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?

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

• in 3327 Division(’39 Ford) the visual components interact to tell a story about a house on Division Street where Ruscha was living at the time, and the dispersion of numbers and words in the address provides visual framework or context of the story: words placed in context with images function as images
• exploited ambiguity of sign and image situated in an equally ambiguous semantic and pictorial space.
• words function as objects completing the semantic content  and design of a picture.
• creates a metalanguage where the concrete image invites one to look for the language behind it
• work embodies idealism and introspection that other Pop artists purged from: embraced vulgar techniques and commercial culture imagery
• uses placement and juxtaposition of words and iconography to generate meaning, to adapt spatial functions of prepositions and conjunctions to link unlike concepts (similar to French Symbolist poets)
• Creates a multivalent metacollage that undermines the cohesiveness of sign and syntax and allows the different components to relate to one another in a variety of ways so that the semantic resonances are multiplied
• fragmentation, isolation, relativism, psychology, and innovation

From:

Edward Ruscha

Exhibition organized by Linda L. Cathcart

Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Buffalo, NY 1976

• his work establishes and defines the area of Pop sensibility where pop merges into neo-Surrealism
• uses letters as the object, sometimes based on a diagonal canvas
• echos movie screen’s horizontally and centered fade-ins and fade-outs of words; presents words isolated on a shaded background
• relates background color – divided into two horizontal sections grading abruptly from one color to another – conveys relationship of word and the ground > feeling of engendered by the word/color combination
• words are the only thing that have no recognizable size – letters have no real size and are just really components of words
• does not intentionally mean for the words in his work to come out as puns but some compositions happen to feel that way

From:

Edward Ruscha

Exhibition in 1990

Elbrig de Groot, Dan Cameron, Pontus Hulten, Bernard Blistene

Museum Boymons-van Beuningen, Rotterdam

• Style uses film culture spin-offs from opening credits
• distilled in deadpan, wisecracking persona that appropriates casual language characterized by a tough-guy approach, disdaining subtlety and sentiment in a to-the-point clarity associated in American culture with a temperament of both Hollywood and where he was raised
• straddles line between sensitivity and ennui but is attuned to the interstices between his words’ literal meanings and those which arise from their being transposed over his often contradictory image-fields
• has qualities of absurdity and paradox, sentimental realism
• colors, imagery, and texture informed by drabness, sentimentality, ad sense of everyday heroics, trademark use of twilight, dusk, sunrise, mid-afternoon skies, nautical or automotive imagery to supply appropriate sensations of longing, expectation, or uneasiness behind his more schematic twists of language
• words as a visually important element can be put in the same category as collage elements, part of another dimension of reality introduced into the picture in order to question the very essense and status of the art work as such
• words have the poetic value, content value which can be more or less stressed
• ruscha: beautifully balanced, friendly attitude is as relaxed as his works
• words are changed by great purity where there is more honing
• reunites all the essential elements of the thinking and feeling that are current, simple, and pure
• the fewer the letters in the message, the stronger is the role of each letter and also the stronger the message in general
• the suggestiveness of letters is enhanced by the scarcity
• short messages are always more powerful than longer ones
• ruscha puts extreme care into the limits and values of words

http://dzineblog.com/2008/11/brilliant-kinetic-typography-videos.html

http://www.vimeo.com/687456

http://www.vimeo.com/1612033

http://www.vimeo.com/736664

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

From Christopher Alexander:

“a pattern language is about patterns being like words. They stay the same but can be combined in different ways like words in a sentence. They can be used as in a network where one will call upon another (like a neuron network). When you build something you can put patterns together to form a language. So a language for you house might have patterns about transitions, light, ceiling height, connecting the second floor to the ground.” *

http://www.patternlanguage.com/

* His work is applied more to architecture, but he presents some interesting analysis into patterns that can be applied to what I’m trying to do with my thesis

• 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.

• new meaning of the media’s interpretation of crises through linguistic play
• impact of media on issues > narratives being produced > mass cognition
• how media conceptualizes issues/news events
• expressing large social dynamic
• public concern vs mass media
• words shape/express public conception of media
• system portrays its own meaning

Suggestions:

• Capturing the media hype of crisis and find a form that would heighten aspect of language
• Look for places where language was used to show sensationalism and structure of form that relates that
• Look at Dada – newspaper articles piece
• many eyes as a test bed for visualization
• figure out form before amount on the scene
• making natural language searching as simple as possible

Broaden Poetry Idea: write down everywhere i see how language is used in a particular form, think about how each would work, street signs, bags, etc, that slip below level of consciousness, think about them as a system: characteristics, what does it communicate as a form without any content, what would it mean with this content on to it

Find 3 completely different forms and experiment with content: differences that exist in different environments’ forms, and how they go out to the public

• Go broad before going deep

Audience: consider the people who will see it, and what is their worldview, understanding, opinion of what media is? what are their assumptions and how can I change those assumptions?

