“It was telling the story he know, of growing up with an indefinable need to be different to reject the mainstream and to embrace this subculture and aesthetic” Doctorow 289

“Another of my favorite DARPA projects is the Adaptive Vehicle Make program. This is an experiment in creating a new way to develop vehicle platforms for the military by crowdsourcing the design and then using a distributed manufacturing facility to build them. It actually worked.” Hatch 159

 

I like to imagine us (us as in Evergreen students, us an in radical reject creative folk, us who grew up with the need to be different to reject mainstream, us who embrace this subculture) as the kind of ‘kids’ who would  take Perry and Lesters ride into our own hands to create something. In reality there is us (us the American population, us the American right, us the patriot, us the war monger, us the capitalists) who open source create a “military vehicle” as Hatch puts it, which is a drone. A DRONE. Not (1.) a low humming sound, not (2.) a male bee in a colony of social bees, which does no work but can fertilize a queen, a person who does no useful work and lives off others but (3.)  a killing machine. A remote controlled weapon of war used to kill people. That is what we (USA) have so thoughtfully contributed to opensource.

M A K E   M A R K S   /   /   C O L L A P S E   T H E   C O N V E N T I O N

(the body is not passive)                             (it’s not all in your head)

 

(there is no ghost in the machine)

 

What is the status of the body in relation to human cognition?

 

sta·tus /‘stādəs,ˈstadəs/

noun

1. the relative social, professional, or other standing of someone or something:

 

“an improvement in the status of women”

“the status of women”

“those who enjoy wealth and status”

“the duchy had been elevated to the status of a principality”

 

synonyms: standing, rank, ranking, position, social position, level, place, estimation, prestige, kudos, cachet, stature, regard, fame, note, renown, honor, esteem, image, importance, prominence, consequence, distinction, influence, authority, eminence

 

the official classification given to a person, country, or organization, determining their rights or responsibilities.

 

WHAT IS THE STATUS OF THE BODY

WHAT IS THE POSITION OF THE BODY

WHAT IS THE ESTIMATION OF THE BODY

WHAT IS THE STATURE OF THE BODY

WHAT IS THE IMAGE OF THE BODY

WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BODY

WHAT IS THE PROMINENCE OF THE BODY

WHAT IS THE CONSEQUENCE OF THE BODY

WHAT IS THE DISTINCTION OF THE BODY

WHAT IS THE INFLUENCE OF THE BODY

WHAT IS THE AUTHORITY OF THE BODY

How do these words take on different meaning w/a relationship to the body? What are our bodies’ (individual + collective) authorities in the CST lab room? In creating? In claiming? What are our physical positions and statures? How does the image of our body (how we are physically seen) and the image we project inwards + outwards (how we affectively feel) relate to the images we are creating next week? etc.

 

“We are merely dealing with figures of speech—ordinary features of our linguistic ability and of conventional language use. But from the perspective of embodied cognition things appear rather different. […] A metaphor is not simply a figure of speech; it is a cognitive cross-domain mapping.”

(Malafouris 62)

 

 : : : CONCEPTUAL MAPPING : : :

 MAPPING OF BODIES AND WORDS ACROSS

GEOGRAPHICAL POINTS OF CONFLICT

BETWEEN SELF AND OBJECT

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

 

Because research procedure cannot “artificially divorce thought from embodied action-taking and […] its surrounding environment”, what intimate linkings between themes of language, ritual and gesture can be made?

 

When encountering the image-schematic structure (“which compromises recurring patterns in our sensorimotor experiences and perceptual interactions”) we confront center-periphery, balance and equilibrium, the  e x p e r i e n c e   o f   b o u n d e d   i n t e r i o r s .

 

What are these bounded interiors?

In a making space, what are we bound to? (physically, gesturally,  a f f e c t i v e l y )

Simultaneously, how do we define the boundary as it defines us?

How can it be expanded to fit us?

How does the boundary uphold us?

