art and satire.

The above images illustrate transmediation and crossover media. All are satire piece in which images have been put together to show something funny but false. The mug shots were rendered by combining the images of the political figures and the jail setting. A St. Bernard dog is added to the famous mona lisa, and the portrait of George Washington is slipping out of the dollar bill.

New Technologies and Education

We have touched upon many new technologies in our class that open up new ways of modeling thinking, collecting and retrieving information, and sharing knowledge. I agree with my classmates who have already posted that second life is a unique, afforadable, and accessable way for students to interact with one another without losing a sense of creativity and personality. If we think of second life as a new virtual classroom as opposed to discussion boards or even back and forth email communication, Secondlife incorporates spacial interaction between users as well as offering new ways to communicate. I can definitely imagine a virtual classroom in second life, where every student is told to meet in a certain spot (like the isis oasis) and then the class could be taught through lecture or discussion, or traveling to different places. ( I can just imagine a group of 20 avatars flying together to visit an educational slurl).

As far as other technologies go, I really believe that wiki projects online are going to make an impact in the University. Collaboration in learning seems to be prominent here at Duke (from my experiences that is) through group projects, presentations, etc. Wiki's offer a new way for students to interact with each other and gain more insight into a variety of subjects.

After our discussions about the benefits of having a completely online learning experience vs. an in class learning experience, I do believe a happy medium can be reached between the two, to secure the best benefits of both spectrums. We do not want to lose all physical interaction, but the internet does offer a gigantic amount of useful tools for educating.

As for technology fads that wont last, I do agree with Aileen that I'm not a huge fan of the podcast phenomenon. I did enjoy making my own earlier in the semester, but listening to them (especially with my short attention span) can be brutal, and I don't know anyone who really commits to listening to podcasts on a regular basis.

I would also like to know the classes opinion on webcams, and if this device is here to stay. I know webcams used to be big for chatting with relatives/friends online, but I haven't seen one being used in a while. Its also interesting to think of the webcam in education, and if it provides a more personal vibe when interacting online.

sketchup

This is a building i made using google sketchup

SL urls

I found three pretty awesome SL URL's

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dive%20World/214/136/21

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Leykis/60/165/32

http://slurl.com/secondlife/La%20Reve/140/162/26/

Dive is an island devoted to underwater adventure. some cool things: the bubbles churning out of Synth's air tank; the scuba package is a full-body set-up. the background is filled with diverse and colorful creatures.

Kromatic is a new world night club filled predominantly with hispanic avatars. there are a bunch of private corners in the club. It is very futuristic, with abstract artwork among other designs.

La Reve Island illustrates the ability to express yourself on second life. The avatar Lash Xevious fills the island with a mystical atmosphere with dreamy shapes and glowing effects.

Photoshopping Culture

I took a little twit on this assignment. I had difficulty thinking of and finding an image that has changed over time similar to those of my classmates, who found great examples (che gueverra, marilyn monroe, etc). The first image--or person for that matter, that came ot my mind was Britney Spears, and how the image she portrays to the public has drastically changed over time. This first image is the album cover for Britney's first album, "hit me baby one more time." The image illustrates exactly how the media portrayed Britney at the time--a teen princess who gave away just the right amount of sex appeal.






This second image is from about 5 years later-a time I would label the peak of Britney's career. Here, instead of being a teen princess, she has become a sex iconic goddess. She exudes sex, seduction, and rebellion in this photo. At this point in her career she moved from being a school girl to the rebellious queen of pop who ruled the music industry.





Here is an image of Britney after she shaved her head last year. This is the last phase of britney the media has portrayed thus far--the derranged britney. this image encompasses many photos of britney we see today, exuding pity, sadness, and shame from most viewers.



Lastly,
this is an image I created using adobe photoshop. I layered each of the above photos to create an image of the "collective britney."




While the photos I have chosen are not reincarnated images of each other, I do feel that the image of Britney Spears, like Marilyn Monroe, is iconic in itself. Everyone sees a different person when they see Britney Spears, and I have tried to connect these three personalities.

This year I am doing an independent study in Visual Arts called "Crafting Identity." My project focuses on the notions of craft, domesticity, and the women's rights movement through the context of a series of aprons that I am making. I looked at the above images in the research of my project. The first image is an advertisement I found in the 1944 magazine addition of "Home Companion"--a popular women's magazine at the time. The second image is a still shot of June Cleaver from the popular tv series "Leave it to Beaver" in the 1950s. The third image illustrates three young women in the present, and finally the fourth image is also from the present, illustrating a women in a pink checkered apron.

