number 1 most common first few words of any chat utterance
• Algorithm scoops phrases and organizes them in order from shortness to longest
• Another section shows the least frequently occurring words in the last few hours
• Structured movements to a theatrical degree or like a song, so their structured but build up to some degree
• Each one has a compositional logic, “i am” starts in center and then builds up randomly and then the whole thing irises back to central screen
• Others sweep across one direction or the other
• Started out by wondering what data would be interesting to listen to? treating the language itself as data? count words and perform linguistic analysis
• Collect masses of text from chatrooms, anaylze it and treat it as data
• Requires a certain number of messages per day in order to function and be varied
• Broadly representative of chat rooms

Meeting notes, other notes, and references

RSS feeds of querries:

• phrases have to be in double-quotes like > “”Barack Obama”"
• to boost search results > “”Barack Obama”"^4 (carat and position number – 1 is the default
• key quotes about the topic/phrase

Jonathan Harris’s 10×10 and Lovelines are two new precedents that heavily relate to the output that I’m aiming to produce.

Just posting some new research

Key Takeaways:

1. media interpretation is framework for which readers make sense of their daily experience
2. impact of media on issues: media exacerbates social problems and cause mass cognition
3. audience is the content analysts
4. target: attention, pattern recognition, and elaboration
5. how individuals construct information
6. “dominant communication paradigm”
7. “structure of thought”
8. “expressing large social dynamics”‘
9. structure of social world through daily news events conceptualized by communication institution
10. public concern vs mass media

• “the new art or science which the electronic or post-mechanical age has to invent concerns the alchemy of social change”
• Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public
  incredulity.
• With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is
  “sent.”
• We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into
  the future.
• Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.
• Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones?
• People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.
• News, far more than art, is artifact.
• The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.
• Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.
• When a thing is current, it creates currency.
• In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.
• A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
• All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
• As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself.’
• Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
• Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
• Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
• The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
• We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
• When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

From: http://www.haikusociety.com/whatishaiku/

The natural feel of the rhythm and melody of the haiku are extremely important. Haiku is about the stripping away of excess in order to attain the goal of truth; simple and raw. The tiny quality of the haiku form, in comparison to longer and more complicated forms, makes every word, every position of stresses and every silence important to the overall meaning. However, the haiku must, above all, flow musically and naturally from the poet, a brief interlude of calm in the chaos of the world.

User-Testing Experiment – Results & Documentation

I created a new prototype and showed it to 4 people who are in the DT program at Parsons.

The first group was two second-year DT students and the second group was two first-year DT students: CLICK FOR TWO VIDEOS

During the testing with the second group, my camera ran out of memory so I had to write down the rest of their response.

Overall, this group felt that the presentation of the content was busy, overwhelming, and confusing. The interesting part of the repetitive language is missed because the emphasis is on the repeated quarried words (carbon footprint, offshore drilling, etc) and not the language around it as much. It wasn’t interesting enough and they wanted to see different and NEW information – not the same things we keep hearing. Visually, the movement of the typography was not appealing and was more distracting.

Overall, the feedback from the groups was very helpful and was a good way for me to identify the direction in which I need to progress. The initial reaction to my prototype was that the repetitive key phrases provided little new information to the viewer. There was more of a “so what?” than a “that’s interesting and unique” reaction to my visualization. One viewer mentioned that we have been in the in a phase now for so long with the direct communication we keep hearing about these crisis that people are “getting it” and just want to hear something new. They wanted more from the information that was being revealed, and at the moment it’s just appearing and that’s it. Just using the key “go to” phrases gets to the point where the viewer doesn’t understand the message and isn’t taking anything away from the project. The word “desensitized” was used to refer to the way that these issues are being communicated and I found that that was a GREAT way to describe it – I want to do something that is sensitizing, so I’m very glad for that response. It very much clarified what I should NOT do for my visualization.

User-Testing Experiment Proposal

Katie Levitt
Proposal for User-Testing Experiment
October 28, 2008
klevitt-user-test-exp

Date: Thursday
Location: Thesis studio classroom
Time: 8:00-9:00pm
Partner: Akiko Rokube

Participants:

1. Name  ___Tarynne Goldenberg___

Role    Experiential observation and provide feedback

2. Name  ___Catherine Lewis___

Role    Experiential observation and provide feedback

3. Name  ___Stephanie (didn’t get last name at time of experiment)___

Role    Experiential observation and provide feedback

4. Name  ___Pei-Hsin (didn’t get last name at time of experiment)___

Role    Experiential observation and provide feedback

The goal of this experiment is to set up the experiential and aesthetic aspect of my thesis, and gain critical feedback from my participants. The value of this critique will allow me to determine what is working and what is not working with my concept and design. I will then be able to incorporate the feedback into the next step in my thesis progression, thus improving the project overall.

Akiko will be documenting the experiment with video and still photography footage that I will collect and use to define my results. The set up will consist of me uploading a Quicktime video or Flash swf file to the computer.

I will be setting up and establishing the audience experience through a narrative demonstration of my thesis. The experiment will include a strong execution of the visual output of my project through textual animation.

I will begin my experiment by showing a short video that exhibits key quotes that I have researched from media theorists, Marshall McLuhan, Brenda Dervin, and possibly others, that encapsulate theoretical ideas about media that pertain to my concept. I will then demonstrate through visualization how I will be filtering a real time channel flow of news media data, although in the case for the user experiment, I will be using static data.

The textual animation will demonstrate my filter as a means of media intervention, and the poetic aspect that comes from my control.

Midterm presentation

midterm presentation

Feedback from Data Source Presentation (before Midterm)

1. Include all global patterns and dynamics of global entropy: include paradigms of the economic crisis, as well.

2. Consider how audio could be incorporated into the project: is it filtering a collective voice that can say some of the aggregated texts?

3. Focus on the visual design aspect: how much is being extracted of the salient words, decide whether it is a multilayered or simple visualization > think about the many visual directions this could take

4. Consider what the end visual execution will be: screen based, projection, LEDs > what is the public representation?