 

 

MATERIAL METAPHOR VS. LINGUISTIC METAPHOR

“You understand I’m going to write this the way I see it, not the way…

“Those big old companies have two common characteristics: they’ve accumulated more assets than they know what to do with, and they’ve got poisonous, monopolistic cultures that reward executives who break the law to help the company turn a buck. None of that’s changed, and so long as that’s all true, there will be little companies with legit gripes against big companies that can be used as investment vehicles for unlocking all that dead Fortune 100 capital and putting it to work.” (Doctoro, 238,239)
This week we began learning the fundamentals of Adobe Illustrator and translating it into TinkerCAD which really opened up the medium of 3d modeling even more. While most of what was being rendered in Illustrator appeared to be scribbles or really rough renderings of frameworks for blue rabbit projects, the addition of this new software has made materializing our ideas a lot more translatable across multiple mediums. I believe it was Bella who drew an elaborate array of scribbles on the entire workspace she created in Illustrator, moved it to TinkerCAD, and raised the height of this flat object. This object turned into a raised maze like structure that may not be able to serve a functional purpose if materialized with a Makerbot, however demonstrates the limitations and possibilities of working with multiple softwares. I am really curious as to how the ease of bringing rough sketches into TinkerCAD will affect the work we’re doing, perhaps the translatability across mediums will make our work less polished or maybe it will force us to work intricately and deliberately on the spines that shape the bodies of our work. All in all, the introduction of new software seems to excite those working and helps clear a lot of the parameters that TinkerCAD hinders our creativity with.

Chuck Neudorf

The time is approaching where the design aspect of our projects is winding down and the creating part is ramping up. Test prints are being done to insure that components are going to work together. Some of us are going to use our 3D print as a prototype for the final product, and that means we still have another iteration to go, this time in a different media. I am finding that the campus is a better makerspace then I thought. Not only are there a lot of great tools available, but there are also a lot of great people available to help us learn how to use them.

How can we better address the similar problems that we all are all coming across during the our sixth week of class?

I have noticed that there are some issues that all of us are starting to face in the finishing portions of our tinkerCAD work. Things like clips, hinges, and male/female plugs are without a doubt the hardest part about creating with the three-D printer. I am still having troubles with the hinges for my glasses frames, and other students around me seem to be having similar problems to solve. Grant is making maraca shakers and would like to have the bottom clip into the top so he can add beads, but needs it to hold steady when someone is using it. All these little complex problems can become huge problems when three-D printing. Working together in specified groups or more peer-assisted lab work could help keep our projects successful and our troubleshooting to a minimum.

“Transposing the conventional demarcation line of human conceptual architecture outside the brain but still inside the skin, the embodied-mind approach may have resolved the traditional “ghost in the machine” paradox by way of what Anderson (2003) calls the “physical grounding project,” but it also has created a sort of embodied cognitivism in which the material reality remains external and epiphenomenal to the cognitive structure.” Malafouris p. 65

While beginning to bridge the “mind” with the “external” Malafouris still cannot abstain from creating certain demarcations of the self.  The holographic nature of the universe ensures that everything is an order of magnitude within another order of magnitude.  The macro is mirrored in the micro and vis versa, they cannot be unraveled or untangled.  The problem is that humans are too used to inhabiting one’s own body, we must explore other ways of existing to realize that we are viewing the universe through just a tiny porthole.  It is interesting to me that we leave our ego behind each night in our dreams and join the ocean of consciousness only to be refunneled upon waking.  Does the same essence that left the body come back, or does a different essence enter us every day, functioning under the mode of our particular neural topography?

Chrissy

(a conversation between myself, Zev, and Malafouris during CST lab)

“What are you drawing?”– Zev

“Me? Oh, I don’t know, I’m just sketching what I see.” –Chrissy

“We should be focusing on the interactions among humans and material actors seeking to discern the properties, emergent or otherwise, that are relevant to the working space and the social setting” (Malafouris 79).

“…But how can you sketch this moment when everyone is moving?” — Zev

“As the linear B tablets exemplify, the engagement between cognition and material culture… is not simply a matter of independent mental representation; it is also a matter of meaningful enculturation and enaction– processes that are dependent on and inseparable from their physical realization, bodily or material” (Malafouris 73).

If participation is action, and observation is action, then one of the key circumstances for engaging in participant-observation is movement. Therefore, movement is part of the process of creation.

The CST lab is an ever-changing situation: questions turn into ideas; ideas form statements; statements turn into materials; and materials become extensions of ourselves.

But how can we really document that shift from question to self?

Mindful creation is shaping the world that we live in. It is also bringing everyone together, at once, to make something happen. And that act of making (that movement), is a picture worth sketching.

