Media Project - Project Plan

My project idea is to make a short infotainment video about comparing the possible actions of a user who wants to prepare his birthday party.

He/she is looking for:
• A place for the party
• A Band or DJ
• Possibilities to send invitations to his friends

One storyline will follow his steps while he is using social media to do it and the other line shows his information seeking through web sites and browsing as if the social media does not exist.

The goal of this video is to show the possibilities of social media and corporate websites on the users point of view.


Tools
• Computer with internet connection
• Video camera
• Photo camera
• Screen recorder software
• Editing software


Project team
Project manager (idea, management, production, editing) – Kerstin Sonts
Project assistant (camerawork, technical help, editing) – Berit Piho


Tasks and timeframe
Feb 15 Defining the idea – what is this project going to be about?
Feb 22 Constructing a project plan
Mar 1 Reporting of the process
Mar 7-13 Storyboarding – Creating storylines, characters, content ideas
Mar 14-27 Preparing the shootings
• Creating the needed environment
• Preparing the order of shooting the scenes
• Casting for actor
• Renting cameras
Mar 29 Reporting the process
Mar 28-Apr 3 Shooting
Apr 4-13 Overview of the material
• Shooting again if needed
Apr 14-24 Editing
Apr 25-May 1 Final overview and correction
May 3 Presentation of the project

Digital marketing campaign - Barbie and Ken

Website http://barbieandken.com/

Today I read an interesting article from Mashable.com. The giant toy company Mattel Inc. launched a campaign to reunite the girls' all time favorite dolls Barbie and Ken. The legend says, that Barbie and Ken split up in 2004, when Barbie started dating with another male doll, calleb Blaine. As Ken is turning 50 this year, the great campaign is devoted to Ken's efforts for getting Barbie back. In my opinion, it is one of the best campaigns I have ever heard about.

Social media used:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Foursquare
• YouTube

Both Barbie and Ken are active in social media and post statuses, photos and videos just like every other person. Ken is characterised as an ultimate manly, but sensitive and romantic perfect boyfriend, who uses every possibility to show Barbie his love and impress her with his actions.

What intrigues me the most is the consistency and premediation of the campaign. The campaign uses an existing brand, which keeps up with time and new trends. There has been a legend generated around these toys, which involve beauty, love and perfection. These keywords assure that the concept never goes out of fashion. Everyone has tried to impress their loved ones, or had issues with their ex. By using the brand, making it contemporary and creating a feeling that people can identify themselves with these characters, the success is guaranteed.

Generative Content Creation - Post 3

For the third assignment in Generative Content Creation, we looked at numerous examples of generative art. It was really amazing to see, what these artists have come up with. Generally simple ideas have been merged with other ideas in unpredictable ways and then could be manipulated again by the viewer.

The assignment involved applying the concepts and theories learned in previous posts on real generative art examples.

With the first assignment we looked into the field of multimedia and new media. Manovich (2001) brought out some good statements and observations in his article. The most intriguing for me was the part where he described how everything is being transformed into computer-mediated form. Every piece of information found on the Internet, be it images, videos, podcasts, music, text or animation, everything consists of ones and zeros. Therefore it could be easily manipulated and as a result made to something different.

The second assignment had us reading articles about generative art, to understand this term better and to get an overview of the background and theories of this type of art. According to Galanter (2003) generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.

Although the system, which is used in the creation of generative art could be anything from natural language rules, a machine or other procedural invention, I guess the main emphasis at least in the light of this course is the computers involvement. As I described previously, all the information in the computers really consists of small particles and these of smaller particles etc, which could be manipulated, changed and altered in many different ways. If the systems and programs are created which use this data to create something new, attractive and interesting, then generative art is created.

Some interesting examples of generative art practices:

Jörg Pininger is a musician, poet and media artist. The application he created for iPhone is a mix of all of his talents. As described on his website the app "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" is a sound toy, a performance tool and an art work in its own right. "You can play with the letter-creatures and watch and listen how they interact with each other or use them to produce soundscapes like you would with an electronic musical instrument. "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" blends art, biology, fun and physics to create a unique, dynamic and interactive sound ecology" (joerg.piniger.net).

