Crowd Sourcing

Project Concept

My 'inspiration' for this concept came from a Machine Head concert I went to a few months ago.  During their last song, they put up a slideshow on the wall behind them of pictures of fans holding up signs where they wrote short messages of how Machine Head's music impacted their lives.  Some wrote stuff like "Machine Head helped me through a breakup," or "The Blackening helped cheer me up after my dog died," and some were just messages like "I drove six hours to see Machine head because they're the fucking best."  Looking back on it, it showed me that the same music can have adversely different effects of people.  My concept for a crowd sourcing project is a website where people would post a picture of a concert that they went to and write a short message where they say what that band/music/concert means to them.  The purpose is to show different music can effect people in very different ways.  The title came from a Machine Head song called "The Blood The Sweat The Tears" which to me perfectly embodies the experience of going to a metal concert.

Participation 

I chose the Johnny Cash Project first because of the six listed, it looked like the most straight foward, but also because I liked the end result the most.  Seeing different depictions of the same image was pretty interesting.

I found the million masterpiece after googling "online crowdsourcing art" or something like that, and it looked like something similar to the Johnny Cash Project but with a different end result.  I tried to draw the cover art of a Gojira record, but it came out looking like a third grade drawing assignment.

The third one I did was the Iraqi Memorial project.  My proposal for the project was to organize a group of musicians to play the Iraqi national anthem and other Iraqi music in Washington DC at a public place like the national mall or a monument on the anniversary of the invasion.

4/17 Questions

1.  The author says that real interaction between machines and humans or humans and art is rare, but aren't video games just humans interacting with machines and art?

2.  Can some participative art be considered both socially engaged art and new media art, or does everything have to be in only one of those categories?

Lecture Writing 1

The first lecture I went to was by Henry Lowood from Stanford University.  He spoke mainly about the history and makings of machinima, which he defined as animated movies created using game technology that can act as a commentary on a virtual world. He started by giving three ways that machinima can be created and presented.  The first method is called demo recording, which he described as replay script based on code from the game engine.  Giving examples from the early Doom and Quake games, he explained that these videos acted as a recording of the actions of a player in which nothing new is learned.  The purpose is just to show gameplay.  The second method of creating machinina he talked about is called screen capture.  Through this method, screen capture software is used to record a viewpoint of an event as it happens in a game.  It does not involve any video files other than game data, and requires no editing with code.  Events are captured in real time through a personal perspective.  As an example, he played the Leeroy Jenkins video from World of Warcraft, in which a player's screen recording records him and his group dying as seen from his perspective.  The third method of creating machinima is called asset compositing.  This method requires people to dig through game files and explore off limits areas of games to exploit glitches and hidden game data.  One example of this he used was a video of World of Warcraft players who used a glitch to be able to walk on walls in order to reach a hidden area not meant to be seen by players.  The purpose of this is to show other players 'what is there.'   Lowood said that machinima owes it's existence to the relationship between players and games, and because of that, it can change how art is created.  In addition to machinima, Lowood also discussed the importance of preserving the history of games and their virtual worlds.  He talked about a project he is working on called 'Preserving Virtual Worlds' in which games and their components are preserved in order to be able to be viewed in the future.  He mentioned two methods for preservation.  The first called software preservation makes it possible to view game data in the future, while the second called documentation identifies that data that needs to be preserved.  He stressed that both methods are of equal importance.

Youtube Mixer

The idea of doing something similar to the inbflat thing was the first idea that came to mind since I knew I could make it work.  I spend a lot of time playing guitar so this came together pretty easily.  I titled it "guitar noises in open c" because I tuned one of my guitars to open c tuning, and I couldn't come up with anything much more creative than that.  Also, I didn't do anything fancy with the arrangement of videos because I wanted this to be about the sound rather than the visual appearance.

4/2 reading

1.  Can analog media that is converted to digital be considered new media if it is made part of a larger, already digital work?

2.  Is lossy compression the only thing that contributes to loss of quality in new media?