Notes

Notes that I have been making directly into this website as I have been browsing the web - need organising and cleaning up.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

What good are computers? They can only give you answers.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.

Quotes from Picasso - from the website http://painterskeys.com/ relating to thoughts on blog walking

1 a: of or relating to time as opposed to eternity b: of or relating to earthly life c: lay or secular rather than clerical or sacred : civil 2: of or relating to grammatical tense or a distinction of time3 a: of or relating to time as distinguished from space b: of or relating to the sequence of time or to a particular time : chronological
— tem·po·ral·ly adverb http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/temporal


From notes taken this time last year, seminar on Action research

Especially in social sciences/practices even education

To up standard practice.

Plan, act, observe, reflect.

Working with children to find out what they want to do, how they want to learn, what they want to create.

A stick has two ends - education: to control and conform, or to change and enhance.


Notes from session Tuesday March 31st

Ben Calder, ex- UWE MA mediascape -- working now with Hewlett-Packard, did a mediascape which draws your path

Remember me the mediascape flash only works with actionscript 7 or less

Fruit loops? Free audio software

Temporal -- through time rather than spatial -- through space

Talk to Constance and to Jackie.

From Dust and Magic -

p 27 “Multimedia is not necessarily a cybernetic art - you can blend sound, music, images etc. together and create “immersive” experiences very well indeed without a computer”

Possibility spaces - a phrase coined by Bob Hughes?

A quote from Jack Tramiel, who founded the Amiga company - and was also in Auschwitz

‘it is hard to believe that it really happened, but it can happen again. In America. Americans like to make rules, and that scares me. If you have too many rules you get locked in a system. It’s the system that says this one dies and that one doesn’t, not the people... that’s why we need more Commodores. We need more mavericks, just so the rules don’t take over.” P 41

Ted Nelson = ‘everything is deeply intertwingled” p 42

It is very difficult fo a big business to use new technologies well becuase new technologies tend to come from little companies that have no “track record” - but “track record” is what insecure big-business managers look for. Hence, the work tends to go to big, reassuring looking businesses that in fact know very little about the new technology.” Bob Hughes p 55

The armchair travel co - lots of still images knitted together into a tour http://www.armchair-travel.com/home/index.htm

“Creativity is universal - but you’re most creative at what you do most” p 148

Robert Weisberg - Creativty - Beyond the Myth of Genius

A basic brief - who your audience is, what you are promising them, what you want to tell them about it, the ‘one great thing’ or ‘singleminded proposition’; the message that will make them sit up and go ‘Wow” What your constraints are p 156

It’s well known that neither telling people things nor showing them things is anywhere near as effective as letting them try things for themselves p 159

James Webb Young’s ‘technique for producing ideas’

Browsing
chewing it over
incubation
illumination
verification


These were thoughts on sound from Dust and Magic - that high quality sound effects the way in which multimedia is viewed - an experiment done by Brenda Laurel and.... two identical presentations involving images and sound, but one with a lower quality sound track - the images were identical, but people thought that the images on the presentation with the lower quality sound were also lower quality. Sound is a much deeper and more instinctive sense than sight - to alert one to the first signs of danger, from behind, at night, the part of the brain that can respond to sound

SaaS - software as a service aka cloud technology

Does interactive art belong in a gallery?

Play is fundamental to the computer experience - not hard work - needs to be fun. Interactive arts - needs to be based on how we play

The Labyrinth - a golden thread navigation system

Espeth v Aareth

cybertext - Perspectives on Ergodic Literature

Rogue Semiotics

Ludologists vs Narratologists in relation to games - the story emerging from the game (latter) of the story supporting the games playing (former)

William Gibsosn Pattern Recognition - inventor of a lot of the vernacular of the internet

story creating the boundaries - creating an athmosphere, a bit like teaching - not being didactic but setting the boundaries, facilitiating, about energy - energy that is created

Like a garden - sights, sounds and happenings

Film always has a third person observer - the camera is always the third person. With a mediascape who is the third person - being dragged in for the ether - the other - the omnipotent

this third person often does not exist in games play

Alan Moore - Voice of hte Fire

Alan Robert Grillet - jelousy

search for a flash fridge magnet game on line - or invent one

highlight all the rude words in a bit of text - ins tit utional - using find/change or the highlighter

Susan Sontag

online advent calendar

Sitting on a park bench people watching - web cams - the Flanure - like meditaiton - the journey or the ending

A group novel - A million Penguins - wiki authored novel - is facebook an interactive narrative?

Like throwing a party - get all the ingredients and set it all up, the timing, the place, the invitations, but then have little control over the outcome

Creating a structure

- like a but journey, letting the story unfold

Chris Webster - working with constructed time rather than with real time - mediascape a bit like a mixture of the two - some constructed time, but some elements in real time

Rybcowiski - room animation - in relation to mediascape, stating with one noise, and building up to a cacophany as you move around, and each sound builds up without ending - like clapping and sound games - would work well with the game idea - percussive games and voice games - have a look at the games book.

“Experimentation has replaced Interpretation” Gilles Deleuze

In need of a beginning, middle and end - the Fraytag triangle - a satisfactory payoff

Education will evolve - personalized distributed ((online) collaborative creative and engaging

people are gatherers - somewhere deep inside us is a gene that tells us to collect

always have an exit stratedgy

"There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish." -

  --  Warren G. Bennis

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

  --  Scott Adams

"Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live." -

  --  Peter Cochrane

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

  --  Albert Einstein

"Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun."

  --  Mary Lou Cook

"Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art."

  --  John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"The bad teacher imposes his ideas and his methods on his pupils, and such originality as they may have is lost in the second-rate art of imitation."

  --  Stephen Neill


The New Games Book - and the whole Earth Catalogue - direct link to San Francisco, the hippies, the anti war movement - leading into the silicon valley phoenomena

“Maria Montessori had been studying Italian children who were classified as feeble-minded. She managed to bring together a selection from all the schools in Rome, to see whether after all they were capable of more than other people thought. She managed to get them on her side by devising ways to make learning exciting and demanding. She found that then they pegged level in reading and writing tests with normal children. She pointed out to everyone that this id not mean that normal chilfren were no better than the feeble-minded. It was simply that traditional schooling was not fulfilling. It failed to make the most of what any of those children could offer, because it underrated their capacities to learn for themsleves. The Power in Our Hands, p82.83

"An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it." Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)