Snaps make things 3D :)

After yesterday's misguided straw and wire exercise, I have returned to my besties, the triangulated muslin. As per previous suggestions, I have added some snaps in strategic places to get an idea of what kinds of weird shapes I could get, and I am quite pleased with the result. I only have two of these panels, though, so maybe I'll have to make a bunch more this weekend. I have to think about how to make these without the cardboard. Originally, i had envisioned making the "skeleton" of the boning that corsets have, but I haven't been able to find this stuff yet, so I might have to delve into the doldrums of fashion district this weekend...

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day 3 - ambient internet noise

today I made an application (for another potential installation idea) that reads aloud any email sent to a specific address (spamtest@stfj.net).
I then published the address to the front page of my website, but colored it the same as the background. the idea is that although people won't be able to see it, spam bots will notice it and hopefully start sending it email.

If I keep the program running all the time, it should just start talking one day. I feel like this junk internet data (largely made up of spam) is kind of the ambient noise of the internet, so this installation would tap into that noise.

Another idea would be to with the same program instead of keeping the address invisible, put it up on reddit and digg and explain the project, and see what people email to it. This could fit in with my investigation on how the internet abstracts us from eachother and what kind of behavioral changes that can induce.

I don't have an audio file to upload, because I haven't gotten any mail yet :)

////// part 2.

I also put a little more work into the droning crowd project, replacing a few more shorthand bits (jk with Just Kidding, etc), and making the 'Dear' (which I replaced @ with, so @nickJonas would be Dear NickJonas) more understandable.

and in response to comments,
It's definitely hard to understand some of the time, but I think this adds to the piece. It's not meant to inform, but to act as the ambient noise in a space. If you stop and try to understand it though, you end up hearing tidbits of conversation in the same way if you were walking down a crowded street you might pick up bits and pieces. i never meant it as a feed reader, but always as an installation in a space. Either a public one or a gallery space. I'm looking into places where I can get a megaphone to use, although more for the aesthetic quality than to make it super loud.

-zach

Day 3: Pants

More potential concepts for the final collection. I figure I would use this week to explore as many ideas as possible, so I have a good number (and variety) of items to choose from when I start building out my final collection next week on. 

Yesterday's shirt collar was about capitalizing on fear. Today, I'm leaning more towards embarrassment. Thinking about how I can make a pair of suit pants embarrass its user, one idea I came up with is to sow blood packs (that are easily punctured) onto the inner lining right above the knees, so if the user crosses his/her legs, there will be theatrical bleeding. The second idea is to insert two thin mental rods connected by a joint into the suit pants, having it span from one thigh, across the crotch, to the other thigh. In this case, if the user crosses his/her legs, the structure will contract and cause the crotch area to tent up (yeah, I went there. I hope this doesn't offend anyone!). I tested this mechanism with paper, and I think it will work(?).

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Twofer

Yesterday was a thing-a-day fail for me. I'm not sure why but it was and I'm trying this week not to let it kill me. So today I did two things.

The first was to break away from my hesitance to use the materials in the cell phones themselves. Since I had already ruined an old Samsung slider phone, I decided to take it apart to see the materials first hand. I had a really inorganic response to the whole process. It was difficult to get to every little part where tech was hidden. There were three different sections that had to be taken apart. In the end, I lined up the materials by the plastic parts created to protect the tech and the tech itself. Density wise, it seemed like the tech outweighed the plastic in the phone but there was still a good bit of plastic used to keep each part separate from itself. After the more straightforward approach, I decided to take some pics of the design of some of the pcb's and then to try and make compositions from the materials. I dunno...this whole thing didn't really resonate with me.

For my second thing-a-day, I set up a set of design rules and observations. It sort of came from this conversation I had about what I'm trying to say. I told my friend, "It's really about how you _have to have_ the latest gadget. And once you get it, you covet it and parade it out. But just as quickly as you fell in love, you scratch it, put use into it--and then all of a sudden it's old. So you go out and get a new device and put away the old one. But it just stays in some drawer until it's reached the end of the products life cycle and totally unusable. Then that device with all of its chemicals just gets thrown into landfills to leach into the earth. It's about this cycle"

I think that this is why I was investigating using light as a way to make it time-based or cyclical. I also think I was interested in clay being a material from the earth and natural.

Soooo...I do sort of feel as if I'm trying to narrow the funnel and get some clarity on what I'm trying to say.

-Jen

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3D crowd

Today I shot 3D pictures of crowds. Naturally I went to times square because I wanted a touristic type of crowd to experiment with.
Next steps would involved merging people together to construct a scene to be seen through the view master.
I selected 10 of the images I took today and turned them into anaglyphs in case some of you have a red/cyan pair of glasses to see the 3D effect :)

-Grace

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penultim.it

Catchy Web 2.0 name, eh? I started building out the first of the 2 prototypes I introduced in yesterday's post: the URL shortener that returns back a shortened URL of the second to last link in the database, rather than the last (which would be the link the user submits). Second to last -> penultimate -> penultim.it, mostly because the domain is available for $40/year should I choose to actually build it out! Conveniently, I didn't need to hack the core functionality because the server-side install comes with it's own (very) basic API framework. Through some PHP and SQL magic, I have the functionality of what I wanted up and running:

Check it out here: http://thesis.kunaldpatel.com/share

Right now it's purely an implementation prototype, so please don't comment on how crappy it looks :-) I'd like to add another piece of core functionality (a "Copy to Clipboard" button like bit.ly has) before moving on to design. I'll come up with a simple layout and project description to frame the context and message of the piece. Once I've gotten that all set up, I'll release it for public dissemination and try to elicit feedback from non-Parsons people this weekend @ the Web Ecology Camp.

For now, please use it! I added some links as I was working for stuff, and I'll check it tomorrow to see what people have added. Thanks!

A revised script of scenes based on the split screens look...

Click here to download:
Ultimate(ly) Happy.doc (25 KB)
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This treatment is mostly to help me to see what would be in each screen at what time and how.

What's in the boxes is what you see, but not necessary what you hear.
In addition, I didn't elaborate about what exactly my characters are saying, but the subject they are talking about.

birthday suit : flash prototype

Because Posterous doesn't seem to like .swf files, here's a link : http://a.parsons.edu/~dasga383/thesis/birthdaysuit.html

The linked Flash app is a mockup of my Birthday Suit project idea. Moving the mouse over the woman's body on the left removes the corresponding parts of the man's suit on the right. Because my eye-tracking setup is calibrated to control mouse movement, this app can be used with it to provide a decidely lo-fi but still valid approximation of the interaction.