I chose these images because of the presence of the apron in each, and the different ways the apron is portrayed. In the first image the apron is seen as the appropriate uniform for a patriotic war bride waiting home patiently. In the second image, we see the apron on the quintessential domestic housewife June Cleaver. She is in the kitchen, symbolically "tied" to the kitchen by her apron. The three young women in the third image shows the transformation of the apron from a coverup in the kitchen to an elegant addition at a dinner party. Finally, the last image shows the apron as a seductive garment.

The images each depict the apron in a different way; it is fascinating to think about the context behind each image.

Response to Copyright Restrictions

The EFF, Creative Commons, and Archive.org are all non-profit organizations whose goals aim to deter from law restrictions on the web. The EEF defends free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights, "fighting for freedom" primarily in the courts." Creative Commons aims to reach the perfect balance of creative control in between total control and no control. Finally, Archive.org primarily targets researchers by providing permanent access to sources.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act" criminalized production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services that are used to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as DRM) and criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, even when there is no infringement of copyright itself."(Wikipedia)

The EFF, Creative Commons, and Archive.org seem to fight against the DMCA, looking to a more open and fair use internet. I do think it is necessary to implement the DMCA, as seen in the article "Innovation, Piracy, and the Ethos of New Media," Microsoft said, 'the impact of piracy, in addition to causing higher prices,reduced levels of support, and delays in the funding and development of new products, harms all software publishers as welll as the local and national economies resulting in lost tax revenue and decreased employment.' Now this might be a tad extreme, but file-sharing is illegal--you are getting something for free when you should be paying for it. Yet it is hard to stand by this law--as I myself have guiltily downloaded for free instead of paying in the past. Individuals think that if you download one song here and there its not making a difference, but everyone is doing this, so it does in fact, make a difference.

The music industry has definitely pulled their reigns in the past years with mega law-suits against file sharers, who are mainly college students. Check out this article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48300-2005Apr12.html

I really enjoyed reading the graphic novel "Bound By Law." From a students perspective, you really gain the frustration of copyright restrictions in the problems the girl faces in producing her documentary.
I really agree with the mission statement of Creative Commons. There really needs to be a happy medium between all-or-nothing control. Fair-Use is extremely important--as seen in "Bound By Law."

So...creating this mashup took me a little over eight hours. No joke. I became obsessed with working on it from 5pm this afternoon till now, 1 am. I had a lot of trouble importing and exporting data rather than actually creating the video. For some reason Itunes wouldn't let me export the songs and video i wanted, so I had to find another way around it (i searched the internet for hours, made various copies of the files in different formats, but ultimately ended up downloading limewire, which i hate,to get the versions. I think my issues had something to do with my computer crash last week-not everything is running smoothly anymore. so after spending 6.99 on itunes for songs and video that i cant even export, i ended up using fuzzy choppy illegal versions. I spent forever trying to add text, but ultimately could never get it lined up right so i nixed all the text in the end.

but...

on a happier note...
these are two of my favorite songs, and I thought that since they are so similar, I would put them together in a mashup! you might recognize the song that comes first--Yael Naim's "new soul" (its the mac air commercial song with the computer in the envelope) the other song is "Fidelity" by Regina Spector. I tried to get the picture and music lined up, and spent a VERY long time editing the transitions.

I think i would have liked this assignment if one, i had better software, and two, i didnt get so stressed about having everything perfect. i would have saved myself a lot of time if i decided to just use different songs and video, but for some reason i was really stubborn and wouldnt quit till I found them.

maybe later on in the semester i'll have figured out how to have added text, and make the mashup exactly how i wanted it to look like.

mashup

I made this mashup as part of a graphic I'm going to use in a book i'm making for my independent study this semester in art. I combined three pictures of ladies wearing aprons to make it look like one fluid scene. The left image is from the popular tv series "Leave it to Beaver," the right photo is from a 1950s magazine ad in "Woman's Home Companion," and finally the image in the window is of a pioneer in the late 1800's. I wanted to portray the existence and cultural presence of aprons throughout time.

cmap

I created a cmap for some lit class notes i had.

My Flickr Account

Check out my Flickr Account. My username is Gool451.
I uploaded some pictures from my semester abroad during my Junior year. This is my first time using flickr. I dont think its anything special; I usually upload my pictures for my friends to see via Facebook. It does however, connect a much larger group of people.
Like the Google Image Labeler, I found it interesting that you could put keywords under the Tag option of your own photo, as well as adding comments on other user's photos.

Its all part of the Folksonomic Revolution...
from Wikipedia:
Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging , social classification, social indexing, social tagging, and other names) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.[1]

collaboration and group work are always stressed in academics, but now we see it reaching into all other spheres of life. I think its awesome. Every person can add their own personal touch, and every person has that extra bit of information to add, that we may not have had otherwise.

