Major Studio Narrative: Mini-thesis Prototype 1

Communico board 1…the FYI Frames..

Major Studio Narrative: Social Prototype 2

Concept

We created a piece of street art to be wheat pasted within the Lower East Side (near Tompkins Square Park) commemorating the 1988 Tompkins Square Park Riot, that is representative of how the music and the people influenced and created social change in the area. 

 We want this piece to remind people of the events that occurred, why they occurred, and what happened as a result. The style and imagery aim to show the current residents the historical significance the square has had to music and society.  The tree is a metaphor for how the events branched out, and how social change is so deeply rooted in the events of that night. The social change that resulted was a conglomerate of different ethnicities, musical styles, and social classes. The people who currently live in the area, are not necessarily connected each other than their geographical space, thus  the tree becomes not only a symbol of the park, but also a way of unifying different groups within a single space. msn_trial.jpg, origfile.jpg, tree2.jpg

Major Studio Narrative: Mini Thesis Concept

concept  

I want to create a series of retro illustrations that explore the disconnectedness of a society in which the channels of communication have been maximized, while the quality of communication has been compromised. 

pitch

In our quest to construct a technological landscape that facilitates communication, making it possible anytime, anywhere, we’ve inadvertently created a sense of detachment and isolation. I believe that putting a “barrier” between people (i.e. a computer, a cellphone, a blackberry, etc.) has jeopardized our abilities to communicate, and ultimately led to the alienation the individual. This project will use a retro style of illustration to emphasize the irony of this situation. Essentially,  inject modern technology into a Norman Rockwell painting to demonstrate how intrusive, yet acceptable these technological crutches have become. Each scenario will depict a situation where the use of a third party form of communication is not required (i.e. exchanging vows at a wedding, or during a family dinner), thus the technology becomes out of place yet raises the question, “Is this scenario unrealistic?”

 

some style/inspiration frames

         

Major Studio Narrative: Portrait Prototype

Group: Tarynne Goldberg
Myeong Jae Lee
Rohini MetharamOur initial idea of depicting the character through a one sided conversation in a breakup was too narrative. We had to go back and refine the piece to portray the character without being too literal. We stuck with the same concept for the prototype and worked mainly with sound and a little text to bring out the character through just the emotions, thoughts and sounds that he/she would experience during this part of their life. Below is our prototype. Enjoy!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7711656600848794819

Collab: Final Project

Conor Clarke, Vaskiliki Touhouliotis, Tarynne Goldenberg

Final Project, Urban Group: Post-Panotptic Pat

dae_ccvttg_pppfinal.pdf

Major Studio:Final Project, prototypes

Major Studio: Final Project, part two

Articles and Research:

1. Analysis of Topological Characteristics of Huge Online Social Networking Services

Social networking services are a fast-growing business in the Internet. However, it is unknown if online relationships and their growth patterns are the same as in real-life social networks. In this experiment, the observers compared the structures of three online social networking services in order to study friendship connections, correlation, and evolution over time. Certain online social networking services encourage online activities that cannot be easily copied in real life; newer sites such as mySpace and orkut show that they deviate from close-knit online social networks which show a similar degree correlation pattern to real-life social networks

2. Structure and Evolution of Online Social Networks

This paper looked at the evolution of structure within large online social networks. The observers looked at two main sites, and found that essentially both were segmented in much the same way: singletons who do not participate in the network;isolated communities which overwhelmingly display star structure; and a giant component anchored by a well-connected core region which persists even in the absence of stars. Their model of network growth captures those aspects of component structure and follows the experimental results, characterizing users as either passive members of the network; inviters who encourage offline friends and acquaintances to migrate online; and linkers who fully participate in thte social evolution of the network.

3. A Familiar Face(book): Profile Elements as Signals in an Online Social Network

Using data from a popular online social network site, this paper explores the relationship between profile structure(namely, which fields are completed) and number of friends, giving designers insight into the importance of the profile and how it works to encourage connections and articulated relationships between users. It describes a theoretical framework that draws on aspects of signaling theory, common ground theory, and transaction cost theory to generate an understanding of why certain profile fields may be more predictive of friendship articulation on the site.