• What is the story i’m trying to tell? The linguistic structure and interface will shape story
• Who am I trying to tell it to and why?
• Think comparatively: how phrases are used in different contexts
• Clarify the elevator pitch on the story I’m trying to tell

Other precedents and supportive info (from comModified paper):

• Kay Rosen
• Barbera Kruger
• Jean Arp
• Max Ernst
• Other Neo-Dadaist artists

References from Sites of Contention: The Analytics of Crisis taught by Janet Roitman

• “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis, Public Culture, 7, 2, 1995.
  
• “On Crisis” in The Practice of Conceptual History, Stanford University Press, 2002
  
• Marx’s Theory of Crisis, St. Martin’s Press, 1994, Chapters 1, 6, 7, 8, 9.
  
• “Millenial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming”, Public Culture, 12-2, 2000, pp. 291-343.
  
• “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value” in Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 1-63.
  
• “Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-Functioning of Ethnography”, in Collier and Ong, eds. Global Assemblages. Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 336-352.
  
• “Hoarders and Scrappers: Madness and the Social Person in the Interstices of the City” in J. Biehl, B. Good, A. Kleinman, eds. Subectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, University of California Press, 2007, pp. 315-340.

Potential aesthetic direction:

Movie credits – opening sequences (i.e.Saul Bass > Mad Men, success of opening of the movie Seven

Potential Language format:

• Form1: Tabloids [http://www.journalism.org/node/35] > one-liners, sensational, serious, impudent, harried, sharp rapid fire, snippets
• Form2: Haiku > 17 syllables total, 5-7-5; Paints meaning and imagery; simple, raw, strips away of excess in order to attain the goal of truth; makes every word important to the overall meaning;  natural poetic flow, a brief interlude of calm in the chaos of the world.
• Form 3: Presidential/Political slogans [ http://wapedia.mobi/en/List_of_political_slogans ] [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_slogans ] > Use most popular ones as madlibs filling in parts with queried findings or at the end of them

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.

DIGITAL MCLUHAN: A GUIDE TO THE INFORMATION MILLENIUM – PAUL LEVINSON – ROUTLEDGE – NY,NY – 1999
- electronic media is turning the world into a “global village”

- McLuhan’s stress on the importance of awareness of a medium’s cognitive effects. He argues that, if we are not vigilant to the effects of media’s influence, the global village has the potential to become a place where totalitarianism and terror rule.

Key to McLuhan’s argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent — it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual’s and, by extension, a society’s self-conception and realization:

- the advent of the computer screen is fulfilling McLuhan’s observations about the global village that its dispersion of information is creating a new power structure whose “centers are everywhere and margins are nowhere” > ” the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village”

- the corporate gatekeeping of news is finally beginning to subside

- decentralization of the digital age > power is limited by decentralization

-McLuhan: the way we perceive contents of each medium – the literal, physical method of the medium, the intensity and clarity of the presented information – governs how we use and derive from the medium, but also its effect upon our overall society

- “acoustic space” > digital space

- “medium is the message” > our use of any communications medium has an impact far greater than the given content of any communications or that medium may convey > shifts focus from content to medium > we think about what we have heard or read more than the medium that gave us that information

- “the medium is the me sage”   | “the tedium is the message” | “the tedium is the mass age”

- “the effect of a medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as ‘content’. The content of a movie is a novel… “

- the medium that serves as content for the web is no one medium but many media because the web has taken its content of the written word in many forms > but the common denominator is the written word > writing is ubiquitous in the driver’s seat of media

- “the user is the content” >  the user is the content of the internet

- “the user is sent” > human is the active master of media – calling the shots, creating the content, having unprecedented choice over what that content will be when it has already been created by someone else

- the content of a medium operates as an intra-medium, or environment within environment, and helps define the rules of our engagement with the overall medium.

