Mark J. Stock

Mark J. Stock might be one of the most inspirational digital artists I have ever seen. I chose to review his piece "Research Code" and I was amazed. Not only does he provide an art piece, he provides extensive research in nearly all of his art pieces. In this piece he consulted thousands of pages of information and added his own contributions. At the end of this project he had created 400 new pages of text and 600 pages of computer code. He then created an image of the paper equivalent of all the work he had done, each revision of each page of code appears on one page of the image. And if that wasn't already impressive enough, the code that was written on these pages was used to create the flowing forms in the image. This is truly one of the coolest things I have ever seen being an amateur programmer myself.

Mark Snyder: Electroacoustic Performance

The performance by Mark Snyder was very powerful and contained a lot of meaning through visuals and amplified instruments. I had a venue in my hometown where a lot of bands would play this style of performances with almost no lyrics and instrumentals to go along with projected imagery. The only difference is that I have never seen traditional instruments such as a Tuba that Mark Snyder used amplified and effected before. It was cool to see this show because I had not heard or seen anything like it in quite some time. The way Mark Snyder coordinated the final song was magnificent, the female performers did an incredible job with both the harp and the vocals. As the music began to come to life so did the images and colors in the back display which shows how much effort and heart went into every song. BRILLIANT.

Persuasive Games

Persuasive games are different then your ordinary game in the fact that they are games that help advocacy groups and lifestyle brands communicate their products and ideas through video games. These games will market a specific product, brand, or idea to a consumer which I think is a revolutionary concept. For example, I was looking at a few of the games and I saw that CNN had numerous games featured on the site such as Campaign Rush, Planet in Peril: Animal Rescue, and Presidential Pong. Also, car manufacturers such as Chrysler and Jeep both have games to show off features of their new cars.  I like to think of a lot of video games as mindless garbage but games that are actually serving a purpose whether it’s advertising a new product or promoting a cause, this could be a good market. Not everyone likes to do comprehensive reading so this enables people to gain information while being entertained.

 

Steve Jobs Stanford Address

Although I am a huge supporter of Microsoft and Bill Gates, I believe that Steve Jobs did a wonderful job with this speech. He has always been a guy who is good at selling his ideas and having great visions in his product design. A lot of the great minds out there will drop out of college and the fact that he dropped out of Stanford without graduating and came back to deliver such a powerful speech shows a lot. Even though I am a Macintosh “hater” doesn’t mean that I can’t show some respect for the legacy he left behind. Bill Gates was a guy who wanted to create a computer that EVERYONE could use and be able to afford. Steve Jobs created products that showed so much style and character that their price tags can ALMOST be justified. I was a little disappointed in Steve dropping the ball on Microsoft in this speech saying that Microsoft copied everything from them. I think Steve was being a little hypocritical in the fact that I have heard him use the Picasso phrase, “good artists steal” many times. Nevertheless people will always remember Steve for his aggressive, persuasive, and creative way of getting his messages across.

 

Raymond Kurzweil

The video that I chose to watch was Ray Kurzweil: The Coming Singularity. Ray Kurzweil is a brilliant man with all the facts and figures to represent what he believes is the future of technology. He believes that by 2020 we will have computers that are powerful enough to simulate the human brain. He goes over the exponential growth in technology where even the growth increases every year. By 2029 he thinks that we will have reverse engineered, modeled, and simulated the brain. This will provide us the software, algorithmic methods to simulate all of the human brains capabilities including our emotional intelligence. By this time computers will be far more intelligent than the human brain. He stresses that these extremely intelligent machines are not coming from space but from within us. By 2045 we will have expanded the intelligence of our human machine civilization a billionfold, which will be singularity. Singularity is a point in time that is difficult to see beyond. Along with the technologies that are helping us try to treat cancer and other disease can be used against us in the future if terrorists get ahold of the technology and use biological viruses they create against us. I knew that Kurzweil predicted the future before watching this video and I thought that he very easily could have just been making this information up but it seems like he has a pretty good idea on how fast technology will in fact advance.

Grid Art Project

Roommate bumped into the table coming back from st. patty's day celebrations but... 900 beer caps of all variety, drink heavily!

 

 

War of the Worlds Broadcast

The radio broadcast, War of the Worlds was very realistic and interesting. If I were alive during the time of this broadcast I probably would have been one of the suckers to actually believe this attack was going on. The entire story was narrated beautifully and with much detail. I would say that the only thing that gave away that this broadcast was not a live report was the music in the background at certain times and obviously the end where Orson Welles expresses that the broadcast was not real to listeners. The acting and writing that went into the production of this broadcast made it so realistic that I stayed fascinated even though their were no visuals associated.