It was sunny finally last week and we even managed a few games of footy, an evening outside on the field without fear of rain, snow, or hail. For sure it didn’t last, my phone even pinged a severe weather warning, so we’ll take heed and keep a googly eye out.
Still, we took advantage of Friday’s shorts weather to have some food in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. It’s quite a place, with lots of new buildings, it was buzzing with people and the queue at Wholey’s the Fish Market stretched around the block. During Lent, churches, restaurants, and markets put on Fish Friday dinners, not quite British fish n’ chips, but nice enough if you close your eyes and add some salt and malt vinegar.
Jumping back for a moment, official notifications aren’t as common in the UK but here we seem to get so many phone messages, so-called “Amber Alerts” from the police, the weather service, other local government services informing us about all types of possible emergencies, including hurricanes, missing children, flash floods and occasionally armed gun nuts or escaped felons.
We’re always on high alert, a country bracing itself for the next terrible thing and then helpless to act when something actually happens. This state of anxiety is the pitch where much of the media sits. Local news is almost all terrible. There are reported shootings, robberies, then traffic reports, road closures, and accidents, sometimes there are stories of hope, veterans raising money, schools winning sports competitions, parks opening, and on the flip side; libraries, theaters, well-known family businesses closing. Sometimes there is no news at all, but something needs to fill airtime, so we have reporters outside courts, waiting on announcements, speculating on outcomes.
When I was learning printmaking I found out that the type cases in newspaper companies were nearly always pre-set, in the early 1900’s you would pick the story off the shelf, say “Man run over by horse and cart” and just change the name, date, and location, the rest already written. This meant that you could turn stories around quickly and get them to press, everything from obituaries, theater reviews, gas explosions (quite frequent), and politics. Same news every week. I don’t think we’ve moved on at all. Local news in the US is completely asleep, serving microscopic attention spans, affirming stereotypes (poor people's crime, rich people’s philanthropy), and firm in its remit to keep the tension high.
There are thankfully still a few good news sources, local non-profit independent journalism exists just about, but I wonder now that my kids don’t even see the news, swiping through TikTok, again all mixed up, a meme, a song, a tank on fire, it all goes by so quickly you hardly have time to take it in.
Anyway, where are we this week?
Stephan
Spaces to Connect
We have a space in our room with three short-throw projectors and a set of lightboxes which we call our immersive space. It is incredibly popular with students developing new projects, and interested in using it to create interactive multiscreen experiences. We used it initially to cast images from the VR headset so that people in the room could see what the wearer sees. This can be sometimes disorientating and slightly nausea-inducing, but otherwise effective and a way of including others in a single-wearer game or app. Our first purpose-built installation was Kaleidoscope, which I’ve written about before, addressing unconscious bias through a series of interactions, asking the guest to make assumptions about strangers and matching those assumptions with truths.
I’m really interested in how the scale of the images and the sound, centering the guest in the room, creates a sense of immersion. These sorts of experiential cubes are a mainstay of science fiction, holodecks, AI interactions (think ‘Mother’ in the Alien movies), contain and isolate experience. These spaces might be safe and controlled, although sometimes we’re trapped and confined. There’s a difference too when we can see beyond the screens if they are projected onto canvas rather than actual walls.
Caves like the one below are growing in popularity but aren’t really thought of as a genre. There are loose categorizations, but remain largely unexplored, probably because they are difficult to replicate for consumers. Perhaps though we might have more of these spaces, workplaces might provide soothing experiences to wash away stress, we might see them in libraries or schools. Again, we need to understand the affordances of these spaces and as storytellers, figure out what we can do in them, that is more effective or interesting as a way of communicating ideas than other technologies.
Life Lessons
I’m writing three courses, two new ones, and a revision of my summer course, just so that I have a few things lined up for next semester, my fourth at the university. I am looking forward to settling on a portfolio of courses that I can dive deeper into and keep developing, although it is fun and exciting creating new courses and probably fanciful to think that I’ll ever settle on a final list.
When I set out to write a course I consider particular topics or threads, and try to envisage little moments; that we’ll have a conversation about this, make something that involves learning a particular technique or playing with a piece of equipment, or I might invite a guest to speak. I’m still a filmmaker at heart and almost everything I do is formed from concatenated images. I try to write them down or draw little pictures, and then spread them out and see what steps are needed to link them more fully. Thinking about how students will move from one idea to the next offers a structure, and usually, because I have design elements in my courses, I can scaffold concepts along a timeline, from ideation, and conception, through to a build, some iteration and settle on an outcome.
I like the idea of having ‘moments’ in a course. Perhaps these are ‘touches’ in the way that Alfie Kohn imagines them. Moments when the learning outcomes are embodied, realized not through a bullet-point list on a slide, but by the actions and interactions of the learners. If I look at my “Everyday Learning” course, then I can see that there were some highlights, for instance, when we went on a trip to the children’s museum, when we celebrated our “festival of half-baked ideas”, when we ran a zine workshop, and when we wrote out personal manifestos. Were there enough of these moments to matter? I’m wondering if the students would include the same moments on their list of highlights? What moments did we miss?
It’s still a process, but this time before delving into the curriculum, when it’s just top-level and forming learning outcomes, is one I enjoy the most
Lost and Found
I’m on the waiting list to beta test the new DuckDuckGo browser, it looks like it is going to be useful, incognito in most browsers is not what you think it is and I’m fed up with personalized ads popping up every time I so much as glance at a particular product. I had to buy a cable for work and now google thinks I’m an electrical engineer.
I’m intrigued by this VR competition from the Museum of Science Fiction..could give it a go, are any students interested?
I told you about tape loops last week, a few people have asked about the effects pedal in the video, the one that looks like a prop in a David Lynch space movie. I would like to get my hands on one from Fairfield Circuitry.
If you want to learn something new, then Domestika (whose courses I really, really like) is selling 4 for $30. Still recommend Felix Scheinberger’s if you’re interested in sketching.
I went to the cinema and saw Everything Everywhere all at once starring Michelle Yeoh, and it was brilliant, amazing and so much fun. I was sort of incapacitated with laughter at one point, I haven’t enjoyed a film so much as this one for ages.
Thank you
I spent some time updating my legacy settings on the iPhone, just so that if anything happens to me that family will still be able to open up cloud accounts where so many photos and videos are stored. We used to have family albums, and photos in books, but now so much is digital and it would be such a shame if they couldn’t be seen by family in the future.
I don’t use my Flickr account as much as I used to, but it is still there and these pictures hold so many memories. Feel free to connect.
I hope that you’re having a good week, boys enjoyed a few days off finally. They are exhausted and missing half-terms and breaks that they enjoyed in the UK. Sure, it’s nice to have long summers, but for the rest of the year. Back home, kids don’t often go six weeks before a week or even two-week break with six weeks in the summer. Children need rest and a chance to reset.
okay, thank you for the lovely comments and emails, always nice to hear from you. If you haven’t emailed, then this is your chance, let’s call an amnesty on not-emailing, let me know how you are, and what’s on your mind. Just press reply.
Take care.