How often?

We often hear statistics about how frequently certain events occur.  One child dies from hunger every five seconds.  Someone buys an iPad every 1.5 seconds.  Someone dies from poor indoor air quality every 15 seconds.  A baby is born every quarter second.  These numbers only let us understand these phenomena on a very cerebral level, though.  Even well-designed infographics only engage the user visually.  I would like to make an installation that cycles through a database of these statistics and allows the user to experience each through a combination of touch, light, or sound.  For example, a light could blink with a period of 1.5 seconds to indicate the frantic pace at which the world is buying up iPads while a gentle burst of compressed air to the back of the hand every five seconds reminds the user how often the world lets a child starve to death.  Approximately five children starved in the time it took to read this paragraph.

QR Code Infobombs

People love to scan QR codes, even if they don’t know what they lead to.  I might like to pepper sidewalks with QR codes made with chalk and stencils that lead to a website that presents highly localized and continuously-updated information on smog and air pollution.  If people scan them while walking along a busy road, I hope I can make the presentation compelling enough to make the link between air quality and traffic stick in their minds.

Secret Keeper

I imagine a tiny black cube with a phone number and instructions on the side, to be placed on a pedestal in some public location.  If you text it a secret (and the text checks out in terms of length and variability to weed out messages like “butts butts butts”), it will store it and reply with an anonymized secret that it has heard before and is most similar to yours.  Each secret gets sent to only one other person after a suitable number have accumulated, so you know that when you tell it a secret, only one other person will receive it.  In a sense, it’s a bit like Post Secret, except for the strange sensation that exactly one stranger will know something deeply personal about you. (Also, the cube may emit a faint red glow when it receives the secret, to indicate some link between the physical object and the process).

Interactivity Project ->

For this project I’m really hoping to make a game for Android tablets/phones that utilizes the touch screen. I’m not sure if that’s too ambitious for the time we’re given but I feel like it’s an area I’m going to need to explore eventually.

My current idea, which I think is definitely too big for this assignment, is to make a wave-based (think Tower Defense / Plants vs Zombies) game wherein you play as a goblin warlock’s apprentice, and your job is to go clear out an old fort that’s infested with humans. Levels would be different rooms, and the waves would consist of different types of people (knights, knaves, whatever). As a warlock apprentice, you know some spells that you can cast onto the oncoming waves by drawing different symbols.

I have some other less time-consuming ideas that I might fall back on in the event I can’t get the barebones version of this running by the due date.

I have a couple of ideas that I am trying to decide between for my interactivity project.  I am interested in doing something that is both screen and touch based using either a phone/tablet, Sifteo, the AR toolkit, or Reactivision.  I’m not really sure what I would do with these later two tools, as I was just introduced to them in class on Monday but I’m keeping them in mind.

My first idea is to continue the Sifteo project that Caroline, Bueno and I worked on for project 1.  I think that we had a really neat idea and I would like to find a way to optimize the clock to alleviate the memory issues we were having as well as create an interface that would allow users to design their own “puzzles” for turning off the alarm clock.

Another idea I have to to use As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Manipulation (which makes it possible to manipulate and deform 2d shapes without using a skeleton) to create a tool for real-time, interactive story-telling.  I plan to implement this algorithm in C++ for my final project for Technical Animation, and I thought that I could extend upon this to let users draw the characters to be manipulated on a tablet, then, by connecting to a monitor or a projector, tell stories by manipulating the characters.  I see two possible applications of this: 1) as a story-telling tool to create a sort of digital puppetry, and 2) as more of an interactive exhibit where visitors could add to the story by either creating new characters or manipulating the characters that are already there.  I’d also be interested to hear other suggestions of applications of this.

I’m also really interested in the idea of educational software.  For my BCSA capstone project I’m working on an educational game and I really appreciated the iPad app we saw Monday that counts your fingers.  I would like to maybe apply the Shape Manipulation I discussed above to an educational context but I don’t have one definitely in mind yet, so I’d also like to hear ideas of such applications or ideas of interactive educational software in general.

For my third (and possibly fourth) project I’d like to create a room with an overhead tracking camera and and front facing recording camera. Users will walk into the room and will receive a series of commands. User actions and responses will be monitored as commands become increasingly antagonistic and or incoherent. Video and photographic recordings will be made of all participants and streamed on the web.

