Week 8 – Experimentation

Changed the structure of these blog posts so I can talk about goals for this week with supervisor

By March 15th need to be clear on what you’re doing including whether you can learn a new skill in time etc.

Goals for this week

• Finish with The Language of New Media
• Start experimenting with specific ideas that come up from the reading
• Start recording references
• Make Project Plan

What I did this week

Understanding Postmodernism

I’ve understood that postmodernism is a rejection of modernism which focuses on simplicity and usefulness. I searched for postmodernism computing and came across a talk from Larry Wall about Pearl and its connection to postmodernism.

I think in order to refine the idea and start playing around with the idea is to define these to use as a framework and guideline

• What is postmodernism
• What is modernism
• What is spatialisation

Experimentation

After looking at Perl I realised that I wanted my piece to be understood by a non tech savvy audience. Perl isn’t a commonly used language amongst coders so, it’s less likely to be known by non coders.

I booked out a projector and have been learning to use MadMapper.

What aspect of spatialisation do I want to show?

• Daily life comparison
  • Show how we think about time linearly but we display time spatially on computers
    • We wake up, go to the bathroom, eat, shower, check mail routine
    • Mail, message, folders etc all lined up for you, You can jump between these different things
  • While we plan our physical spaces in a certain way for example schools being close to residential areas etc. The digital version of our buildings (clothes store, grocery store, hospital) all exist in the same area you don’t have to travel to get from place to another. You can have 3 different tabs open zara, sainsburys, call with doctor
    • Is this how we lose our sense of time in the digital space? because we don’t have to travel a distance it feels like everything is done so quickly. (Look into humans and productivity is it important that we are always doing something? Time and mental health?)
    • Could you create an interface that has that injection of distance and travel.
    • What would a linear computer look like?
• Media specific
  • instagram is a grid format you could 5 posts about each day of your holiday. Friends can jump between the different days look at them in a different order as opposed to listening to you tell the story in a particular order
    • Linear thinking with a spatial interface. Everything is laid out in front of us all the time. With linear thinking there will always be the next thing.
  • Wikipedia you can jump through the web page find the specific thing and jump elsewhere.
  • Drawing depending on medium you can’t erase what you do but digitally you can jump between layers adjust something you did it at the beginning of the piece right at the end
• Our strong tie to technology is through media. Media will morph to the new technology. Are computers different? computers are a flexible technology we could use computers in a different way to how we do now. Is optimisation and simplicity the best way to design is this a modernistic view that postmodernism rejects? Odd contrast of computers being designed spatially not linearly which is a postmodernist effect but we want to make things as simple and optimised which is modernist view. Oxymoron?
• Different parts of life to look at spatialisation to see the digital version of it
  • Geography, urban planning
  • Sociology, social structures
  • Philosophy
  • Time, History
  • Economics