The Beached Whale

Left my computer with 3 and a half hours worth of rendering last night and it had some kind of error so I’m currently re-rendering that, once it’s done I’ll have just a little time to finish rendering the final cut of the video and get it compressed / uploaded.  It will be finished and ready to show by the presentation, but it’s been a hectic 48 hours or so to get to this point.

As I was working on the project I came up with ideas (the process of working on it changed my concept for the end result somewhat) and I ended up trying to draw modern parallels in technology to much of what Engelbart talks about.  Some of what he says in defining the HIRC’s goals couldn’t really be visualized so I went with some abstract, symbolic visuals in those places.  I edited the original audio a ton, sometimes just cutting out single words hear and there for clarity, other times removing pauses between words to give it a rhythm that would mesh with the music.  Hopefully the result will be something that is interesting and relevant not only to people already interested in the subject, but to anybody who uses modern technology.  That’s part of what made ‘The Machine is Using Us’ so good and I hope I can attain a similar feel in my video.

I think the project is coming together now, I have about a minute of footage finished.  I also have the whole 4:30 worth of audio cut together along with original music I’ve composed to accomodate the speech.  Hopefully it’ll blend with the visuals, there remains a lot of work to be done but at least I’ll have finished audio to follow as a guide now…

Finally got around to looking through the body of the presentation, and slowly came to the realization that this would be a really technical, boring video if I just tried to cover the key points of the demo.   Much of it is very slow and tedious, and Engelbart frequently messes up and has to backtrack; seeing the presentation in its entirety helps me to understand perhaps part of why the ‘mother of all demos’ didn’t make huge waves and influence rapid progress at the time.  It’s not a very concise presentation, and it’s clear he hasn’t rehearsed a lot of it before, often he stops mid sentence and goes for minutes at a time without speaking while he resolves a technical issue.  Instead, I think I’ll need to focus it on the philosophy and goals behind the HIRC’s research, a little under halfway through the presentation Engelbart talks about this.

I guess that abbreviation never caught on.  Interesting article though, I didn’t really have a good understanding over how the different protocols worked and what defined them.  The WWW certainly allows the most freedom, but also tends toward being a mess.

The project is coming along alright now, I have an animated introduction based around the question Engelbart poses at the beginning of his talk put together now, I will certainly need to do a lot of work in the coming days to get this finished, though.  After looking over the scholars week schedule I couldn’t find anything about us and don’t really understand when/where/how I’ll be presenting.  I have found a high-quality version of the original demo (the youtube version isn’t good enough, the audio quality is barely intelligible at times) but my computer can’t record off of the sound card so I still need to find some way of doing that.

I had an interesting experience recently in a video class I’m taking right now, and it definitely made me think about Nelson’s ideas of how the current, regulated system of education harms and slows the learning process in some ways rather than fostering it.

For an assignment, I had to shoot a short video project, including certain parameters.  Just about everybody was shooting their videos on and around the Baylor campus and I wanted to do something different and unusual to set my video apart.  I filmed my whole video in front of greenscreen and composited digital backgrounds to create a sort of futuristic cold war setting for my chase scene.  Though I was definitely trying to make a video opposite what I knew the professor would expect from us, I was very careful to include all the requirements.  I put way more time and effort into my film than was expected of us, because it was very ambitious and I was willing to work a little harder to show what I’m capable of.

When we showed our videos in class, everybody including the professor was very impressed by my video and enjoyed it.  The other videos were good too, of course, but basically stuck to the requirements for a short chase scene.  I was pretty confident that, given I was careful to meet the requirements, I was going to get a good grade on the assignment.

I ended up getting an 80%, far below the average grade in the class for this project.  I knew the video wasn’t perfect, but I hadn’t expected this.  There were two primary reasons I was graded down.  Because of some stylized color effects in the video, it wasn’t clear if I had properly white balanced or not, though I had.  Also, the professor didn’t see the beginning and end of the ‘chase’ segment of the video in the way I had defined it when making the video, so he graded it down for not being long enough.  I explained both of these issues to him afterward and he was very complementary of the video but insisted that he was just grading based on meeting the requirements.

I don’t have hard feelings for the professor over this, but it definitely reminded me of the downside of the current education system that we’ve been discussing in class.  I put 110% into my project and tried to think outside the box while still meeting the requirements for the class and because this made my integration of the requirements less obvious, I got a worse grade than people who cut their videos together in the last 24 hours before the deadline.

What lesson does this teach a student?  To me it seems the lesson is to do what is expected.  There’s some room for creativity within this boundary, just don’t go too far.  Perhaps the fact that the professor and other people recognized the added effort and were impressed by the result should be enough, but grades are important and if I had to do this over I would certainly go for something more conventional that would take half the time and get me a better grade.  As a result, I’m likely to shoot for exactly what will get me the grade (a less beneficial endeavor, other than the getting a good grade part, though I’ve learned plenty of other important stuff in the class) and only really experiment in projects that I’m making on my own.  It makes me see projects like this one as a sort of ’standardized test’ of knowledge, which just isn’t what I was expecting.  Whether it is really a bad thing to use assignments like this to test for specific, general knowledge is debatable.

I’m sure some people would defend against this criticism with something to the effect that “In the real world, you have to produce exactly what your client wants and expects from you.”  True, but I don’t think that’s really applicable to this situation because the parameters were very minimal, and in an educational setting free thought and creativity should be encouraged – school assignments aren’t work on commission.

