beating a dead horse

  1. Talk to the person next to you about anything for 30 seconds. If you can’t find a person, talk to yourself for 30 seconds. The topic can be about anything.
  2. Think of one word to describe what you just talked about.
  3. On paper, draw the word with the word.
  4. Crumple up the paper.
  5. Throw it out a window.
  6. Retrieve the paper. If you are physically unable to retrieve the paper, let it be.
  7. Once you’ve retrieved the paper, open it up.
  8. Trace the wrinkles on the back of the paper.
  9. Once you’re done, crumple it up again and throw it in someone’s face.
  10. Apologize to the person and retrieve the paper.

(the following images are grouped by their front & back)

img001 img002

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img003 img004

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img005 img006

For this assignment, even though it wasn’t a relevant reading, I found this quote from Art and the API particularly inspiring: “The specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment.” I was interested in “instructing” the person what beating a dead horse by repeatedly talking about the same subject would look like. I know I have a tendency to do this a lot, so I thought I would physically manifest this process.

The most hilarious aspect of this was the trouble people had with finding windows, let alone open ones. You’d be surprised at how many closed windows (including insect screen) as opposed to open windows there are around this area–so I expected people to find unorthodox windows. The definition of windows, after all, includes “a thing resembling a window in form or function, in particular.” One person threw the paper out a door, and another person tried to open a window, was confronted with an insect screen, gave up on that step, and moved on.  I was also surprised at what people did with the crumpled paper at the end–two chose not to unfurl it because it wasn’t in the instructions, and one unfurled it by accident (her friend unraveled it).

Mostly, I was interested in how people would interpret “3) On paper, draw the word with the word.” One actually said out loud, “How can I draw this with a pie? I don’t have a pie with me!” which surprised me because it was a miscalculation on my part. I had no idea people would attempt to draw the word with the object the word referred to. But as expected, interpretations varied; the word “pie” was written with many many pies, the word “rubbish” (misspelled as “rubish”) was written with “rubish” all over, and the word “fruit” wasn’t even drawn as a fruit–it was a cup of orange juice, according to the person who drew it. So I think I got this part right for showing interesting variations and thought logic people have when presented with a vague statement like “draw the word with the word.”

I would definitely tinker with using an actual pen (probably a marker) instead of a measly pencil. You could barely see the traced wrinkles on the back. I would also introduce more aspects of repetition; in retrospect, the point of the project wasn’t emphasized well. Repetitions could include talking to multiple people to fill the paper up with more drawn words, or just draw more word associations from that single topic. After all, the resulting drawing itself wasn’t very interesting–it was just the process that was interesting.

infinite loop or so i thought

lala

The recipe is reflective of Paranoid Android by Radiohead: when I tweet something, the system replies to me with “i may be paranoid but not an android.” To correspond to the lyrics, I chose to tweet “what’s that”:

paranoidandroid

At first I thought this would create an infinite loop of my account tweeting “i may be paranoid but not an android” every five minutes or so but I soon find out that was not the case. Either twitter has a system that blocks tweets that contain the same content as the tweet that came before or IFTTT considers “new tweets” as original tweets and not tweets spawned from IFTTT (highly possible that it’s the latter as they want to avoid a case of the infinite loop). But I still like the recipe, even though its sole function is to amuse myself with the inside joke of “haha, it’s like the machine tweeted back that it’s not an android to me after I asked what’s that.”

I experimented with more recipes, changing my tactics:

paranoidandroid2

This one uses hashtags instead to enable specificity in what gets tweeted after. So for the new tweet, I specified it to have “#whatsthat” so that the action becomes tweeting “#imaybeparanoidbutnotanandroid”. I made another recipe to make use of this hashtag specificity, but this one did not work well. I made the trigger “#imaybeparanoidbutnotanandroid” and the action “#whatsthat” in order for the two recipes to bounce off each other, but the recipes did not react to each other as I had hoped. Meaning, the third recipe did not get triggered at all, probably because of the conjectures I made about “new tweets” in the previous paragraph. Oh well. Technology!

Some thoughts about IFTTT, Art and the API, and Formula for Computer Art: I like how these actions are scripted beforehand. There is a formula for it, which means anyone with the means can do it; they do not have to create the template, as there is already a template. Creativity is left to what they do with the template, which is provided by the API. Interesting thing is, the function of these API is to generate connections, just as art is the bridge between one thing to another, from creator to the viewer, from vision to execution, from idea to consequence.

Board Games

I have a friend who uses board games as a majority of his social interaction. I did not realize that people has been using this technique for so long.

the student loan industry

It mostly caught my attention because I know Paolo is an educator at a major university that has its students pay $60k a year. Right now I’m trying to discern what kind of tone he carried when tweeting the quote, but I can only attach my own sentiments to it, marking it with my own opinions about how I feel about college tuition in America (it’s mostly cynical and negative like everyone else’s).

I did read it in his voice though.