4. A Face(book) in the Crowd: Social Searching vs Social Browsing

Large numbers of college students have become acid Facb ook users in a short perod of time. In this paper, the observers explored whethere these students were using Facebook to find new pople in their offline communities or to learn more about people they intially meet offline. The data suffested that users are largely employing Facebook to learn more about people they meet offline, and are less likely to use the site to initiate new connections.

5. Group Formation in Large Social Networks: Membership, Growth, and Evolution

The processes by which communitites come together , attract new members, and develop over time is a central reserach issue in the social sciences – political movements, professional organizations, and religious denominations all provide fundamental examples of such communities. In the digital domain, online groups are becoming increasingly prominent due to the growth of communitya nd social networking sites such as mySpace. This paper seeks to answer the questions: what are the structural features that influence whether individuals will join communities, which communities will grow rapidly, and how do the overlaps among pairs of communities change overtime?

6.When Online Meets Offline:The Effect of Modality Switching on Relational Communication

Collaborative partnerships developed via text-based computer-mediated communication commonly shift interactions to alternative formats. Extant research indicated that shifting from one modality to another, or “modality switching,” can have profound positive and negative effects on relational outcomes. Drawing on social presence theory and social information processing theory, this study examines the influence of meeting FtF after varying lengths of time interacting via computer-mediated communication on relational communication. Consistent with predictions, remaining online yielded greater intimacy and social attraction than the other conditions in which FtF contact occurred. With respect to the CMC conditions, modality switching modestly enhanced relational outcomes in the ‘early’ switching partnerships but more strongly dampened those of ‘late’ switching ones.

7. From TV Pitchman To MySpace Buddy

Alltel spokesman, Chad, a fictional character was given a mySpace page, and essentially a large friend pool followed. People become so fascinated and into the story of Chad that it lead to the creation of a fake website for his enemies, who in turn also received a fan base.

8. Measurement and Analysis of Online Social Networks

Online social networking sites like Orkut, YouTube, and Flickr and among the most popular sites on the Internet. Users of these sites form a social network, which provides a powerful means of sharing, organizing, and finding content and contacts. The popularity of these sites provides an opportunity to study the characteristics of online social network graphs at large scale. Understanding these graphs is important, both to improve current systems and to design new applications of online social networks

9. Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics

Openness and scalability, modularity and trust, transparency and security; these are some keywords emerging from contemporary debates about the structure and future of the Internet among engineers, entrepreneurs, and other individuals intimately involved with the programming and design of technical infrastructures. Such terms of debate may not be familiar to anthropologists and other cultural commentators who more regularly focus on the workings of gender, race, and identity or analyze structures of power, sovereignty, and governance. However, they are no less terms of political contest for being embedded in technical practice. This nexus of technology and politics is where the fieldwork described in this article took place, focusing on a distinct social group whose defining characteristic is recursive in nature: a group constituted by a shared, profound concern for the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association. I call this mode of association a “recursive public”; the people who participate in it will be referred to as “geeks”; and the Internet is the condition of their association.1

In this article, both argument-by-technology and discursive argument are followed to trace how openness exists simultaneously in both forms: first, as the rhetoric and ideas espoused by individuals who work on, care about, have responsibility for, or otherwise see themselves as involved in the Internet; and second, as the real technical and legal structure that the Internet may take at a particular moment in time. This article differs from existing research in that it uses this example and these informants primarily as a means for carrying out an ethnography not of geeks but of the Internet itself.

10.Musical Community on the Internet: An On-line Ethnography

How and why people find meaning in their use of the Internet should be as important as textual analysis for anthropologists to study. Ethnographic approaches understand the social and technological interactions (and processes) that despite taking place in the virtual realm of cyberspace, have consequences for lived social worlds. Until recently, anthropology has produced relatively few studies of the Internet, and fewer still were ethnographically based. The problem may be, as Michael Fischer argues, that “ethnographic fieldwork provides the tools of investigations, but those tools are challenged by cyberspace to maintain insider-outsider critical and comparative perspectives—not to become absorbed—and to adapt writing strategies that can map voicing and tonalities, locate people and their social structures, and thereby articulate critical sites of constraints and openness” (Fischer 1999:246-247).