The recounting of the girl expressing hatred for the game even as she couldn’t stop playing it sounded familiar.  My roommate and some other friends play xbox 360 quite a bit and often say things like “Oh, I hate this part!” or “I hate this stupid game!”  (These are usually the most difficult parts of the game.)  Sometimes I ask why they’re playing it if they hate it, it usually doesn’t go over very well.

I found myself beginning to feel concern for Jarish’s welfare, it makes me wonder how he turned out after having such an irregular childhood.

On the whole I agreed with a lot of the points made in this article, I think a large majority of people who didn’t grow up with video games tend to misunderstand them entirely as a mindless, sedentary time-waster that will turn your brain to mush even faster than television.  In my own experience the same people who held these beliefs also espoused the wonders of reading, it always felt like a contradiction to me given that reading has less maximum potential to engage a person and is actually significantly more sedentary.  Granted, most video games aren’t good physical exercise, but I would say that playing a good video game could be as beneficial (though in some different capacities) as reading a good book.  And really, what knowledge or skill you acquire from enjoying something should be beside the point.

Another question I thought about while reading this essay is how long it will take for video games to be recognized as a legitimate art form by the general public.  If we come to hold them with the same esteem as other games it won’t really get us to that point, as few people would identify popular board games as masterful works of art even if they are.  Video games have come a very long way in a very short period of time, and the progression reminds me a little of the history of film – first it was seen as a fun diversion with no future use, and even after the picture shows caught on it took a long time for film to be recognized as a ’serious’ art form.  A lot of the video games that receive critical acclaim in this area tend to be lauded for elements that make them like film or literature, such as visuals and story – Bioshock, for example, feels sort of like a semi-playable movie to me.

Oh, and the project.  I’ll be honest, I probably need to pick up the pace.  I’ve begun work on the introduction -starting with the question Engelbart poses at the beginning of the talk.  I’m planning to create visualizations for the early parts of the talk resembling Commodore 64 and other early computers, and move forward technologically as the video progresses.

The story was a fun read, stylistically it reminded me a bit of Asimov, only with aliens similar to Tolkien’s elves brought into the mix.

I see how the society of the Kimonians could be seen as a parallel to the philosophy behind web developers and other computer scientists who don’t want the ultimate end of the internet to be business/profit oriented.  The Kimonians seem to freely share all their information with each other – it’s unavoidable, in fact.  As a result their society has progressed much further than mere humans are capable of doing, even though they may not be vastly more intelligent.  Often in sci-fi telepathy is portrayed as a fancy alternative to talking, I thought the way that it was made into the Kimonians’ great breakthrough that allowed them to so vastly surpass humanity was an interesting idea.

That was a really interesting article, although I’ve done my best to steer clear of MMORPGs I always found the concept behind them to be interesting, so a look at an early MMORPG shows some interesting tendencies and discoveries; the authors’ observations ended up being somewhat philosophical as what they learned pertained to human nature.  There is an interesting division between what people will do in real life and what they’ll do online.

Here is my extract for my final project.  It’s not perfect but I tried to keep it relatively short and succinct, primarily because I wanted to avoid saying anything in describing it that might end up being inaccurate.

On December 9, 1968, computer scientist and inventor Douglas Engelbart presented a demonstration of emerging computer technology that would later become known as “The Mother of All Demos.” In this videotaped presentation, Engelbart exhibited the first public demonstration of a computer mouse, video conferencing, hypertext, and a system similar to email. Much of this technology would not come into popular use for decades afterward, yet Engelbart has received little recognition for his work in computers, which was very far ahead of his time and on some levels surpasses technology available today.

In this video presentatin created as part of Dr. Campbell’s “New Media Studies” course, I have set highlights from the narration of Engelbart’s original demonstration to new, original video and animation to bring an added level of meaning and draw parallels to modern advances in technology. In addition to the video presentation, there will be supplementary information on the work of Engelbart and others at the forefront of the New Media community.

Sorry for the bad pun, though technically speaking, I’m not really sure if it counts as a pun.

Vote for Baylor at http://www.one.org/projects/ , apparently we could win a free concert and we’re pretty close in the voting right now.

Anyway, I looked all over the place for tonight’s reading, to no avail.  I did learn a little more about the reading though, it is a short story originally published as an anthology.  It should be interesting to see how this ties into the class, I look forward to reading it when it comes online.

Though “Really” and “Much” were the two most common words on my blog, (aside from whatever articles and pronouns they take out automatically) I did notice that most of the relatively large words were relevant to what I’ve been writing about, and even showed the tendencies toward discussion of film and video, as we mentioned in class.

So anyway, my project.  There hasn’t really been any physical progress on it since yesterday, but I’ll try to elaborate a little more on some of the particular ideas I have in store, or at least want to experiment with.  The “word clouds” that I’ve talked about previously have a really neat visual design to them and I’d like to incorporate something similar, perhaps even include some word clouds in the video – for example, I could show a word cloud of a transcription of a part of the video, then highlight a word as Engelbart begins to discuss that particular element, using the cloud as a recurring “map” of what he is talking about.

I don’t want this to become unfocused, but I’m still interested in including media from sources other than the Mother of All Demos, if only to mix things up a bit visually and try to show multiple perspectives on what Engelbart is talking about.  I don’t imagine this will be longer than 3-5 minutes but I want it to have enough going on in it that people will want to watch it again.