I wonder what this–WHOA

This tweet was particularly interesting for me because despite having been a mac user for a while, I’ve never thought of messing with its controls or doing funky things to its interface. These short, simple instructions served as a reminder to me that even the most popular, commercialized products have their silly bugs. #Windows

How to make abstract art

Using a straight edge:

  1. Pick a point anywhere on the sheet of paper that is not too close to the edges.
  2. Draw 4 non-perpendicular lines that branch out from the selected point.
  3. On each of those 4 line segments, draw 1-2 non-perpendicular lines that branch out from them.
  4. On each of the existing line segments, draw perpendicular lines connecting a line segment to its neighboring line segment in a random fashion. No two lines may intersect (cross) each other. For clarity: the lines must be perpendicular to the starting segment, but need not be perpendicular to the neighboring segment.
  5. Recursively execute #4 within the shapes and subspaces formed until satisfied.
  6. Draw a small number of perpendicular lines that branch out from the lines enclosing the larger spaces. These lines will not join two lines together.
  7. (Optional) If there exists a large amount of unoccupied space on the page, repeat the entire process until satisfied.

Voilà!

ticha rev 2 ticha rev 1

 

ticha rev 3

How does this compile

lewitt - clean

Executing Sol Lewitt’s artwork was mostly a challenge not because of the instructions themselves, but the way the instructions were presented. In all the computer science classes I’ve taken, they always remind students that they should write code for people to read – not for machines to execute. The strict ‘style’ rules about line length, proper indentation, and commenting code is a clear indicator of how seriously they want students to follow this philosophy. As in the case of Lewitt’s instructions the audience can be interpreted as both the person and machine, it becomes very challenging to execute because of the drawn-out line length (it certainly does not follow the standard ‘at most 80 characters per line’ protocol), lack of punctuation, and abundance of connectives. For me, it became confusing to the point that I had to annotate the instructions to keep track of key points, positions, and the like.

lewitt-instructions - annotated

 

My first attempt was pretty heavily annotated:

lewitt - rough

DINO Pet: An adorable 3D printed dinosaur nightlight powered by algae

I needed only to read the first four words of the tweet to have my curiousity piqued and exploration initiated. But beyond my nostalgic senses tingling with the “adorable” form of a dinosaur, the project has profound implications by using bioenergy (i.e. bio luminescent  dinoflagellates, hence DINO). While the scope of the project seems focused on the education of youth, it also points towards a future of sustainable energy. Not to mention it’s 3D printed shape that has undergone much research to find an ideal that could sustain the life of the algae.

Investing in the Kickstarter project is definitely on my mind. I would certainly like my own little DINO pet sitting on my desk–far easier to take care of than a cat.

Written by Comments Off on DINO Pet: An adorable 3D printed dinosaur nightlight powered by algae Posted in Assignment-02-Tweet

A Good Recipe

iftttThis morning, I was pleasantly greeted with an optimistic text saying “Mostly Clear today! With a high of 84F and a low of 72F.” I think the best part about this, besides the fact that I did not forget to check the weather for once, is that I got a taste of optimism so early in my day. In this regard, I think IFTTT is a beautiful way of customizing my API use to its fullest.

According to Jer Thorp in his article “Art and the API”, APIs are already architectural feats to get data from one place to another. However, I think IFTTT takes this architecture to another level by breaking down the walls between APIs and allowing a person to reorganize the way they send and receive data. In addition to that, the design of the site is soooooooo user-friendly! I only have to click a few buttons in a few seconds to link my apps, and the text is really big to tell you “THIS STEP IS SUPER EASY”. It’s just one of those “Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” ideas.

Then again, when I compare IFTTT to the generic examples in Jim Campbell’s Formula for Computer Art, it’s pretty clear that IFTTT is a straightforward input-output design. However, what makes this so genious is that IFTTT’s output reaches every single person on a personal level through the APIs that basically define our networking world.

I also think IFTTT has a long way to go because many great APIs are still missing from the list (snapchat anyone?), and the action and trigger options are still relatively narrow unless you know how to customize RSS feeds. That said, I just joined and I am already hugely optimistic about what this may become in the future.

 

Connections

My recipe connects the Tumblr I use as an art documentation site and my Facebook. Every time I post on the Tumblr page, a Facebook post with a link to the Tumblr post is generated on my wall. This union is utilitarian; it is an attempt to make uploading work to multiple places easier.

I find The Formula for Computer Art humorous. Acknowledging that the computational/generative process is often overlooked, the formula makes commentary on the importance of the creative process and not simply the trigger and result of an artwork. Attention must be given to the properties of the media when creating the piece, and this applies to computer art just as much as any other genre of work. The formula looks at the process of creation as a high level flow chart, the way a computer itself sees a task. I see this progression in If This Then That. The service is literally trigger, connections hidden to the user/viewer, result. IFTTT is a tendon connecting structure (content) and triggered force. Art and the API illustrates how these tendons connect musculature to skeleton in a big picture. The article illustrates how connections take form and generate content with impact, reaching masses through tributaries of information and purpose.