“The hand is not simply an instrument for manipulating an externally given objective world by carrying out the orders issued to it by the brain; it is instead one of the main perturbatory channels through which the world touches us, and it has a great deal to do with how this world is perceived and classified” (Malafouris 60).

Lester said…’We going to be ready to open soon?’ Perry had fallen into a classic nerd trap of having almost solved a problem and not realizing that the last 3 percent of the solution would take as long as the rest of it put together” (Makers, 201).

Reality stared back at us from the white board as we all quickly realized that time was of the essence. We have four short weeks to perfect and complete our design, run test prints, create images that represent our project, and finally, to bring our idea into reality. Four weeks! Doesn’t seem like such a short period of time until—the ringer—we discovered that we are competing for limited resources; the ability of two 3D printers to print for two committed programs, non-stop for the next four weeks. Nine hours each was our allotment. Time to get to work.

‘Soon, soon.’ Perry said. He stood up and looked around at the shambles. ‘I lie. This crap won’t be ready for hours yet’ (Makers, 201).

“Is he a psycho? What the hell is his beef with me?”

“I think that he thinks that technology hasn’t lived up to its promise and that we should all be demanding better of our tech. So for him, that means anyone who actually likes technology is the enemy, the worst villain, undermining the case for bringing tech up to its true potential.”

 

The struggle between human and technology was quite apparent during the participant portion of this weeks COM exercises, when the TinkerCAD website was going through updates. I love that we always have a fall-back method to still make sure we learn something useful, be it more programming oriented(OpenSCAD) or visual(Adobe Illustrator). The most important development this week though was by far the formation of smaller groups with similar project scopes. I was also excited to see the Blue’s and Rabbit’s switch up Mondays and Tuesdays, because I was wondering what effect, if any, it would have on us. We are sort of our own experiments in this class which has always intrigued and confused me..

“You mean to say that you’re surprised by building stuff out of unusual materials,” – Cory Doctorow. I’ve noticed an interesting dichotomy amongst the students, which, although it has always been present, it is now making its way into the foreground much more intensely than it did before. It seems as if there is a split … Continue reading »

“But it would be very difficult to draw the boundary between the internal and the external parts of the cognitive system involved, even if one were able to locate precisely where these cognitive processes were enacted.” (Malafouris 71)

This quote seemed very fitting to me well for one because our class is working with technologies that have a good way of blending imagination and the material. Using these technologies you can really see that the inner and outer go together perhaps in ways that are just to complex and works at such an implicit level you can’t really put words on it. I feel like history has been like some metamorphosis for our species, thats leading us to a tip of the ice burg like next stage in evolution. So it will be interesting to continue to see how our collective imagination and the material become more and more blurred and fantastic.

“venture capitalism is the major source of funding for commercial lawsuits these days”(Doctorow, 242).

“The body is not as is conventionally held, a passive external container of the human mind; it is an integral component to the way we think”(Malafouris, 60).

Is there a legitimate sense of agency behind the culturally inherent quest for monetary gain? The concept of venture capitalism is very interesting to me because it promotes the almost non-human ability to personally detach and disengage from the transparent interaction between creation and creator. Coming into the “free” market with a solidified understanding that “selling out” and selling out quickly is the achievable working goal can be viewed as a contemporary form of social and market manipulation. Appealing to the mass in disregards to personally creative interests. Is this disconnect from material engagement and purpose entirely detrimental, or can it become useful in other exploitive situations of human interaction? Acquiring a sense of agency over the ability to disconnect from the process of creation when necessary could be useful in viewing one’s output from a different perspective, or could prove to be just as impractical.

“You don’t have to do the suing. That’s the point. You outsource that. You get the money; someone else does the business stuff”(Doctorow, 242).

“Our stories are about the world, so our stories are about people figuring out what’s causing their troubles and changing stuff so that those causes go away.” (Doctorow 176 – 177)

I’ve always known music to be powerful on a personal level, but once I began performing and seeing how my creations affected people listening, music became an entirely new tool.  I’m interested in looking at what ways a performance is successful at being an emotionally receivable experience.  I ask this question with a bit of a hunch.  I’d bet it has a great deal to do with the performer’s mind/spiritual/emotional standings.  Ex:  Two musicians can play the exact same piece on the piano, the first is accurate, intelligible and you can acknowledge that it is of quality.  The second, however, contains all the qualities of the first, but is driven by an emotional force that is moving, powerful and evokes a response.  In short, you think the first was good, but the second made you cry. . .

