Week 05
RE-READINGS
At the start of class this week each group presented to the class there performances for House of Leaves so far, we had one more week to finalise and respond to any feedback from this session. It was really cool to see what everyone had put together, I thought that the animal crossing group had done some really amazing work. I had always thought Animal Crossing would be fairly limiting in customisation like Club Penguin was, but the work they showed featured well thought out camera angles, location choices, character selection/customisations and just seemed to gel well together to create a coherent video. I think the cute aesthetic of the game made the horror narrative even creepier.
It’s interesting to see the application of something being used in a contrasting style to what it was originally intended for. How could I apply this idea to my main project?
The respone to my groups outcome was awesome! I honestly didn’t exepct people to like it, but we got a really good response on what we made. Ferg’s scene of the mineshaft was the standout. I think we did a good job of working with our limitations, using the different aspects of the game to our advantage like the minigames helped us to try and think about communicating the themes of the text in a more conceptual way as we were fairly limited with typing in the game. I think you have more of an opportunity to be creative when there are limitations.
The outcome can be viewed HERE
MAJOR PROJECT
This week we chose our texts which we would be using for the major project. I had checked out most of the texts that were offered and found majority of them quite difficult to unpack. I wanted to choose one that I was able to understand so that I’d be able to draw ideas from it with confidence. The text I chose was Bodies and Digital Utopia by Catherin Bernard, I found this text fairly easy to understand and it is also centred around technologies role in a future world which is something i’ve become quite interesting after reading one of Metahavens books, Psyop.
Another reason I chose this text is because I found once reading through it a few times it was full of phrases and ideas that I would be able to draw upon for the project. I have gathered a few of the terms and ideas that jumped out to me from the text, all from the first paragraph!
new eugenic conciousness
physical bodies are cumbersome
their opacity is opposed to the transparence of the digital utopia
experiences are disruptive
digital economy
body politics
neo-natal procedures
use of the body within specific parameters
PSEUDOCODE
We also got introduced to psuedocode this week. Essentially, psuedocode is a way of explaining a process using more literaly instructions than real computer coding. It’s a way of trying to understand the process of something in a more human way before coding it in computer language. We’re meant to try and think about and develop a psuedocode for our main project before we start actually coding it.
We were tasked with choosing a simple task that we complete every day and trying to turn the process into psuedocode. I chose having a shower and the code looked like this:
START
IF shower door closed THEN
open door
IF shower door open THEN
test temp
IF temp is not good THEN
adjust temp to good
IF temp is good THEN
enter shower
AFTER enter shower
shut door
BEGIN cleaning routine
END
The main idea was to think about each step in this process and which actions would rely on an action happening before them, as well as the result of an action affecting the possiblity of another on happening. It sort of seems like how you would tell a robot to do something, you couldn’t just say ‘have a shower’ you would need to break it down into seperate steps and instructions. I guess that’s what coding is actually, instructions for a robot.