- online media is characterized by the volition is facilitates in its writers

- we absorb online information through our eyes and must give it our undivided attention

- the internet made an honest metaphor out of the global village – converted it from a metaphor to something much closer to a depiction of reality

- “the machine turned nature into an art form” > McLuhan’s fundamental consequence of the competition between media > new technologies bump predecessors to a position to be admired, no longer used > as we increase control over nature and our distance from it via technology we gain ability to appreciate nature for its own sake

- the ease of accessability on the internet and its capacity for dissemination and retrieval > anything on the web is spoken forever

- “we look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. Faced with a totally new situation, we tend to always attach ourselves to the objects…of the most recent past”.

- the amplification of acoustic space by electronic media

- 4 laws of media – amplification, obsolescence, retrieval, reversal

- multiplicity is the active ingredient in…the Web that books and libraries flip into

- what happens when hypertext links are limited to give just the information that the government wants its people to see and no more? > all options for info is created by the propaganda machine > triumph of choice transcends into the illusion of choice on the web > what extent of our current levels of choice are illusory

- Big McLuhan theory: examples of media and their effects in terms of how they manipulate humans without our concurrence, often without our awarness > wake-up calls to those unaware of the profound power of media in our and ever society

__________________________________________

VERBI-VOCO-VISUAL EXPLORATIONS – MCLUHAN – SOMETHING ELSE PRESS,INC – NY,NY 1967′

- we can no longer tolerate the irresponsibility of social trial and error. When information moves instantly to all parts of the globe it is chemically explosive. Any chain reaction which occurs rapidly is explosive, whether in personal or social life.

- the normal movement of information have the effect of armed invasion on some culture of group

- packaged information which we call entertainment transforms living conditions and basic attitudes

- it is the ordinary flow of news and pictures from every quarter of the globe which rearranges our intellectual and emotional lives without either struggle or acceptance on our part

- our present conceptions of what constitutes social cause, effect, and influence are quite unable to cope with this electronic simultaneity of conspicuous co-existance

- “geography and time are now capsulated”

- “the physics of typographic lineality have dominated our perception

UNDERSTANDING MEDIA – MCLUHAN – MCGRAW HILL 1964

- words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. > they are a technology of explicitness

- all media as extensions of ourselves serve to provide new transforming vision and awareness

- print > repeatability

- consequence of typography is the emergence of nationalism > became an intense visual image of group destiny and status and depended on the speed of information movement  unknown before printing

- once a new technology comes into a social milieu it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated

- is is the instant consequences of electrically moved information that makes necessary a deliberate artistic aim in the placing and management of news

- both book and newspaper are confessional in character, creating the effect of “inside story” by their mere form, regardless of content.

- “real” news is “bad” news > newspapers has to have “bad” news for the sake of intensity and reader participation

- newspaper, from its beginnings, has tended, not to the book form, but to the mosaic or participatory form > mosaic form has become the dominant aspect of human association

- the press is not only a telephoto mosaic of the human community hour by hour, but its technology is also a mosaic of all the technologies of the community.

- even in its selection of newsworthy, the press prefers those persons who have already been accorded some notoriety of existence in movies, radio, TV, and drama.

- the owners of media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that their power is in the “medium” and not the “message ” or the program.

MCLUHAN INFO AND QUOTES FROM WEBSITE

WIKIPEDIA

- “medium is the message” = new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization

- “Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue.”

- Tetrad:     * What does the medium enhance?
* What does the medium make obsolete?
* What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
* What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the “grammar and syntax” of the “language” of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium “overheats”, or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.[6]

From: http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/

- 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.

From: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marshall_mcluhan.html

- 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.
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RETHINKING COMMUNICATION – DERVIN

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COMMUNICATION, A DIFFERENT KIND OF HORSE RACE – DERVIN

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Examples_of_paradigm_shifts_in_complex_systems_and_organizations

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http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/

a paradigm shift could cause one to see the same information in an entirely different way.

The paradigm, in Kuhn’s view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it.

The paradigm, in Kuhn’s view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it.

When enough significant anomalies have accrued against a current paradigm, the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis, according to Kuhn. During this crisis, new ideas, perhaps ones previously discarded, are tried. Eventually a new paradigm is formed, which gains its own new followers, and an intellectual “battle” takes place between the followers of the new paradigm and the hold-outs of the old paradigm.

After a given discipline has changed from one paradigm to another, this is called, in Kuhn’s terminology, a scientific revolution or a paradigm shift. It is often this final conclusion, the result of the long process, that is meant when the term paradigm shift is used colloquially: simply the (often radical) change of worldview, without reference to the specificities of Kuhn’s historical argument.