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Kettlewell had done amazing work for him this morning, just out of the goodness of his own heart, and Perry had repaid him by being a stiff-necked dickwad.” (Doctorow, 218)

I feel like people are starting to get more invested into their projects, although I can tell that some are becoming disillusioned with the structure of the class. I’ve heard multiple complaints about how the class has almost stifled students’ creativity. However, this is something I do not agree with; I feel like the ability to choose whatever you want to make and print is incredibly liberating, which is why I chose this quote in particular.

“Do I give up my agency when I give up my physicality to John with a scanner? How do I maintain a sense of self when my tangible body is abstracted?”

-Lauren

“I don’t see it as a woman (or man) when its on the screen. I try to get a good scan, I really don’t see you as that (an object)”
-John

This is an attempt to explain but by no means justify a small aspect of the objectification of women within our society.  I think that often the one directly responsible for executing this objectification within the creative world of digital media is often blinded in the moment of creativity.  This was my experience while scanning Lauren and then having a conversation with her about it days later.  Was my goal as the creator of the scan to show her as an object? No.  But now, stepping back, I can see how easily this image of her, although not my intention, could be used to objectify her.  I am reminded that we as ‘Makers’ must take a step back from the creative process and take responsibility for the things we make and how they may affect the world.

Is optimism always possible or favorable?

“No fucking way”- Doctorow, Makers, 227

I’m not sure when I stopped being an optimist about everything, but I think this class might change that. Certainly, not much in Makers can be seen as optimistic, but this week, while I was still mad about my inability to link the class to the text, I saw people being more optimistic than me. People were having troubles with their designs and seeing it as learning oppurtunities. People would look at misprints and say “I’ll get it at some point soon.”  The class is effectively acting opposite of the text, and it will be interesting to see where it pans out.

“But it would be very difficult to draw the boundary between the internal and the external parts of the cognitive system involved, even if one were able to locate precisely where these cognitive processes were enacted.” (Malafouris 71)

“He patted her arm. ‘”You forgot who you’re talking to. I love fixing stuff. Don’t sweat it.’” (Makers 206)

In Malafouris’ s work, he “undermines” the cognitive processes enacted upon stone tablets that were written sometime in our history, to be able to further understand how the human mind has evolved into more complex interconnected thought processes which is that of our brain. Although this is a hard thing to read by judging the hand movements on a stone tablet, is it not almost like looking through computer code to read how the computer is thinking? Since the creation of computer coding, mankind has worked in a much different way, and I believe that whoever controls the code of the machine can very well control the code of the human, which lives off of, or bases their life off technology, much like Perry and Lester do in “Making.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

When I was shopping on Amazon I came across this new device and after watching this video I didn’t know whether to be excited or disturbed. This device is a channel for consciousness to flow through and even has the mechanical hardware to seemingly make decisions and respond of its own accord to questions. My question was then: is this thing animate or inanimate? It’s seems to be quite animated but isn’t it just a thing? While sitting and meditating next to my printer I thought to myself: this thing is animated by my actions, is it animate? The same thing applied to the Amazon Echo. In a sense it is animated–by my consciousness extending itself into the software and hardware. But does that form of animation have a sense of its own animation? If the biological body is animated out of the mind, who’s to say a mechanical body cannot house conscious?

“But you can’t put everything under one banner—you can’t just declare to these people that their projects are ours—“ (Doctorow 217)

“Without a corporate entity, it’s like trying to herd cats.” (Doctorow 217)

These quotes make me think back to the documentary we watched in class about the industry of 3D printers and the process in which MakerBot essentially sold out and went from open source to closed source, putting the community’s collective work under MakerBot’s name.  Is it true that a community of individuals working for a movement is something that can’t be herded?  Do people need a leader in order to work towards something?  Perry tried so hard to share his idea with everyone and allow them to work off of it without being under Perry’s rule.  But when they faced trouble Perry had to take the leadership position in order to efficiently deal.  Is there any way around this?

