Joy… it’s a student blog.

Today’s lecture was really mostly about the way in which we can visualise our thoughts and ideas so that others can understand the direction in which we are heading for our projects. The main point to note was about:

• SKETCHING

Sketching is an extremely useful way of explaining our thought processes visually. They are only rough conceptual designs, but are enough to put a theoretical idea that holds no shape or form, onto paper in a physical form so others can understand.

• INFORMANCE/ role play

Acting out the interactions that are to take place. Similar to when we had to act out where the words would be on the screen and how they would move around [information visualisation 2006]. This gives a better understanding of the sequence of events that take place within the project.

Once our groups were formed, we got into discussions about project ideas and the general direction we wanted to head in. My group was assigned a “variation on mirrors” theme.

some general points that i noted while we were reading over all of the (23) ideas were:

• people were to have their photo or real-time video taken upon entering the gallery
• use of screens – tv or compute, as the means of displaying the work
• space constraints
• ubiquitous computing needs to be thought about more thoroughly
• some ideas contained ethical concerns – aging people’s photo’s, changing their facial features, taking photo’s without permission

Ideas we kind of threw together, guided by other peoples thoughts are listed.

1. On the wall of the gallery, there are a sequence of screens that will be made to look like windows of a viewing platform (like in a zoo -to look at animals in the glass enclosures). Imagine what it would be like to be in an enclosure and have people looking at you, pointing, discussing etc. These are the images that will be shown on the screens. The people actually stopping and looking at you throught the screen would be triggered when you are in front of a picture. When you simply walk past, the images displayed on the screens will be of groups of people walking past.
2. As people enter the gallery, their photos will be taken, or real time video feeds. When they enter into the space, they will see a series of artworks (displayed on screens) that are all of the person, but in an altered way. Each piece would have had a different effect or filter added to it, to alter it’s appearance. For example, one might be a sin city style, one would be a water colour painting, another might be a cartoon version moving as the user does. *Think more on these effects*
3. There was also the idea of having a movement driven piece, where the user, by their movement, or lack of, makes the artwork come to life or even just be displayed. There are some issues with this idea, dealing with the constraints of the space we are using – public, and cannot be limited to only one user/viewer at one time.