Pininger's application is a good example of generative art, as it has all the characteristics of generative art, complex systems and allows manipulation by the user. The user can choose how to interact with the application. Each order gives a feedback and results in new sound or visual pattern on the display. The sounds can be formed into generative music and the lines, created by the flying letter, could form a digital painting.

This is an iPhone application made to imitate the creation of Jackson Pollocks paintings. Jackson Pollock was mentioned in several articles which discussed the meaning of generative art. Galanter argued, whether Pollock could be called a generative artist or not, as his techniques of painting were rather random that systematized.

http://www.bestiario.org/research/flow/

This application represents the chronology of tagging process on wikipedia articles Santiago Ortiz and his team have been selecting for their research. This application uses the data available in the Internet and combines it into a visually attractive and informative systematic form. By moving the arrow over the graph, each sector lights up and the information about this research topic could be seen.

The second example from Ortiz also uses the data from the Internet. It is a tridimensional scheme, which represents the strength of relations between cities from searches on google. The user can turn the globe and look at the different cities, their coordinates and the results from Google. The methodology of the generation process is described as well.

http://bestiario.org/research/citydistances/

To conclude, the topic of generative media was new for me. It was interesting to see how the art, technology and information connect to each other and create amazing artwork. Some of the artworks and their intentions still remained a little vague for me but probably it takes time and practice to understand this topic a little better.

Galanter, Philip. 2003. What is generative art? Complexity theory as a context for art theory. In In GA2003–6th Generative Art Conference http://www.generativeart.com/on/cic/papersGA2003/a22.pdf.

Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Massassuchets: MIT Press. http://www.manovich.net/LNM/Manovich.pdf

Task 14 - New Interactive Environments

What is it you are going to take with you from this course, be it negative or positive experience, content-related or organisational aspects and so on? Write down your experiences, observations, reflections on your Weblog.

What I did gain from this course were some good articles to use for other courses, the concept of activity theory, I got to know about PLENK course and MOOCs in general and Flashmeeting application. So actually some interactive environments.

In general I was not satisfied with the organization of the course. It seemed like there were a lot of demands from the lecturers side but not so much effort spent. It felt like we were just given tasks just because something had to be given. The whole concept was vague and to admit it, did not motivate to give a 100% from my side either.

I would make some recommendations for the next year:

• The concept of the course should be really thought through and argumented
• The timeframe and expected results should be specified
• If it is not possible to give all the tasks at once, there should be a certain time when the students can expect the new tasks
• If the course starts in the middle of the semester and most of the students are from IMKE, it is not a very good idea to spend so much time on defining the term "interactivity" as it has been done in almost all the courses so far.
• It is useful to provide some new interesting knowledge regarding the topics of the course, even if they are not part of the tasks, they may be interesting to investigate by the students
• Maybe there could be some interactive environments tested and reviewed by the students, which would make the tasks more practical

Things that I liked:

• The assessment process was clear and easily followable
• The reflections of the tasks by Terje
• The task of comparing Plenk10 and NIE course
• The different tools used in the process of the course as some of them were new to me

Task 13 - New Interactive Environments

Describe your activity and explain how would you redesign it, re-instrumentalise it and re-organised it to be more efficient, enjoyable, etc.

The activity that I am analyzing is workout. Working out has become an activity of itself, not a necessity for getting things done, but rather a thing we have to do to stay healthy and fit. Computers have helped in a sense that it is now possible to monitor the efficiency of our workout, to calculate calories, distance heart rate etc. It is a kind of motivator. In the other hand, computers are the reasons people are not moving naturally as much as they had to before these technological developments.

But how can digital technology help people be fit and at the same time make up for its guilt of turning people into office-slaves? One thing that I thought about was how technology can help to gain more from people, who are spending their time and energy working out. For example, people are going to gyms, spending hours in a week on exercise machines, spending energy and letting it all go to waste. But all this work could actually do something more than just burn fat or build muscle. The energy which is created on the exercise machine could be collected and used for example for the gym's lighting. Fortunately there are more and more gyms, which are starting to use the energy from exercise machines and therefore saving up from their electricity bills. This is one example but there should be much much more.