11.Social Networks and the Semantic Web

A formal, web-based representation of social networks is both a necessity in terms of infrastructure as well as prominent application for hte Semantic Web. In this paper we prsent three advances in exploiting the opportunity of semantically-enriched network data:(1) an ontology for the representation of social networks and relationships (2) a hybrid system for online data acquisition that combines traditional web mining techniques with the collection of Semantic Web data(3) a case study highlighting some of hte possible analysis of this data using methods from Social Network Analysis, the brance of sociology concerned with relational data.

12. Online articles about the Samy Worm: how one mySpace user hacked the system and figured out an exponential algorithm for making and finding friends online.

Intro to Broadcast: Project 1 final revise

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Major Studio: New Media Public Art featuring Triangulation

this is a mouthful, but it basically means any public exhibition that maximizes communication between strangers…with that being said, here are 3 examples:

1. In Your Hands, by Dash MacDonald from ARS Electronika 2007

n Your Hands, a performance involving remote control roller skates created by Dash Macdonald.

Macdonald created roller skates that are controlled via a remote, which was manned by the installation visitors. In doing so, his destination and physical being was put into the hands of others. The point of this project was “meant only to divert attention from what’s actually going on—namely, a subversive social experiment that critically questions how far people are prepared to go in pursuit of their own entertainment.”(wmmna.com)…However, Macdonald creates and sustains triangulation through the formation of a crowd, and the subsequent interaction of that crowd with each other. By using entertainment as a blatant way of causing people to participate and interact with his piece, he also forces strangers to interact with each other in spectating and taking turns.

2.I, the world, things, life by Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren from the Nordic pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2007

Dahlgren created an interactive dart board where the audience takes plastic arrows placed in boxes, and throws them at the wall covered in black and yellow dartboards. By taking part in the installation, the audience is continuely modifying the work of the artist, and previous visitors. Triangulation occurs between visitors who interact with the dartboard at the same time, causing discussion about what is going on.

3. Sohpie Calle, Greenwich Village phone booth project, 1994

This piece of work was based on a suggestion that the artist contribute to the improvement of life in New York City. She spent a week sitting on a chair next to a phone booth, and changed the aesthetic appearence by covering up the logos, stocking the booth with snacks, cigarettes, drinks and flowers. She also engaged passerbys in conversation and encouraged them to leave comments on the notepad she set up at the booth. This may seem a little dated, but back in 1994, before the first big boom of the cell phone craze, this public space art project was very relevant. The art took form based on the triangulation that occurred between Calle and the audience.

In the end representatives of the telephone company threw all of Calle’s improvements into a trash basket (wwmna.com).

Major Studio: Instruction Sets for Strangers

On the east side of Union Square there are rows of benches along the walk way. I noticed that certain “characters” seem to have locations that they specifically stay in. For example, there are two men who tend to sit on the more southern benches with their luggage, both are heroin addicts, and display the same sets of behavior every time I see them. There are also several homeless people who sleep or lounge on certain benches. While other “characters” have areas they stay in (i.e. the steps at the south end) they may move through the east part of the park.

In a city like New York, where personal space is something people consider valuable (despite an overwhelming feeling that the city lacks personal space), its inhabitants are sometimes willing to surrender their space, like on a packed subway car or an elevator. However, in a public space such as park, like Union Square, people go to have an experience, albeit contrived, with nature. But, people don’t just go for the nature, they go to get away from the business of the city, more specifically, more space.

There are unspoken courtesy rules about sharing objects within a public space, like the benches on the walkway, concerning the amount of space one takes up and what is “appropriate.” However, I find it interesting that people will come and sit down on the bench next to these characters. These people range from young couples to men in business suits on break. A few inches from the strung out heroin addicts is a happy couple playful engaged in a conversation. In a place like New York where public space and private space is cherished, why is it that people so willingly share a physical object with someone who they would not normally associate with?