live brief evaluation (or i'll be glad when this is over)

The main thing that I think of when I think of this brief is having far too many ideas and things to learn and nowhere near enough time to carry it all out. I really wanted to try to stretch the brief as far as I could, to really take my web skills further and see what else I could do instead of just a nice layout and working links.

My first ideas were very much wanting to show the mix of the real and virtual in my life, and not really concentrating on the everyday boring routines but looking at the traces left by my scurrying around the place and the weird things in my head, which naturally affect my perception of the outside world. I was also interested in the idea of leaving traces on web pages, which found it's way out in my new addiction to twitter, which I started using as a tool to track my thoughts about just about anything and also my ideas and research for the project.

I also started using myspace and facebook more as it was suddenly classifiable as work since it was an example of “web 2.0”, although I didn’t end up using them in my project at all.

The final product is something like my original idea but not. It’s a lot simpler than I had originally planned, my original idea was to have lots of random pages and having them all interlinked, almost a representation of my mind or memory. The final product is still pretty random, I tried to keep the text to a minimum apart from the pop ups, I wasn’t about to explain myself or anything on there, I wanted it to be confusing.
Some of my ideas such as the singing kokeshi and myspace feeds had to be abandoned as I was running out of time and it was making everything far too complex. I had to simplify my ideas into something I could actually make instead of something that I couldn’t get to work.


I think in the second year of this course I will definitely be doing interactive design, as much as I like motion graphics and am starting to like video I’m starting to become obsessed with the possibilities of interactive design. After looking into the twitter API and getting an idea of how web 2.0 works and how different sites can be mashed up together and used as well as looking into the work of Brendan Dawes and John Maeda which focuses on the more experimental uses of digital media. At the start of the year I was still interested in web design but wanting to see if I would be good at anything else, and after messing around in other areas for a bit I’ve found that I’m more obsessed with web design than ever, as everything else I’ve enjoyed this year can easily be brought into web design, which is something I tried to do by using video and second life in my website as well.

typical...

i find a website of amazing twitter and flickr mashup amazingness, view the source and all the comments explaining everything is in french...

i don't speak french...
it's amusing though...

// Si elle est appelée sans paramètres,
// cette fonction renvoie une valeur en virgule flottante indiquant la version Flash Player ou 0.0
// ex : Flash Player 7r14 renvoie 7.14
// Si appelé avec reqMajorVer, reqMinorVer, reqRevision renvoie true si cette version ou une version ultérieure est disponible
function DetectFlashVer(reqMajorVer, reqMinorVer, reqRevision

dammit... Michio Kaku told me that english was going to be the language of the global community, and of the "elites".

but it reminded me of the AIDO page by brendan dawes, which is probably more do-able.
(woo! 100th post!)

i think we hit a psychic wall

researching twitter api and mash ups and making my head explode.

so much code that i don't understand makes my head hurt.
and i'm having to use safari to blog and check email which is just plain WEIRD.

anyway...
i first tried looking at the badges on the twitter site, which i thought i would be able to customise relatively easily. i stared at the code until my head felt a bit numb, and then found the twitter fan wiki which contains loads of cool mashups, i especially like twitter in 3d (oooh it's swooshy) and celly which is very cute.

there's also handy descriptions of the twitter api which i'm hoping i might be able to make sense out of. but to be honest i'm not sure. it makes my brain numb.

i've also been looking at stuff by john maeda which i'll blog about later... mwaaah...

i can't go off critical studies cold turkey.

"...The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, i see myself there where i am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; i am over there where i am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where i am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does not exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that i occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror, i discover my absence from the place where i am, since i see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed towards me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, i come back towards myself; i begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where i am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that i occupy at the moment when i look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with the space that is around it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be percieved it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there."

- Michel Foucault, "of other spaces"

walking home..

tra la laa laaa laaaa.

using my crappy 4 mega pixel camera. i figure the crapper it looks the more realistic it is.

meet fio kohime

she scares me a little. maybe because she's almost like my digital self but not.
maybe it's the eyes, i've made them red so people can be lazy and tell me apart from her without having to look at the name. cos people are lazy.
and she's probably evil.
so far i've had a few problems transferring my inventory, not everything is copyable or wants to behave.
it's also a bit tricky to make sure that she doesn't start creating her own traces just yet... i want to have an exact as possible copy of fio kaminski, and then people can mess with her and she can have her own life and seperate existence.


i think this idea was mostly inspired by the life_sharing project by 0100101110101101.org. although i'm nowhere near as hardcore as them, i'm not making all my data available, just a copy of my avatar.
at the moment she can edit my objects but i think that right will be revoked before i give the password out, and she can't build on the island.

catch up...

plans many plans...

ideas:

- my second life clone, called fio kohime is already in existence. since so much of my time is spent on second life, i've decided to create an identical avatar so that people can see what it's actually like to be me in second life. at the moment she's pretty much identical to fio kaminski in appearance, i just have to make her inventory identical too (easier said than done, damn permissions). i was planning to make her password openly available to anyone really, but too many people have said the word "machinima", which makes me a little worried my little clone would be abused, although it would be interesting to see what people did with her and what she would end up looking like. It could be an interesting little existence.

- a website mashed up from several different things, but mainly including abuse of java script. or flash. i dunno.

inputs:
- twitter
- myspace
- facebook
- digital photos from a crappy 4 mega pixel camera for the authentic crappy photo web look
- daft punk's "technologic" lyrics seem to describe my day. maybe include mp3 somewhere. or just use lyrics in ANNOYING POP UPS FROM HELL. i used to be able to make pop ups but then pop up blockers kept blocking them :(

so i need to:
- finish making clone
- plan website (layouts going to be pretty random, but i need to plan which page follows which etc.)
- take shitloads of photos
- continue twitter ramblings, and using myspace and facebook
- relearn java!

meet yoshimi

she now exists in two realities.