A Friendship Taken to New Heights

 

Popular posts from this blog

VR and Empathy Machine's

 What I really appreciated about Chris Milks Ted Talk was how he expanded upon the idea of film. he describes it as "the same now as it was then." But what Chris wanted to do was to use technology was to make stories that couldn't be made with current techniques. Each time he presents a new piece, people seem to have stronger and stronger emotional responses to it. I think this speaks to how powerful immersion is. The more immersive the piece is, the more invested the user becomes. I think this is what his goal was with the last project when he did clouds over Sidra. It was incredibly moving to see her entire environment. It was as real as it could be. He could have made a documentary on Sidra, but often times those can become movie-like. This project was the opposite of that. "You are sitting there with her... and because of that you feel her humanity in a deeper way." I think this piece captured that idea beautifully. It captures her world in such a way that e
Read more

Sharing Digital Texts - Cameron Whitney

Image
  Post Secret Ted Talk Post Secret Website Post Secret reminds me a little bit of the Yellow Arrow Project. It involves anonymity and sharing words with others. Thinking about this website and project warms my heart and simultaneously makes me feel like I could cry. It started with Frank Warren, a man who printed out 3,000 pre-addressed postcards in 2004 and randomly handed them out on the streets of Washington, D.C. He included instructions on one side and the other was blank. The instructions told the people who received the cards to “anonymously share an artful secret they’d never told anyone before.” Some people send in deep secrets and others send in funny ones. It is a beautiful form of digital literature as he posts them on the website so people can view new ones every Sunday. I’ve always wanted to send one in and I know that eventually, I will.
Read more

The Cyborg Manifesto and Hypertext Essays by Abby Tran

     In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Donna Haraway mentions that the cyborg may change the way people view gender. This is particularly interesting because, if you look at current technology, a gender is often given to it. I don’t really disagree with Haraway entirely, but I think that we might have a harder time completely leaving the idea of gender than she assumes. (Then again, I didn’t get to finish the reading, so she might have talked about this more and I missed it.) My reading of Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story was interesting in that I could start to pick up on the plot, however fragmentary it seemed. From what I gather, the story is about a man who saw his ex-wife and son die in a car crash, after having learned that his ex-wife was sleeping with a friend of his. What was most compelling to me was the almost violent nature of this friend, who pretends to hit animals while driving and insinuates that he has slept with
Read more