Industrious Clock

Made by Yugo Nakamura, the Industrious Clock is essentially a clock and calendar, telling both the time and the date at the moment of the viewing: which includes the year, month, day, hour, minute and second. However, instead of having the numbers simply flip from one to the other or change in a simple animation, all of them are being shown as written out in pencil and erased by hand. As a result, the numbers in the second timer are constantly being written and erased in a endless cycle, while the others take much longer to get changed. As a result, there is almost a hypnotic quality to how the numbers are written, erased and written again, making viewers have to shake themselves out of staring at it for too long. It is only when viewers first encounter the page that there is a second of frenetic activity, when the pencil and the eraser set the date to whatever the actual time is before going at its normal pace. If one thinks about it, Industrious Clock is a fairly simple Flash animation: only ten individual film clips are needed to write out the numbers and possibly some special coding is needed in order to tie in the clock aspect of the work to the actual date and time. However, because the numbers are apparently being written out, there seems to be an act of futility in how the person doing the writing is forever trapped in writing out the time, almost like some sort of Sisyphean punishment in Hell. As a result, there is a slight disconnect between knowing that this is already recorded animation and seeing it as actually being written out. I think that this directly related to class, mainly in its usage of Flash and especially in the time-based aspect of the work, mainly in that it is portraying time itself but done in the hands of a human.

Response to the Text Project Critique

(Sorry for the late response, but I'd almost forgotten to do this)

While I was a little nervous over how my project would be received, I was pretty happy to hear how well it went over with class despite the terrible endings that I gave to the story (a aspect that I would not have done if I had more time and skill to make an actual game out of it). I have to admit that I was not too sure of how to fulfill the project's requirements while finding a subject to work with that I enjoyed. So my decision to use part of a story that I have been playing with ultimately worked out for the best.

Compared to everyone else's projects, I feel that the coding used for this was rather simple. But considering how I chose to have this tell a rather convoluted story, complicated coding wasn't really all that necessary and might have taken away from the storytelling aspect somewhat. Overall, I would say that my intentions and the product for this project was successful.

About Digital Comics

While surfing through the site Deviantart.com, a popular art-based image hosting community, I came across an entry that had been featured as a work of note. Made entirely in Flash by Yves Bigerel (account name Balak01), the work discusses the storytelling potential of digital comics. Apart from a few grammatical errors (English is not the artist's native language), the information presented in it provides a newer way of seeing and appreciating comics in a digital format. In the comic, two characters go over the pros and cons of the medium, mainly by having one of the characters beat up the other as a way of demonstrating how the storytelling can be controlled. As artist points out, digital comics allow artists "new ways to create time with space," mainly in controlling the arrangement and size of the panels, have panels spontaneously appear to set up surprise viewers with content they may not have expected, control the passage of time within the events of the comic to create a slowing effect, and so on. The tone of the explanations is similar to that in the publications of Scott McCloud, who wrote and drew Understanding Comics and other books on the subject, an aspect that the artist acknowledges.

Due to the fact that we have been working in Flash, I the felt it was appropriate to discuss the work here. Mainly in, as the characters note, how the artist can control what the viewer sees as they progress along the comic while the viewer can take their time in absorbing the information in the comic or go back to catch something they may have missed. It is this type of interactivity that I find interesting, mainly in the equal control given to both the artist and the viewer. What also made it stand out to me was the fact that it talked about sequential works, a topic that never fails to interest me. As such, I may try my hand at creating a digital comic at some point in the future.

Isometric Screenshots

Art is often attributed with trying to make viewers see the world or its events in new ways, something that Isometric Screenshots does well. Made by Jon Haddock, they are meant to give the impression of being a screenshot from a computer game, mainly in how all objects in the space are of the same size throughout the image, not unlike what is seen when playing The Sims or some derivative like it. However, far unlike a game, these images are renditions of major iconic events in recent history (often of the more violent variety) or are of iconic fictional events seen in films (such as The Sound of Music and Twelve Angry Men), mainly in that they are images that "that created a cultural event". In seeing such events in isometric space, the overall effect makes these scenes seem less visceral even though most viewers understand the power behind such scenes should not be lessened in strength, creating an odd disconnect upon seeing the picture and connecting it with the images of the real event. As Haddock notes further down in the page, the events he chose to render are those that had a major impact in his life and the images would likely have been different if another had made them.

I found these images to be interesting mainly in that it makes viewers rethink just what events are being portrayed in the images and try to match them up with what they know or if they don't, then it makes them curious to look up the events being portrayed. In my case, several of the images were of events that I had no idea of beforehand (the beating of Reginald Denny in 1992) or I had an idea of but was uncertain if it was correct (the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.). By reinterpreting these cultural images in isometric space, one has to think about what they know of recent history or go out to learn about the events depicted and explore things they would not have otherwise thought about.

Velvet-Strike

Protest of war can take on many different forms, from mass demonstrations to writing public denouncements to the less than legal act of vandalizing buildings with anti-war themed graffiti. In the case of the works presented in Velvet-Strike, most of its works act in the latter form. But instead of being based in reality, the works of graffiti are made for the purpose of being used in the virtual reality of the game "Counter-Strike". The game is a multiplayer shooting game based on the premise of the War on Terrorism, where player can take the side of either the terrorists or the counter-terrorist commandos. However, the greater social and political dynamics are often put aside in order to engage players of the more exhilarating aspect of being in a fight. The graffiti spay paint modifications offer a point for players to remind others of the greater effects of the War on Terrorism. As the description in the About page succinctly puts it: "Velvet-Strike is a collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game 'Counter-Strike'." By downloading the spray-pattern files, players can easily add such anti-war messages to any point in the game's settings for any other players to come across. It is in these small modifications that more conceptual art can find its way in unexpected settings like a shooting game.

What compelled me to take a closer look at this particular new media site was partially spurred by my own interest in the military and partially by video game dynamics. Upon discovering the more subversive aspects of the intentions behind what drove the creation of Velvet-Strike, I found the idea of placing an anti-war theme into a war-based setting to be an amusing way to pass on ideas to others not intentionally looking for such things in a video game. Because of this, I am curious as to whether there is the possibility creating such spray patterns for other MMORPG games such as Halo or Warcraft to promote the anti-war messages apparent in Velvet-Strike's collection.

The Visual Thesaurus

Upon scrolling through the various artists listed, the title "The Visual Thesaurus" stood out to me in that I wondered how exactly a thesaurus could be rendered visually. Upon clicking on the site, I found that it works by showing how different words connect to one another in their meanings and synonyms in the form of a web. By searching for a word, one can come across many alternate words for it, find out if it is a noun, verb, etc., and get a definition for it. From there, clicking on synonyms will allow users to explore the synonyms for those words.

I found this website to be especially intriguing in how it works in transmitting information by working like a person's train of thought. I saw that it is much like a visually oriented Wikipedia but for just words instead of encyclopedia articles. Of course, because of this surfing option, the site would work better when users have time to spare instead of needing a quick definition. With this more innovative way to look up words, the site and its program can be considered new media in how it utilizes programs to illustrate the complexity of the English language.