About
Jeff Watson is an artist, designer, and Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Games at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
-
"I’m not saying that the games that were at Games 4 Change are bad games, nor am I suggesting that…"
“I’m not saying that the games that were at Games 4 Change are bad games, nor am I suggesting that they shouldn’t be made; I’m very much in support of their development. I’m simply suggesting that serious games should loosen their focus on the context of their creation: it should be OK to label games as “serious” if they achieve a “serious” goal, rather than whether or not they’re created in a “serious” context. And then maybe the idea of a serious game being a good game will become the rule rather than the exception.”
– simon wiscombe’s blog» Blog Archive » Serious Games: A Conflict in Contextual Creation
Posted in Quotes
Comments Off on "I’m not saying that the games that were at Games 4 Change are bad games, nor am I suggesting that…"
Embedded papercraft objects are better than embedded digital objects
Responsibility has yet to be claimed for the beautiful papercraft sculptures that have mysteriously popped up in Scottish libraries and arts centers, each accompanied by notecards featuring the Twitter handles of relevant authorities or personalities.
Tangible artifacts like these have so much presence. It’s hard to imagine augmented reality objects ever having this kind of impact.
This project is a great example of how “embedded” media objects and an active engagement with technology and network culture doesn’t always need to depend on glyphs, bar codes, scanners, cameras, or smartphones — as cool as all those things are.
Just because we can do something 100 percent digitally doesn’t mean that we should. All media forms are tools in the transmedia artist’s toolbox, and every tool has its place. How much less effective would these sculptures be if they had been objects that you needed to download Layar or some other AR app in order to view? How much less presence would they have? How much less mysterious and thought-provoking would they be?
Yes, it’s true, AR people: embedded papercraft objects are better than embedded digital objects.
This is what differentiates the true media artist from the technofetishist. The former adopts whatever medium or combination of media that suits the needs of their project and maximizes impact. The latter always adopts the highest-tech solution, regardless of other options.
Posted in Blog
Tagged augmented reality, books, locative media, papercraft, scotland
Comments Off on Embedded papercraft objects are better than embedded digital objects
"The shortcoming with them, of course, is that, among many other things, they don’t talk about punk…"
“The shortcoming with them, of course, is that, among many other things, they don’t talk about punk rock or genre film. They talk about the contemporary art world, which to me is a corpse of a whole bourgeois European high-art tradition that ran aground, that particularly exhausted itself in, like, ’68 and exists today merely as some kind of way for people to distinguish themselves from others as sophisticates or something. I don’t see how any of that work holds a candle to some of the images and sublimity that one finds in forms of genre films and pop music.”
Posted in Quotes
Comments Off on "The shortcoming with them, of course, is that, among many other things, they don’t talk about punk…"
Inscrutability and data visualization: the lost language of the khipu
While it has long been understood that the Inca khipu was an advanced thread/cord-based numerical accounting system, there are tantalizing shreds of evidence suggesting that it was much more — a singular kind of writing, capable of containing myth and recording history. Unfortunately, in 1583, “Peru’s nascent Roman Catholic church decreed that khipus were the devil’s work and ordered the destruction of every khipu in the former Inca empire.” This decree spelled the end of the khipumayoc, the Incan caste of writers and readers who alone could decipher the meanings of the khipu’s intricate knots and finely-woven colored strings.
It’s possible . . . that khipus were actually examples of semasiography, a system of representative symbols—such as numerals or musical notation—that conveys information but isn’t tied to the speech sounds of a single language, in this instance Quechua. (By contrast, logographic languages such as Chinese and Japanese are phonetic as well as character-based.) The Incas conquered a huge number of neighboring peoples in a short time span, between 1438 and 1532; each of these groups had its own language or dialect, and the Incas wanted to integrate those new territories into their hyperefficient organizational network quickly.
If khipus are examples of semasiography, the obvious next step is to break their code. Nearly a decade ago, Gary Urton, a professor of pre-Columbian studies at Harvard, began the Khipu Database project (KDB), a digitized repository of 520 khipus. (831 khipus are known to exist worldwide.) Urton has argued that khipus contain vastly more information than once believed—a rich trove of data encoded in each cord’s colors, materials, and type of knot. The KDB may have already decoded the first word from a khipu—the name of a village, Puruchuco, which Urton believes was represented by a three-number sequence much like an Inca ZIP code. If he’s correct, the system employed to encode information in the khipus is the only known example of a complex language recorded in a 3-D system. Khipus may turn out to be something like bar codes that could be “scanned” by anyone with the proper training. (Salon.com)
Separated from the meanings that gave rise to their intricate structures, khipus appear to us not as texts but as abstract textile artworks. However, because we know that their origin is in the representation of data, khipus have a powerful and mysterious presence. A similar experience can be had when we look upon an abstract data visualization: simply knowing that a given visualization is somehow derived from real flows of sensor data or network traffic imbues it with mystery and a patina of inscrutable meaning. No “legend” is required to appreciate such works — indeed, a legend or key can have the effect of lessening the mystery and robbing the viewer of the imaginative act of speculating on the “meaning” of the visualization. Perhaps this makes the loss of the khipu’s secrets a little more tolerable: so long as we cannot read the tangles of their knots and cords, we are free to imagine what they must mean.
Posting Anonymously: The Talking Statues of Rome
Anonymity affords a kind of honesty and directness that isn’t always possible when people know who’s doing the talking. It’s important to find ways to break free of the tyranny of our real identities. For me, privacy is only a part of the problem on the web. Services like Google+ address the diversity of our social lives, but still tend toward identifiable speech. I wonder what social media would be like if it was optimized to enable users to not only choose who they are posting to, but who they are posting as.
The talking statues of Rome (or the Congregation of Wits) provided an outlet for a form of anonymous political expression in Rome. Criticisms in the form of poems or witticisms were posted on well-known statues in Rome. It began in the 16th century and continues to the present day.
The first talking statue was that of Pasquino, a damaged piece of sculpture on a small piazza. In modern times the weathered fragment has been identified as representing the mythical king of Sparta, Menelaus, husband of Helen of Troy, and a major character in the Iliad, holding the body of Patroclus. In 1501, the statue was found during road construction and set up in the piazza; soon after small poems or epigrams critical of religious and civil authorities began to be posted on it. One story of the origin of the statue’s name, and of its witticisms, is that it was named to honor a local resident named Pasquino. A tailor by trade (in some versions of the story he is a barber or schoolmaster), this man’s career took him into the Vatican, where he would learn behind-the-scenes gossip. He would then spread this gossip, with acerbic commentary, for the entertainment of friends and neighbors. Upon his death, the statue was named in his honor, and people began posting commentary similar to Pasquino’s on the statue. (wikipedia)
Posted in Blog
Tagged anonymity, congregation of wits, google, rome, talking statues
Comments Off on Posting Anonymously: The Talking Statues of Rome