I remember after the Virginia Tech Massacre, news programs were actually getting their information on updates from Wikipedia. Wikipedia was the fastest site of having new facts and updates about the topic. Its incredible how these forms of sharing have become so widespread and popular. I wonder if wikipedia is just a fad, or it it will continue to gain popularity and credibility in the coming years.

My Wikipedia Entry

Last night I created a very new Wikipedia entry for Cosmic Cantina. Check it out at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Cantina

First I had an entry up about the Belmont Apartments, where I live here in Durham. I described the the apartments and facilities, the address, and other random facts. It stayed up for about five minutes! Someone deleted it because of its lack of significance in an encyclopedia. It was really disappointing to see it go away, because I felt very attached to my new creation and addition to this gargantuac folksonomic site.

I spent a little more time on my Cosmic Cantina entry, even using code to put the "history" title in and the "references." it looks pretty legit if I don't say so myself.

This exercise was pretty hard because everything I wanted to post was already up there, and I couldn't think of anything to add. Its amazing how many people edit and look at pages every second.

I didn't have any struggles about putting myself out there in this way, or on the validity of my post. Anything that a user puts up as a joke or as false information seems to be immediately deleted. In this way, there does seem to be some control on the validity of wikipedia posts.

"The Internet Goes to College"

Its true. Us college kids rely on our computers more than anything else. To communicate with our friends, our classmates, our teachers, and even our parents, the internet provides a speedy way to send and get the information we need.

The Article "The Internet Goes to College" from the Pew Internet and American Life Project didnt bring many surprises. For instance, it didnt shock me at all that 86% of college students have gone online, compared with the 59% of the general population.
I know that I depend on the internet to get in touch with friends, to contact my professors, and to submit assignments. But I also (and more frequently) use the internet in my spair time. In fact, if you walk into any dormroom on Duke's campus, you're most likely going to find someone on their computer.
We download and listen to music on itunes. We make fun of outrageous videos on youtube. We look up crazy facts on wikipedia. We friend eachother on facebook. We look at photoalbums. Now we even watch tv shows and movies in streaming HD.
And now, (if we can afford it) we can do any of this on a little handheld device and bring it anywhere we go.

With everything this easy, its no question why college kids demand more than our parents' generation. Diana Oblinger writes in her article "Boomers & Gen-Xers Millenials:Understanding the New Students" that "for today's learners, customer service is an expectation, not an exception." If our internet is going slow, we become outraged. If we dont get a response to our emails, we wonder what is wrong with the other person. If we order something online and it doesn't come in time, we refuse to shop there again. In short, we've become so used to speed, accessability, and customer service, that when we don't get exactly what we want we become enraged.

We all know that our grandparents 'hiked up hill in the snow everyday to get to school." In our age, we dont even have to leave the house. If we wanted, we could do all our learning in our pajamas on the couch, with our laptops purched on our laps.

My favorite city in Europe is Vienna. This is a picture of the Schonnburg Palace

ISIS 240 Class Readings

I didn't know what Web 2.0 meant till I read Mary Madden's article "Riding the Waves of Web 2.0" It turns out that Web 2.0 is a "conceptual umbrella" that forms the "participatory Web as we know it today" (blogs, wikis, social networking). In a sense, Web 2.0 is the array of multimedia available at our finger tips when we turn on our laptops. For instance, if I wanted to, I could write my own song using apple's "garage band" feature, and put it on youtube, for all of my fans to listen to. Or maybe I'd make a movie using imovie. I could join an online dating service like eharmony, find people in my geographical network on Facebook, or create my very own website to display my artwork.

Madden writes that that wikipedia is one of the poster children for Web 2.0. "The wikipedia entry on web 2.0 is, of course, one of the richest sources of information on the term. MSN's free online version of the Encarta Encyclopedia, in comparisoon, doesn't yet have a web 2.0."

So what do you think? is wikipedia legit? I certainly use it very, VERY often. Anytime i want to know more about some obscure fact, i simply type it into wikipedia. Maybe I want to know the biography of a famous actor, the history of cheddar cheese, or the population of Japan. I find what i want in a matter of seconds. Perhaps my blind trust in this encyclopedia created by users like myself is part of my generation. I think college students use the internet with more confidence, and believe everyone out there is out to do good. Take EBAY, for instance. I have bought many items on Ebay in the last five years, and I've even sold some of my old stuff. It seems kind of bizarre to buy something from a total stranger who could be lying about the product, but ebay has yet to let me down.

There are, of course, many cons to Web 2.0. Pediphiles find it easier than ever to track down their prey. Illegal file sharing has yet to be dissolved. Identity theft happens often. And what about interpersonal skills?? If we are sitting on our computers all day searching facebook or myspace, will the future generations even know how to interact with their peers??

Me pushing the Tower of Pisa upright again...