The term “paradigm shift” has found uses in other contexts, representing the notion of a major change in a certain thought-pattern — a radical change in personal beliefs, complex systems or organizations, replacing the former way of thinking or organizing with a radically different way of thinking or organizing:

http://www.meryl.net/2008/01/175-data-and-information-visualization-examples-and-resources/

RETHINKING COMMUNICATION (DERVIN)

- all societies are characterized by both conflict and consensus, and the amount of conflict and consensus varies over time and between and within countries

- a compelling problem for communication research is how and to what extent mass media in developed societies help to turn conflict into consensus

- paradigm is a unit of methodology that is the formal rules of scientific practice and scientific problems that are solved against a background of consensus of what counts as an acceptable explanation, that is what it takes for a scientific problem to be solved.

Deane Neubauer – essay

- the prevailing consensual view of politics and economics developed parallel segmentations of knowledge, action, and consequence within the prevailing social science, which by extension came to form the dominant communication paradigm

- the academic disciplines developed during this period as vehicles for articulating and expressing these large social dynamics

- oversimplifications provided by the empiricist/behaviorist mode and the code of value neutrality that provided political comfort to “social findings”.

- central to this interpretation of american social sciences is its operation as a mask for power

- communicative institutions have gained increasing power to structure the social world through their conceptualizations of daily political and economic events

- these media interpretations become the frameworks through which readers/viewers make sense of their daily experience.

- reference points to judge the seriousness of the issues > the role of mass media/ that it plays in creating useful reference points about issues

- public concern via mass media

- when people interact with news: 1) what are the events of this day? 2) what do the experts say? 3) how does the story effect me? 4) check to see that they have right information 5) make connections by reasoning, elaborating on existing info, and making decisions or new ideas – new ideas, ways of thinking, how it develops a new opinion

- targets sensory awareness, short-term memory, and long-term memory

- information needs include what they are doing, nature of the problem or issue, and how the situation can be improved

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.

The question about what the visualization was doing was “is this everything that’s being said and look at what we’re doing” . It was obvious to the viewers that I’m not trying to push the “green” idea, and that I’m just saying look at all of the plethora of stuff out there. It was mentioned that what I’m pulling has something to do with the media, but the view wasn’t getting that concept from the visualization.

Because we have already seen packages of things to make you feel something and the idea to create something poetic in the form of a haiku, for example, takes package, reworks the language, and puts responsibility on the viewer to decipher what is happening in the visualization so that they’re not forced to see something that’s already out there.

About midway through the critique, the participants brought up the idea of recreating the words and language to create something new, like a haiku, which was ironic because that’s what I had done (as a very low fidelity sketch) for an earlier prototype. I told this to the participants and they mentioned that they loved the idea of taking something threatening and putting it into a delicate and element format of a haiku. This direction is completely unique and it could make something funny and would be the true hook to my project. It would be beneficial to explore what I can do with the language in order to put it into a prose format. It was also asked if there was imagery that needed to be presented in addition to the text, but if not, the visualization could be effective just as text.

The participants stated that at the moment the cloud of language being presented doesn’t become obscured, so they asked if I wanted the truth to become obscured because of the language or is all of the language building something else? Does it fall into a wall the metaphorically obscures the truth? These are questions for which I am really grateful for the ideas that they bring up in my project.

Another question that came up was that of the risk that happens with it being too random may come up when generating an expression without me having to be part of it. However, the magic is in the challenge of making this happen dynamically.

Additionally, I met with a professor in the Anthropology department, Janet Roitman, who teaches a class called The Analytics of Crisis. It was suggested to me from Colleen that she would be a good contact for my project. At the time when I met with her I had not completed my prototype, but I discussed my thesis concept and showed her my midterm presentation which included my earlier experiments and low-fidelity prototypes. According to Professor Roitman, I have been taking the right approach in my experiments and am on a good track – capturing the crisis narratives that are being produced by us and by the media, and the mechanisms that are creating the problems. It actually happened to be something that some of her students were trying to do, but on a more an academic platform. Coincidentally, she said that what I’m trying to achieve with the crisis concept is what she is trying to get her students to achieve as well. She was interested in keeping up with my project and having me present my thesis to her class, which I plan on doing closer to the end of the semester when I have a prototype that is more visually and conceptually complete. She also responded well to the haiku experiment (I showed her the static results that I showed in my presentation), just as my first user-testing group did. This also went over well in my midterm presentation, so it’s apparently clear that taking this approach is the best way for me to go with my output – let there be a level of randomness that creates the interest in the language.

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.