Yarden Solomon

“The task is not to understand how the body contains the mind, but to understand how the body shapes the mind.” (Malafouris, 60)

“Sometimes he grunted or scatted along with his playing but more often he grunted out something that was kind of the opposite of what he was playing, just like sometimes the melody and rhythms he played on the piano were sometimes the opposite of the song he was playing, something that was exactly and perfectly opposite, so you couldn’t hear it without hearing the thing it was opposite of.” (Doctorow, 172-173)

Throughout these weeks, I’ve been noticing a duality in the world. The duality in body and mind, material and conceptual,,light and dark, moon and sun, male and female, positive and negative and so on. It also seems like many of the questions we work with understanding have more then one answer and take many perspectives to grasp. In my mind, I imagine this concept as a shadow. When light is cast on to any material object, in it somewhere contains a shadow. We could apply this concept to everything, and notice that for everything there is an opposite thing,a counteractive, a shadow.

 

“She pored over the stack of menus in the kitchen. Does food in twenty minutes really deliver in twenty minutes?”

“Usually fifteen, they do most of the prep in the vans and use a lot of predictive math in their routing. There’s usually a van within about ten minutes of here, no matter what the traffic. They deliver to traffic jams too, on scooters.”

Doctorow, C. (2009). Makers (p. 169). New York: Tor.

 

 

New technology and methods give us more effective and efficient ways of dealing with “problems” or “needs.” But recently I have been contemplating the question, are we making more problems then we are solving? How is it consciously acceptable to pay someone to bring you a hot processed chemical meal in fifteen minutes when nearly a billion people around the world are suffering from malnutrition. We have the technology and process to create fast food empires and industrial supermarket chains, but cant figure out how to grow and package food in a way that is sustainable? Some people have so much food they can throw it away, but we cant figure out how to distribute food so that people around the globe aren’t starving?

 

“She pored over the stack of menus in the kitchen. Does food in twenty minutes really deliver in twenty minutes?”

“Usually fifteen, they do most of the prep in the vans and use a lot of predictive math in their routing. There’s usually a van within about ten minutes of here, no matter what the traffic. They deliver to traffic jams too, on scooters.”

Doctorow, C. (2009). Makers (p. 169). New York: Tor.

 

 

New technology and methods give us more effective and efficient ways of dealing with “problems” or “needs.” But recently I have been contemplating the question, are we making more problems then we are solving? How is it consciously acceptable to pay someone to bring you a hot processed chemical meal in fifteen minutes when nearly a billion people around the world are suffering from malnutrition. We have the technology and process to create fast food empires and industrial supermarket chains, but cant figure out how to grow and package food in a way that is sustainable? Some people have so much food they can throw it away, but we cant figure out how to distribute food so that people around the globe aren’t starving?

 

 

 

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comments:::

This week was a good week. What I observed this week was, everyone working in Tinkercad on their chosen projects. Everyone seems to have a friendly feel for the bunny project. We also assembled groups that had similar projects for week 10. We combined seminar groups for wk 6 and that was insightful. We discussed Science and Shiva. Everyone expressed thier points of view and opinions in a civil manner and this is always accepted. As the quarter comes to an end everything seems to have this nice flow to it. I hope this continues the rest of the quarter.

“The reality is that you can now deploy dozens of machines, working 24-7, creating thousands…

*****DIsclaimer: My bibliography did not copy and paste. I will fix it soon, but note that I do have one on the printed form at the moment.

 

Cameron Ball

 

Confront the problems with language I have been having.

“Poetry enacts and tells the open secret”

“What is the answer?,” asked Gertrude Stein as she was being wheeled into a surgery room where she would later die. Upon getting no response, she responded: “in that case, what is the question?”

What is it that I have been trying to say?

 

How can the combination of two extremes of linguistic expression be put forth in a 3d format to make the creative process more intuitive?

What are the implications of making something that you do not know the meaning of into matter?

Zaum: “A language which does not have any definite meaning, a transrational language” that “allows for fuller expression.

+

Descriptive, rational language using the binds of language that Zaum is trying to disrupt

+

3 dimensional text

 

Bonus points:

• “display and juxtapose elements at the same time”, like paintings
• create a Tralfamadorian text
• put this new mode of deliberative creative choices balanced with liberative practices “into conversation with an interrogative dynamic” in order to figure out what words to omit and which ones to keep

The terms on which I have been asked to justify my project are all oriented towards a utilitarian pragmatism. Is it worthy to print? Why is it meaningful to print? How does it help you progress from a to b? These questions are in direct opposition to the thesis of Zaum, which is itself an antithetic thesis. I can work with convoluted contradictions, but it is necessary to note that this will, in fact, “make nothing happen.”

