By Sukanya
This was the first week of ‘regular’ class schedule.
Day 1
We started the week with Critical Theory class, with guest lecturer Sarah Aoun. The topic for the week was privacy and surveillance, and a lot of Sarah’s work revolves around this — she is currently an Open Web Fellow with Mozilla, working on issues of data privacy and digital security, and a co-founder of Tandem, an organization working towards “using digital strategies and tools to build more equitable futures”.
We spoke about the history of surveillance and how closely it is tied with colonialism and empire. The act of counting and observing populations has historically always been political, as part of machinery for exercising control. For example, Blood Quantum Laws defined who is and is not Native American — a person’s “blood quantum” is “defined as the percentage of their ancestors, out of their total ancestors, who are documented as full-blood Native Americans.” These laws were used by Europeans to justify taking land.
“ With every advance in history, at the same time, law enforcement figured it was a great way to surveil people ” — Sarah Aoun
We discussed surveillance practices today — from the Aadhar scheme in India, to the PRISM program revealed by Edward Snowden, and social media surveillance and monitoring.
For homework, we had been asked to write a short piece speculating we were in the year 2050 and speaking to the supreme court about surveillance regulations — half the class had to argue for stronger regulations, and the other half argued for surveillance. The group came up with creative speculations on future technologies — from internet of things tampons, to thought surveillance.
After class, some students started preparing for a family dinner that evening, lead by Phil — a delicious falafel feast. Kate Compton, the author of Tracery tool, also joined us for a meal, and shared some of her work, including “Generominos” — A construction set for generative interactive artwork
Day 2
On Wednesday we had a crafts session, lead by Kelli Anderson (one of the 3 teachers for the crafts track — the other two are Robby Kraft and Pam Liou). We discussed the difference between digital and analog — in a literal sense when we speak of signal, but also in an experiential sense. While code and computers are digital, we think of the physical, materials and textures as analog.
Kelli spoke of craft as the interaction of the physical, through our senses. While creating things digitally, one has ultimate control, and perhaps too much choice. The digital has some implicit judgement on what is signal and what is noise. Working with physical things, however, involves working in tandem with the material, and paying attention to something outside of oneself. It requires time and patience to understand a material, and the knowledge is not fully transferable — it has to be learnt by doing. The Jacquard loom represents a separation between these worlds — or the separation of logic from materiality — for the purpose of practicality. Though this could change in the future and we might start seeing more programmable surfaces and materials.
While interacting with digital objects, there is an implicit understanding or assumption that the object was programmed by a human. With ‘analog’ things, however, one doesn’t expect this, and thus tinkering with the ‘analog’ can lead to surprise, and presents an opportunity to create the surreal — such as Kelli’s “COUNTERFEIT NEWSPAPERS” project, or the story of “Pizza Rat”.
“Craft is all about listening to ‘the grain of the thing’ ”
By paying close attention to seemingly mundane, and focusing on things that might generally be overlooked, we can get to know a material and work with it to do what it already wants to do, or learn ways to impose behaviors and rules on it.
These videos by Johan Rijpma illustrate this :
As an assignment, we were asked to go out and pay close attention to something for 10 minutes. We then came back and wrote a ‘program’ for a classmate, based on the observations we made.
A bunch of us then went to Alyssa Davis Gallery to meet Alyssa and discuss a potential project we could do at her amazing space.
Day 3
Software day with Zach. We started the day by splitting up into groups to go over homework from last week — about John Whitney.
When we came back to discuss our experience with the homework, Phil brought up Whitney’s military connections, and the lack of subversiveness in his approach — and as a response to this, he tried to create something that was ‘art directly intended for military use’ — a game of shooting planes, but not with the intention of it being ‘fun’. Which lead us to a conversation about interactive media art, and how it is difficult to evoke other emotions, as people tend to interact with pieces in playful and fun ways.
The artist we looked at this week was Muriel Cooper, who founded and lead the Visible Language Workshop (VLW) group at MIT, after working as the art director at MIT Press for several years. The VLW combined with other groups in the 1980s to form the MIT Media Lab.
Muriel Cooper was one of the first designers to recognize and use the potential of computers and programming for graphic design. Many of the things we take for granted today with digital typography — such as transparency and anti-aliasing — came from the VLW’s research and work. She also developed “Information Landscapes” in 1994 — an groundbreaking interface exploring possibilities for information architecture, that presented text and information in a 3d landscape — in many ways richer than the interfaces we see today.
We also looked at artists who worked closely with her, such as John Maeda and Jaqueline Casey.
Zach then took us through some code examples — loading a font in openFrameworks, and using it as an image or as curves and shapes. We also looked at working with 3d, and and playing with the vertices of individual letters.
After lunch, Ann had arranged for a ‘failure sharing’ talk. Generally, one only hears about successes when people talk about their work, but we don’t get to see the failures and ‘behind-the-scenes’ work. She shared her experience of conceptualizing and materializing her final project for the fall ’17 SFPC final show, and the problems she encountered along the way. She recounted advice she received from Taeyoon — to focus on what the most important parts of the project were, and what she wants to say with the project.
Day 4
Taeyoon started hardware class this week with “Something I wished I had covered last week”.
“If you’re stuck, its not your fault — its the teachers fault. Remind the teachers and TAs”
We discussed if-statements and logical and bit-wise operators. Bit-wise operations operated at a per-bit level — a handy analogy is a parking lot. In a parking lot, a car only needs to look at a single slot to see if it is filled or empty, the state of the parking lot as a whole is not important in this case. Similarly, bit-wise operations only look at a single bit at a time, where as ‘logical operators’ look at the whole. We can use bit-wise operators to keep track of several on/off states in a single byte, as is the case with the Arduino. We could also use bitwise operations to simplify or round a number, if we are only interested in a certain amount of precision.
We then spoke about the various ways computers represent numbers and data — booleans, char, ints, longs, floats — each using a different amount of space, from 1-bit to 32-bit.
We reviewed our homework from the previous week — recreating the 1-bit computer on an Arduino — and discussed how there are different ways of approaching the same problem. We went though Ed and Hans’ code to see the difference in their approaches to creating a latch. In creating the adders on the Arduino, we realized that we were not actually adding anything, and as Taeyoon reminded us:
“Computers aren’t adding either…
The great part about computing is that its all lies”
Our 1-bit computers also performed addition only by using logical-operations — the properties of addition emerged from various arrangements of logic gates and circuits.
We then spoke about converting Analog to Digital convertors. Analog signal takes continuous values, but digital signal is ‘high’ or ‘low’, i.e it has only 2 states. Analog signal is important because the world is analog — but to have it connect to our computers, or ‘digital worlds’, we need a way of converting. By ‘sampling’ analog signal, i.e., reading values at certain time-steps, we can digitally recreate the signal as ‘highs’ and ‘lows’. And similarly, we can ‘fake’ analog signal by a process called ‘Pulse Width Modulation’ — by modulating the duration of ‘high’ and ‘low’ digital signal, we can create an analog signal. We saw this in action by using a potentiometer to dim an LED on our Arduinos.
Taeyoon then spoke to us about ‘Finite State Machines’ — a state machine is a way of modeling events as ‘states’, and ‘actions’ that transition from one state to another. A state machine has 3 important components — time, memory and decisions. This is important to consider for projects that are more elaborate that switching an LED on and off — as an architectural way of thinking about our code and the functionality we are trying to create.