For the love of Samsung

Background

Samsung is a a multinational conglomerate company with it’s headquarter in Seoul, South Korea. Samsung holds financial, political and cultural supremacy in South Korea and is rapidly expanding globally. It is comprised of industrial subsidiaries, as well as entertainment, commodities, food market and much more. It is the archetypical Chaebol, a single family in control of the matrix of corporations and enterprises.

Corporate Group Share holding structure.

[Image 1] This diagram, created by Citi Research, shows much of the assets and profit going into Samsung Everland. It is a company that manages a Samsung theme park in the outskirt of Seoul among other services. It was the heart of controversy regarding illegal inheritance of wealth within the family that resulted in 9 year trial between 2000 ~ 2009.

An illustrated family tree of Samsung owners.

While Samsung is cherished as the economic backbone and the pride of nation, it also attracts criticism in market monopoly and subsequent inflation, the way wealth and power is inherited and ties to the politics via arranged marriage. The family members attract celebrity-like attention as well as notoriety for their lavish lifestyle and significant role in arts, culture and sports. [Image 2] They are also subject of popular imagination, often times romanticized in K-pop drama series about arranged marriages, scandals and of course, they are the epitome of Gangnam Style.

Illustration of C.E.O family and subsidiaries.

[Image 3] shows similar relations as the image #1, however with focus on the relationship between Everland, Samsung Life (insurance), and Samsung electronics. It was found in an online newspaper reporting on the correlations of various subsidiaries and the Chaebol family.

[Image 4] shows the corporate shareholding structure with subsidiaries in different colors. Download this PDF samsung

One of recent issues with the company was regarding passing on of power from Lee Gunhee to his son, Lee Jae-yong as the vice-chairman and his daughter Lee Boo-jin as the head of Everland and Hotel Shilla. Lee Gunhee and the Samsung heirs were accused of stealing from Lee’s father’s trust, as well as series of controversies when he was “found guilty of embezzlement and tax evasion in Samsung’s infamous slush funds scandal.”

 [Image 4/5] Two images on top illustrate Chaebol’s shareholding structure, that is of Pyramidal, on the left and Circular, one the right. Source Their tricks and strategies have been political and social controversy in South Korea, because of it’s tremendous scale as well as how politicians continually forgive their misbehavior. It explains South Koreans’ shared an ‘affective’ relations to Samsung.  

[Image 5] The image illustrates the familiar relationship of different Chaebols, Media and press, and politics. Samsung is the blue terrain that intercepts with most of other conglomerate.

When the power shift is complete, the Lee junior will be the third in Lee family to become ‘the emperor’ of Samsung. It is no doubt that the inheritance of power resembles the family on the North of border.

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Project Idea

Inspired by Golan’s comment (from the lecture) to work with data that means something to me, I’d like to search for public data on Samsung as well as other private and speculative datas on their shareholding structure. The goal is to create simple and elegant visualization of the network between subsidiaries and the Chaebol family. I appreciate the aesthetics of Mark Lombardi’s simple drawings and research and the technical achievement of They Rule.  While the illustrations I collected for the proposal are interesting, it is largely based on subjective decisions, and have been influenced by their political intentions. I’d like to create an objective view of the network that reflects complexities of the corporate structure.

Technical tasks

1. Identify data. Collect and parse data on corporate shareholding structure, translate necessary information and create a set of csv files that can be used for visualization. I did a brief search online and I fear there might not be a public data available in excel or txt file. I might need to hand craft the data from Annual report, or work with other available data on Samsung.

2. Create 2 dimensional visualization of selected data with Processing or Openframeworks. I will need to learn to use various techniques and libraries. Priority is to create systems which can be used to process various data, because each subsidiaries and sister companies may have different relation to the parent company and the family. The goal is not to create aesthetically pleasing interface, but to become familiarized with working with complex and incomplete sets of data. This is the technically challenging part of the project, therefore I will make a separate post as I make progress.

3. Translate the visualized data to other form. This is where aesthetic interest plays an important role. I’m thinking of using the data to generate 3 dimensional form to 3D print, via OpenScad or Grasshopper with Rhino. I’m new to both platform, so it will take some time to develop. I might call for collaborator on the phase 3 if will be more interesting.

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Pardon me, this assignment is a month too late. I’ve been super busy organizing workshops and exhibitions in Seoul. Check out some hackers and media artists we met for Demo-Day Seoul. Now I’m back in NY, and will continue to follow this class. I’m impressed and encouraged by other student’s work! The time frame for this assignment will be about three weeks from now, so hope to make visible progress by March 23rd, while I may continue to work on it afterwords.

thanks!

ty