Category Archives: Uncategorized

ypag

11 Mar 2015

Daily Routines
This visualisation compares daily routines of famous creative people between work, sleep, creative work, food, job etc. Although, I am not so impressed by the visualization because it’s a bar diagram per person, one row represented by one person, I really like the content used for this visualisation. I believe that if this was done in D3 or some such tool, user could have switched between different modes too see exact sleep times between people, peek of creativity per week etc. This visualisation is interesting because it gives me more ideas of how a survey of hundreds of creative people can be done to map their daily life schedules to draw conclusions on how creative people organise their life.

Reference: https://podio.com/site/creative-routines

WWF advertisements by Murilo Melo:

There is something unique about decomposing something into it’s components or visualizing an entity with all of its dependencies. WWF ads by Murilo Melo are posters that place all the things that will get eradicated if a tree is cut around a tree. This visualisation has an impact on the viewer.

Reference: http://murilomelo.com/65642/554986/-/wwf

dantasse

11 Mar 2015

Ok, dang. Too early for LO 9 I suppose but I got to share this because what I thought it was is super inspiring.

Emily Garfield’s an artist, and some of the things she draws are maps of imaginary cities, like these:

Based on the title of this article about her art, I thought there was some kind of fractal algorithm behind it. Turns out she’s just drawing these by hand, which is awesome, but I’d love to see generative cities, where you put in a few parameters and see what the map looks like. Right now they’re evocative and fun, feel like the city map from an old video game or something. But I feel like they could be evocative and informational. Like, get a rough idea of what a city would look like if you put this or that policy into place. And then, it’d be even better to connect it to life somehow; to take a map and see how it’d feel on a day to day basis.

Huh, maybe that’s a final project idea. (well, it’s two final project ideas: generative maps, and maps -> feelings.)

Places and Non Places by Andrew Price

Price takes satellite photos of places, manually annotates the “Places” (buildings, parks, useful space) and the “non places” (roads, pavement, parking lots, green space that you can’t really use for anything). Here’s an example in San Francisco: download

Then he quantifies the ratio of places to non places (places are blue, non-places are red). 4.25:1 in this case, or 81% place. Here’s an example in suburban Little Rock:

0.08:1, or 8.5% place.

I find this really compelling, as it gets at what we really want to know about density. How much is *neat stuff* and how much is dead space? Neat stuff is fun to walk around, dead space is not. Also, it might give us a way to quantify the destructive impact of parking lots, wide streets, and other big wastes of space.

The downside is, it’s quite labor intensive to make one of these drawings. (So far.)

Zack Aman

05 Mar 2015

Red Shirts and Blue Shirts (The Gay Agenda)

“Red Shirts and Blue Shirts (The Gay Agenda)” is an interview about gender and sexuality (gay marriage, specifically) taking place within World of Warcraft. The author starts by private messaging people who respond to someone asking about LGBTQ guilds and asks them to explain their thoughts. What interests me about this project is how it coopts the communication present in the game, which is more frequently used for killing dragons or trading virtual items. She takes a virtual world and reminds the viewer that there are real people behind the avatars, and those people have thoughts with real consequences in the physical world. I was surprised that the quality of discourse was so high, though this might be skewed by editing out all of the non-responses.

My biggest complaint is the camera work. I’ve played WoW– I know it’s natural to move the camera wildly and jump around, but it makes for a painful viewing experience. Other than that, I’d like to see some larger context to her research, such as how frequently people actually respond to her, and her general estimation of whether or not WoW players are homophobic. She was surprisingly effective at conducting an interview within the virtual space, going to extra lengths to make sure her intent was well received.

Washko understands her work as an intervention, and through her work she seeks to actively change the gaming environment for women. Her work is grounded in feminist theory, but especially in engagement and facilitating discussion to change belief. What is innovative about it is that it is translated to the digital world, which is tends to be even more misogynistic in its protective anonymity.

Show Me How Not to Fight

“Show Me How Not to Fight” is an auditory translation of game data in Counterstrike. Events from the game (such as footsteps and gunshots) are extracted from the game, piped to Ableton for quantization, and then rendered on the screen as a graphical score for live musicians. This is something I’d love to be able to do; there are tools to parse Dota2 replay data (https://github.com/onethirtyfive/skadi) but I haven’t found anything for realtime data. Access to game data would allow me to do a lot of interesting things such as controlling sentiment of chat bots.

In the Counterstrike instance, i like the data being piped and turned into music–the percussion is fitting given the percussive nature of the game. I do wish, however, that the quantization were less rigid; I think it divorces the output from the source a bit too much.

sejalpopat

03 Mar 2015

reMemory Bot
A bot that retweets posts that reminisce about the “good old days”.

This is a twitter bot that looks up tweets with phrases like “remember when”, and “we used to”, from the past year and randomly selects ones to tweet at regular intervals.

Here’s a screen shot of some posts that the bot retweeted.

Most of the posts are a bit sappy which is expected but some of them are kind of quirky and random.

mileshiroo

03 Mar 2015

@_rap_game combines a random rap acapella with a random song from an SNES era game.

My bot is _rap_game and its URL is:
https://twitter.com/_rap_game

_rap_game describes itself as:
“Whose goal is at least 13,156 Rap acapellas combines game music (Official Audio)”

I’m interested in what occurs sonically and perceptually when you overlay two songs that may or may not share musical characteristics. Regardless of song choice, there will be a moment when the tracks seem to respond to each other.

At first I thought this interest could manifest in a tool, so I made a bot that allowed you to create combinations of songs following the syntax “song1 + song2 + song3”. This tool allowed you to produce a mix just by typing words, after only a few seconds. It was exciting to try unlikely combinations. I became particularly obsessed with the song “U Guessed It” by OG Maco, combined with 8-bit tracks.

This combination work better than other combinations of songs I had tried, so I made the decision to narrow the focus of the bot. Since music from SNES era games tends to be repetitive and rhythmic, it works well in place of beats or instrumentals. The songs from the games have a childlike quality, and they lend this atmosphere to the accompanying rap acapellas. The simplicity of the game music is usually at odds with the subject matter or tone of the rap songs. Since the two randomly chosen tracks won’t have matching tempos, the discrepancies in timing between the acapella and the game music also create meaning and particularly they alter perception of the rapper’s flow.

_rap_game combines a random rap acapella with a random song from an SNES era game. I use a small corpora of 92 raps songs and 143 game songs. I plan to expand those lists. I’ve been listening to the bot’s music going to and from school. Some songs I enjoy, and will continue to listen to.

The bot’s sounds currently have 1.1k plays on SoundCloud. Someone named Manny Santacruz wrote commented “this is so trash” on “Future Feat Kanye West Won Acapella Kirby Nightmarein Dreamland Music Boss Tower”.

I don’t think _rap_game fits into one of Michael Cook’s categories if only because it produces sound and not image or text. In one way, it’s comparable to bots like @twoheadlines that combine two pieces of content.

_rap_game’s full SoundCloud archive can be found here.

Examples: