Scratch project

Learn more about this project


My project is perhaps best described as a visual narrative. By pressing the space bar and clicking on the red arrows, the visualizations lead the viewer through a short mystery.
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/jaqelang23/2197530

Simkins and Steinkuehler

      The article made interesting distinctions between moralization in videogame contexts versus real life. It began by setting up basic understandings of moral theory developments and assigning the view to which the article was attached. The article seemed to take the position that morality should be taken in terms of context, cultural or personal, etc. As such, the context of a videogame is different than the context of say the classroom. Certain things are appropriate, morally one, and not in the other. The article presents the importance of role playing in RPG videogames, and how it can apply to building an understanding of diverse moralities, and stronger senses of morality, in class settings. In relation to RPG's, the role often switches between different types of characters, each with their own moral sets based on what would be appropriate action for that character. Many games provide choices for what kind of character the player would like to be. As the character changes, so does the morality. If I play a rogue, given my alignment, it may be moral for me to steal rather than not to. On the other hand, if I am a cleric, it would be immoral for me to not kill those who are evil and to kill those who are not. Explaining the differences in morality in role-play situations not only enhances an understanding of how morality shifts in different contexts, but provides an understanding of how valuable role-playing can be for building sensitive morals that can understand another's perspective.
      It seemed undefined whether or not the article took the opinion that game morality could have an adverse affect on real-life morality for students. It also debated but didn't quite answer what was special about RPG video-games. Is it the technology and interface, or the story? The article explored both sides of the argument.

Gill, The Usefulness of Videogames

   While the article did heavily focus on the way students incorporated videogames into their projects and draw from them as resources, there was also information on how computer graphics can be used in curriculum. The ways students were using the graphics visually could easily be used in an arts classroom, and the relevancy of drawing from videogames is not lost. The class that was used in the article showed students using videogames for visual and functional reference. Many students manipulated the CG system to mimic the visualizations of videogames they were familiar with. Being familiar with videogames gave student's an area of knowledge from outside the class to build their skills off of, offering not only their interest and gaming to motivate them but also a source of pre-existing acquaintance with a similar technology to build their skills from. It provided a starting point. As a result, most of the student projects ended up having the appearance of videogame interfaces.
     The teacher in the article used student interest in videogames to inspire what could be done with the CG software. The results were impressive, and the students seemed more interested in their projects because they were linked to something they enjoyed doing in their free time. Students also used each other as resources for the projects, novices using those more familiar with the program to learn and a number of students also using what they knew of and from videogames to inform their software use.
       Game play was an interesting pursuit of investigation for learning mentioned int he classroom, and have we have discussed in class it is a useful one, a way to engage and motivate students. 

Tim Lefens Lecture (extra credit)

The Tim Lefen's lecture last night was really enjoyable, refreshing, and not exactly what I had anticipated. He's a very personable speaker, charismatic and humorously energetic.His views on what constitutes authentic art were also...unexpected? In some ways, his beliefs were expressly in contrast to what our own SUNY art education department hold as doctrine. In other ways though, the two spectra of thought are not incompatible.

Lefens' opinions of authentic art making seems to lie in the immediate and intuitive response to a work of art as well as in the genuine art making process itself. For him, real art is elevated, not on some leveled plateau where everyone is equal. Real art strives to ascend, to make that leap beyond the physical, which is not to say that real art does not manifestly contain the visceral. One may know real art upon sight instantaneously, for it will pounce upon them with the extreme profundity that throws the experiencer into a space of limitlessness, of pure sensory and the other-worldlyness of that elevated plateau where real art resides. In other words, real art hits you hard, is life changing.
For Lefens, the thinking, cognitive, or intellectual aspect of a work of art is secondary. These pieces that rely on humor, on the novel, or intellectual are not real art. If it has to be explained, if it doesn't have that hard visual affect on the viewer, then as smart as it may be it doesn't make that jump to the higher level. He does allow for socio-political context or activism to enter real art, but it shouldn't only be about "saying something." This is a kind of superficiality of what real art is and does, which again is the genuine movement of being and emotion felt upon witnessing.
Real art-making, likewise, is not a purely cognitive experience, if one at all. In the act of making itself, the artist needs to let go and loose one's self in the creating in order to go to that higher place. If the artist thinks through his whole making process, he remains entangled with what is too earth-laden.

This seems at odds, at first, with what our curriculum aims to instill within us. We are indoctrinated into the school of "the big idea" where art is nothing without concept, without being something more than simply visual or expressive. Often, art-making in our lesson plans may start with cognition, with an idea to be visually interpreted. The artist-student necessarily is always conscious of their end goal, of "saying something." This type of making might seem more aligned with thought or idea rather than the type of genuine self-loosing (as in to loose, not lose or loss) art that Lefens advocates.
I do not think the two views are wholly exclusive of each other though. Lefens does allow for socio-political or "big idea" aspects to enter into real art, as long as they are not the main focus. In our program, having that conceptual tie is important, but so is having a genuine personal experience with art-making. I think the personal tie, the self-loosing strain of authentic art, can be found in both Lefens' ideals and New Paltz's ideals. I think that at times the focus seems only to be on the conceptual, but this is perhaps because that it is controversial in how much attention is put upon it, and so is used to motivated students to investigate their own opinions of it. At the same time, the conceptual is very much an opinionated part of what we are taught to teach, but the emphasis, if seeming more one sided or heavy handed than it should be, is so only because the conceptual is what tends to be neglected.
I think the attention that is gets makes it seem like the traditional and technical is forgotten, which seems to be bringing about a resurgence of these more traditional concerns.

Because of how art-making is framed in the context of the school, I do wonder if it is problematic though, in terms of genuine art-making from a Lefens' perspective. We prompt student, they start with the idea and must carry this concern throughout the project. Does this stifle their ability to "let go" and fully create? I don't think that art should be only expressive either, but that perhaps meaning is found through the creative process and only really cognicized at the end of making when the artist can step back. Is it possible to balance between the two in an education setting at all in order to achieve this breed of real art?

The lecture also made me wonder how much Lefens himself is influenced by phenomenology, from a Heideggerian perspective specifically. Heidegger's phenomenology shares some overlap with a lot of what Lefens' what speaking about. Lefens' spoke about this kind of reduction of the artist, of the self that happens in the art making process, in which the self is loosed and temporarily lost into the being of creating. Cognition doesn't play a role in this authentic act, but is put aside while the self is fully taken by the being-in-making. This is similar to what Heidegger and Husserl talk about in the reduction of self, in the step back, where the self becomes fully involved in what is being done. If you are painting, you are wholly painting. The being of that action acts a place into which being is fully thrown. If this reduction and beingness does not occur, the act is inauthentic.

Why youth heart technology: networked publics

   Boyd discusses the differences between mediated and none-mediated publics, specifically networked publics in terms of mediated. Mediated publics are facilitated by various media, including news, television, radio, and other forms of mass media communication. The public is mediated through these forms, bringing information to a broader audience that cannot be defined in terms of the physical. Networked publics in specific are mediated through technology networks, including mobile phones, blogs, internet based group sites, etc. These forms of mediation in particular are explored, in terms of how their spread and audience differed from an unmediated public.

    The networked public is specifically relevant when looking at youth. As a group, a public or an audience, these networked publics are the main publics within which youth interact or act as audience. This is the space where students exchange, experience and witness. Being aware of their interactions in this space, exploring the inner workings of the mechanism of networked publics can provide insight into the lives and interests of students. As educators, it is also a responsibility of ours to examine the communities where our students engage and how they go about doing so. The article mentions that engaging in networks can lead to expressions being misinterpreted, especially for new comers. In these spaces where youth play audience and actor, they put versions and views of themselves into that public, knowingly or not. Connections and impressions are made, and these impacts have an effect, varyingly, on the lives and development of students as people and as members of society. Doesn't it make sense then that educators should help students learn how to make informed interpretations and decisions about what they witness and express within these publics? It relates back to the other article on new media literacies. This is where students are, where they will need to use certain skills and will absorb and be susceptible to impressions, information. This is where learning should also take place, where student involvement and interaction should be addressed, where the new skills for the future of society will be birthed.

In relation to this idea of networking publics and how audience, witnessing and potentially learning can be spread is this video from T.E.D.



the video doesn't seem to want to embed, so here's the link
http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html

Popplet- Interview mapping

Pew research article

The article was a report of statistics in relation to generational internet usage. It looked over things like broadband household use, email use, gaming, social networking, online banking and shopping, all in relation to percentage of generational use. Younger generations, teens and generation Y, dominated in some areas, like entertainment and social networking, while older generations held the majority in activities such as emailing or using the web for health research and online banking. All generations showed in increase in internet use and home broadband. The G.I. generation was the least likely in almost every activity involving the internet. It was interesting to see how the generations compared in their online activity.

Show and tell

 I came across two educationally focused social networks. Classroom 2.0 is non-subject specific, while art education 2.0 is specific for art education. Both sites offer connection with teacher's all over the world, combining the power of social networking with other tools like blogs and media resources. Classroom 2.0 seems a bit more extensive. Both sites are intertwined with other digital extensions, such as twitter and facebook. They offer useful resources for teachers, as far as a space for exchanging ideas and seeing what others do in their lesson plans.


http://www.classroom20.com/
http://arted20.ning.com/

Kellner and Share

   The article focuses on the critical media literacy and how to address it in the classroom. Critical media literacies can be described as lenses for thinking critically through or about media. If I introduce an image of a celebrity, the critical literacy is not simply learning about the celebrity or how to draw the celebrity, but about either how the image reads, why celebrity has importance in our society, what impressions these images imprint on society, etc. The article points out that media and contemporary popular culture is apart of the lives of students. The questions are  how do media enter the class room and what do we do with that aspect of student life? Media undoubtedly enters the classroom. Students bring it in with them, knowingly or not. If the assignment is to create a portrait, what do you do when your student chooses to draw a celebrity, as they often will? There is the choice to ignore it, treat it as any other image and face. But it isn't just any face. It;s a face of celebrity that the student deliberately brought in, after filtering out dozens of other contenders for the assignment. Why this person? Why this pose? This is where the critical literacy can be introduced. The material media is there to work with, the critical literacy is in what you do with that media. And then who does what with the media that students track in on their feet? A separate teacher? Someone in the English or social studies department? Surely every subject area teacher has enough on their hands to pack into lessons, but critical literacies aren't a new subject area separate from all the rest. Because of their critical nature, they can work with any lesson already structured into the class. It asks for a re-framing of information, which can be done by any subject area, albeit more easily in certain some . In visual arts education, critical media literacy is all too easily incorporated into the class. Acknowledge student choices and popular culture instead of ignoring their role in the classroom and the lens of education if re-framed.

art image conversation

I'm not certain who or what to use for this discussion if it's to tie into the larger lesson we do. I have no idea what I'm going to be doing for the larger lesson.

I thought, though, about connecting the book I used to the art discussion. The illustrator is Jon J Muth, who's work is widely published in children's literature. I'm not sure his illustrations would produce much conversation though.

The other interesting thing that using an artist like Muth provides is the potential for dicussing comic books as art works. Muth is also a comic book illustrator.
As is Dave Mckean, another artist I had in mind who also has some experience in children's illustration.

Because some of his work often involved collage, maybe it would provide a greater possibility for connection with the media exploration lesson?
In either case, a predetermined formal discussion of the images would work, and possibly an interpretive thematic discussion.

A more interesting direction might be to go with Jason Hackenwerth, newly discovered for me, who works with large balloon sculptures. I was thinking of maybe working with balloons for the materials exploration, so this could be a good preemptive tie-in.

Blogger is not letting my add any more pictures at this point.

We Make Money Not Art- Jurema Action Plant

 

The Jurema Action Plant uses sensors attatched to the plan to amplify the electrical impulses made by the plant. These amplified signals are then translated into movement that is enacted by the robotic component. When people come close to the plans and try to touch it, the plant moves away from them. The project explores relationships between plant and animal or human connections with technology. How are plans like us? How can they use technology? What does this experiment do to our understanding of sensory in other living organisms?

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/10/jurema-action-plant.php

Jenkins

This article was pretty thorough in discussing more or less what the course is based on. It talked about the phenomenon of participatory cultures, focusing on the ones that are created by the internet and digital media. In these participatory cultures, the participants hold a great deal of choice and power in not only how they choose to interact but in how they shape the culture itself. Youth tend to be the largest group in participatory cultures, more than half of the younger generations being apart of participatory cultures in some way. Yet, even though the majority of youth are involved in these circles and learn and interact within them, they are not addressed in an educational setting. As educators it is part of our job to be attentive to what impacts the lives of our students, not only to relate to them but in order to be more informed on what they are doing. learning, and how. Participatory cultures are there, and youth are heavily apart of them. The question, then, is how do educators address this aspect of life? If our job is to prepare students for the world, participatory cultures are certainly a growing part of that world, in what ways do we prepare them in regards to these growing communities? To start, it may help to be more familiar with them ourselves. Jenkins provides also a set of skills that youth can learn from these modes. These and other skills, though, might not be cognitively acknowledged by youth without the proper guidance and context to provide a lens through which to see the skills and their value. That is where education comes in. By working with participatory cultures and their various interfaces, educators will enhance the likelihood of students taking away world-skills from these experiences while also being more engaged by an interface that they use daily outside of school.

One thing I questioned int he article was the lack of awareness that was put upon the youth, or students. An example was given or a teacher trying to use the historically based game Civilization to teach a concept tied to history. Instead the students took from the experience the understanding that what took place in the game was factual history, which is not the case. The point is that students do not usually abstract for themselves the concepts that can be taken from participatory cultures. I disagree to some extent. I think more youth than are given credit for are able to realize that a game is not the same as fact or reality, that a person online is not the same as a person in the real world, that theatrical violence is not the same as real violence, even if they are unable to articulate as to why this is. That why is where attention should be focused, but I think youth can usually discern reality differences without help.

Magazine Cover

Cloud Composite

     The big idea I was working with for this image was that of the Cyborg, as described in Sweeny's article. I understood the cyborg as a symbiosis between humans and technology. In this cyborg state, the mechanization would be imbued with humanity, and humanity in turn would be embedded with the broadening systems of communication and progress of technology. I saw in both modern technology and the concept of humanity and people themselves a network, a system. Both run along lines of electric impulses to function, to carry information and communicate. Our hearts and hard drives pump and heat to flow energy and life into body and spirit, whether it be of flesh and sinew or metal and plastic. To communicate my understanding of the cyborg visually, I created a composite image where the grid-map of the human body flows into the circuitry of a computer. At the center of the chip, whose circuits connect to the human brain, hinting at synapses, is a human heart receiving life-giving maintenance from a god-like human hand and tool. Two hands, one robotic and one human, shake at the bottom of the image inside of the human body, showing a bonding connection between technology and people.

Retouch

For the retouching project, I transformed myself into a dragonfly-human hybrid, resembling a pixie. I reformed my bone structure with highlights, altered the color of my skin to camouflage with an insect world, changed the makeup of my pupils and eye-shape, gave myself the implied ability to fly. The dragonfly itself often being a symbol of transformation, I used this assignment to explore the ways new technologies, like Photoshop, transform our perceptions and identities through images. By rearranging our physical appearances and viewing altered images under the pretense of reality, we make the natural into something fantastical. This transformation of reality and nature makes every picture a story, a kind of myth. This myth is then taken into ourselves as we translate it in relation to our identities and understandings. I'm interested in how this technology gives us the freedom to alter ourselves and how others understand us. At the same time, I think an image can be taken for granted as being natural truth, which presents a kind of danger in the confusion and false assumptions that we may make off of that pretense. It makes me think of Photoshop with a sense of whimsy and foreboding, much as I view fairy tales.

ASIMO by Honda

With no readings or specified posts for this week, I thought I'd share a quick video of ASIMO. ASIMO is a learning robot in continuing development from Honda.

Photoshop semiotocs

         The article prefaces itself with a lot of technical talk to set up a background for what it seemed to want to address. The author kept coming back to the idea of privacy in the classroom and the idea of reality in Photoshop. In terms of the concerns about privacy, most of it was directed at using pictures as documentation for educational researchers, and how Photoshop could possibly enable researches to get around the delicate subject of documenting minors and their artwork. Photoshop allows you to do things like alter or remove an image, so if say you scew a students face and make them visually anonymous, there might not be a legal problem in using them in research examples. To me, the more interesting idea was the concept of how to work with reality in the context of a classroom and Photoshop. Photoshop is a new technology, an specifically one with opportunities in the field of art. Because it works with photography, it asks us to take into account the uses of that art form. Traditionally, photography has been thought of as a means to capture an absolute image of reality-what is actual and seen. If, then, we consider the documentational purposes of the photograph and introduce this into the workings of Photoshop, we are posed with a question and options. What od we do with the knowledge and perception of reality once we have the capacity to alter? Photoshop allows the user the ability to perhaps make something "more" real, or more true to the reality that is felt. Photoshop allows teachers not only to get their students thinking about what reality is (in an aesthetic context or otherwise) but also acquaints them with a new technology skill and perception.

              The article also mentions the use of semiotics and hermeneutics, in relation to both art and Photoshop. In semiotics, it seems to ask how Photoshop alters social semiotics, or how we as a society understand symbols in visual form. Photoshop's alterings change images and the symbols they come with. If these are now the symbols we see prevailing in society, our understandings of these symbols and what they represent are changed. The hermeneutics, how we interpret these symbols, of this new batch of images should then be informed by the existence and capacities of Photoshop. It opens a new visual system of symbols and interpretations directly linked to the creator. This is not something entirely different from what various modes of art have done in the past- altered reality. Except that in the use of Photoshop the image is often a photograph, something that we associate with untampered visual truth. And this is far from the case. And so the use of Photoshop in the class room gives students the first hand experience and understanding of how an image and photograph is a lie, a lens that can help them better interpret their visual worlds.

Cloud Visuality

   Working from the idea of the Cyborg as my main big idea, I moved to explore themes like cybernetic, humanity, humans and technology, humans and robots, robot communities, prosthesis, artificial intelligence, humanoid, technology and community. Above are examples of my most successful cloud searches.












Prosthesis  

 Most people think of artificial limbs, such as leg,
when they hear the word prosthesis. And a large part of
what I found in temrs of images was true to that conception.
Other images though, showed a connection between technology
and prosthesis, special effects and prosthesis, community and
prosthesis, and just some generally less thought of parts
involving prosthetic. I search prosthesis out of the connection
between the artificial and human, part of the cyborg idea.                                          Artificial Intelligence

                                         Artificial intelligence also brought me to a lot of images of robotics. This extended to things that were designed, involved computing, and in one case were of a learning robot prototype, called Asimo, produced by Honda.





Humanity

 Most of the images I came across had to do with community, how people connect, in some cases on a large scale. Some other images seemed to point out the funny quirks that humanity has.








Human robot

I was hoping to find images that showed a direct link between humans and robots, and that's more or less what happened. I found images of networks and circuitry, of robotic and human hands juxtaposed, of the computer like network of nerve points on the human body, and an image of the book out of which modern cybernetics ideas generated from.

 

Towell and Smilan, and Hellman

The Towell and Smilan article seemed more or less a reiteration of what we have been discussing in class. The ideas for implementing methods of teaching visual literacy in a class room with a multicultural picture book component was perhaps the most useful aspect of the article for me. What was most interesting for me, though, was how the Trinidadian teachers involved in the workshop brought in their own unique dialect. Not in the workshop, but in the classroom, the teachers seemed to be very conscious of bringing in local culture to better engage the students. They still valued the importance of speaking proper English, as part of becoming a global citizen, but the importance of local and cultural community was still kept as a very important component of literacy and education. The teachers' value on heritage and cultural identity in education reminded me of what some of those in linguistics study, which is the way a culture and community forms the language. If one studies a language, they inevitable learn, and must learn, about the community it evolved from. The importance of retaining cultural literacy is then essential to education, if we are to teach communication and the ability to understand the ideas of others. The article also brought up the role and importance of thinking by analogy, a skill that I've always found a valuable way to learn and relate knowledge. In terms of multicultural children's literature, analogy can be a useful tool to help students relate to the book and to other cultures.
    
Hellman's article gave the titles to a few books I'm really interested in getting for my own pleasure, like the Black and White book that was mentioned, which dealt with reader-constructed narrative. The freedom she described in the character of the postmodern children's book appealed to me, much in the way I think it does to today's children and even adults. We live in a layered society, where the partitions that once dictated the differences and values between things like low and high art, cultures, and ages have been done away with and are now part of a more unified conglomeration. In this state, education finds itself in the midst of intertextual and cross-cultural reality. And because of all that the current now offers, we have the ability to pick and choose, which is what some of the postmodern children's book incorporate into the framework of the story. Like the books, this age is meta, self-reflective and referential. Because of their unique quality in being able to deal with many multifaceted themes at once, the perspectives that are sometimes neglected, like multiculturalism, have an opportunity to be involved int he mash-up of everything else.

Big Ideas and Sweeny's Cyborg

One of Sweeny's ideas that could be used as what Walker called a "big idea" is his conception of the cyborg. Sweeny's cyborg is one of his lines of sight, in this case where the human and the technology form an intertwining symbiosis with each other. Fostering not necessarily a dependence upon technology, but rather an interdependence with it, could be useful as a foundational basis for acquainting students with technology in the class room. Teaching students how to be a part of the technologically changing world and to work have it work with them can be a beneficial perspective for them. It will encourage them to open their minds and scopes to the possibilities of new technologies, while eliminating part of that element of the fear of change and perhaps making it easier for them to think of ways to combine art and technology. Seeing technology within ourselves, or ourselves in technology, can help us come to a more interactive and understanding place in our perspectives, thus allowing for new opportunities of progress and innovation.

           While thinking on this idea of seeing ourselves with and connected to/by technology, I thought of Aimee Mullins. Mullin's is a contemporary spokesperson for "handy-capable" people. A double amputee, missing both of her lower legs, Mullin's has a unique perspective on things like prosthesis. Her own manufactured and designed limbs enable her to do things that "normal" and biologically equipped people might not even be able to do. She can change her height, her appearance, her characteristics as a species to transform into a cheetah, potentially her ability to do things like run and jump as well. Her own "humanness" and her abilities are changed and in some ways enhanced by her cyborg transformation via prosthesis.

  Another thing the idea of the humanity involved int he cyborg was the movie Bicentennial Man, based off of an Isaac Asimov story by the same name, starring Robin Williams. Williams' character is an android who longs, like any other Pinocchio, to be a real human. As the movie progresses, he challenges the concept of what it is to be human. As a make-up of pure technology, what makes him artificial? What constitutes for genuine feeling, even if it is comprised of coding and algorithms, when our own brains are just as similar to computers but chemical instead? Is being human biological? If so, what about prosthetic limbs, plastic or implanted hearts? The android goes through great lengths to establish himself, legally, as a human. And well, I won't give away the ending.





The movie A.I. goes into similar explorations through the experiences of an android suited to be a child, though with a less optimistic outcome.