Because if to think about it, the gyms are not a necessity for people. It is possible to jog or lift weights or dance in a group everywhere. Instead, people spend money to go to one room with many people to sweat and suffer together. At least in the earlier days, this meant that something would come out of the sweating and suffering, such as a building for example :) Physical work was done for some purpose.

Digital technology together with science could take more advantage of people just jogging around or going to group exercises, dancing or boxing. There should be some kind of energy collectors used on the hands and feet of the people in action. Every movement could be transformed into energy and from there to electricity. Then why not go together to the gym and do good for the Earth. This is something to think about to the scientists and technology developers. It should not be very difficult I guess.

Ethics and Law in New Media homework - Week 11

Analyse both free software and open source approach in your blog. If you prefer one, provide your arguments.

Free software is a kind of software, which can be used, copied, modified and shared for non-commercial purposes by anyone with no fees or purchases. Examples of free software that I have used are for example GIMP image editor and Openoffice text editor. These are quite quality software freely downloadable from the web. Both of them are also open source softwares.

Open source software is a software, which has an open source code for everyone to see. It enables to study the code and find out, how does the coding work in the specific software. But for that you have to be a pretty good programmer I guess. But still if you can see the code, copy and alter it as you wish, it is kind of similar to free software, with some limitations - you are not able to modify the original.

The difference between the two software versions still remains a little confusing to me. Probably it is more of a question of ethics. Free software is a kind of way of thinking while open source is waiting for some income. I would not know which software to choose, as I don't know programming and can't read code very well, therefore I could not modify the code anyway.

Introduction and Foundation of New Media - Essay reviews

In this post, I am going to review and comment three essays, written by Mehrnoosh, Kersti and Valeria.

Mehrnoosh wrote an interesting essay about image tagging and retrieval, comparing folksonomy and controlled vocabulary. She described different researches about how people retrieve images from the Internet. There was some interesting food for thought for me in that essay. For example that unlike for texts, while retrieving images, people do not focus much on the authority of the image but rather on the fact, that the image represents what they want. Another interesting thought was that often the searchers have a well-defined mental image of a potentially satisfying picture already in their mind. I found some recognition in those thoughts.

She went on by describing folksonomy, or in this context image tagging by the users opposed to controlled vocabularies. Mehrnoosh brought out the advantages and disadvantages of folksonomy in the image retrieval process. I liked that she had found quite a lot studies about the topic to back up the arguments of the both sides. The last paragraph brought out an example of the National Archive of UK and their plan to add their digital collection to Flickr. I liked that example in the end and maybe I would suggest to use more examples like it in the rest of the text as well, just to illustrate the essay.

Kersti's essay was about digital ecosystem and whether it is a fertile metaphor or the new type of ecosystem that uses ecological principles. She focused on the notions associated with the terms of "digital", "ecosystem", "new media" and "metaphor". She brought out a lot of interesting tangible examples to illustrate the essay. The way Kersti went through all the related terms and devoted a paragraph for each matter gave an overview of the thoughts in her mind about the topic. Although some of the arguments remained a bit confusing. For example equalling the term "digital" with "online" - this should maybe have been explained a little more.

Kersti's writing style for this essay was kind of philosophical and at the same time had a personal touch, which made it easy to read. In order to back up her arguments a little better, she should have used more references and citations in the text.

Valeria wrote her essay about online memes. I like the way Valeria can connect the topics of her every post to a lot of other examples from different fields. If to look at the first part of her essay, she starts with examples of Mona Lisa and some from Japanese culture. But all the examples work in the context of her essay.

Valeria's essay is very well structured and each chapter of the essay describes content relevant to the explanation of online memes and their phenomenon. There are many references made from different researchers and web sites, which gives her arguments a good backup. There aren't many suggestions to make for Valeria as I found the essay good, comprehensive and summarizing.