 

Let’s call the part of the brain that produces meaning, or in this case, words, a word extruder. If my creative process was a Makerbot, the temperature of the extruder would constantly be off. The ideological filament that started out solid is either overheated into mush or undercooked so that it won’t stick to the previous layer. Also, my word extruder doesn’t know how to decide how much infill to put inside of the model. Whatever shell I create might be too dense, or too light and airy to support itself. My own mental makerbot doesn’t even extrude the sweet smell of expired pancake syrup when it creates things.(smell the makerbots while they print, trust me.) It isn’t my fault, just the fact that humans aren’t as precise as computers, and sometimes they have no idea what or how to extrude.

Maybe my word extruder isn’t an extruder per se, but the word “extruder’s” odd cousin, “nozzle.” It derives from the word nose, “small spout.” The muse hits my nozzle with sneezes of creativity, inspiring me with a breath big enough to blow mnemosyne’s boogers out into a transrational tissue. And I get embarrassed when I sneeze in public. When I don’t have any tissue to write on. This isn’t the extruder’s determined, straight-lined, and confident process. This is my personal language disorder.

I will be working with the Cubo-Futurism of the early 20th century Russian avant-garde. My main imports from this school of linguistic experimentation will be Roman Jakobson’s strict descriptions of language and its features, Krucenykh’s idea of Zaum, and Vasily Kamensky’s format, word, choice, and gut feeling of his ferro-concrete transrational poem “Tango with Cows,” while balancing it with a type of poetry oriented towards sense: confessional phrases not unlike Robert Lowell’s very quintessentially poem-ish poems. These confessional, rational, descriptive segments are important  because the contrast between liberated words and deliberated words will deal with the Barthesian notion of the death of the author. Barthesian duality, so to speak.

Kamensky’s ferroconcrete poetry was in reference to the reinforced concrete that had recently been introduced for the building of skyscrapers and other large and futuristic buildings. The specific example I will be using, “Tango with cows,” is called such to point out the clash between the new metropolitan lifestyle, constituents of which were learning the new dance craze called the Tango and living inside these ferroconcrete skyscrapers, and Russia’s vast history as a pastoral culture. Kamensky was one of the earlier Russian pilots until he had a near fatal crash, and returned to a literary career. Indeed, some of the poems in this book/zine/pamphlet resemble a map of land from the point of view of an aviator. The form also experiments with various fonts and typographic inconsistency, furthering the combinatorial play involved with this type of poetry. Also important to note is that it was published 100 years ago, and the first translation is underway, set to be due mid-2014. The half-truth that poetry is by definition untranslatable lets the reader of the english version see a different side of the poem than what Kamensky wrote a hundred years ago. In consequence, the interpretation is further complicated by the fact that Kamensky’s intent is clouded by the intent of the translators, and the fact that Kamensky’s original intent was that of no thetic intent.

Roman Jakobson was a French-Russian linguist who was one of the first to make counter arguments to Sausserean structural linguistics, and made significant achievements in the field of phonology, as well as semantics, poetics, and morphology. For his phonology, he drew primarily on the ideas of his sometimes interlocutor, Nikolai Trubetskoy,  who shared Jakobson’s passion for breaking down units of language to their atomic level. Later he came to America, working at Columbia, Harvard, and MIT, and advanced Charles Sanders Pierce’s semiotics and strongly influenced Claude Levi-Strauss and Barthes. It is important to note that if one spends enough time looking up Jakobsonian linguistics, one will discover that he got his start in his teens writing weird sound poetry under the name Aljagrov, experimenting with transrational language that was being studied by the poets surrounding his Literary Circle. He then went on to make a very descriptive analysis of the distinctive features of language, applying a set of binaries to each of the seven features, giving each a (+) or (-) value. This marriage of a disciplined and descriptive set of binaries to classify sounds and language contrasting with the system of free play at work in his sound poetry is the direction I hope to go with my project. I cannot read pages and pages of pure sound poetry, or pure semiotic freedom. Sound poetry can be put into conversation with confessional, descriptive, rational phrases to highlight the folly of our language and make it much more meaningful. The fact that the seemingly rational looks silly next to pure sounds, and vice versa creates the dissonance and delightful constellation of meaning that is left to be desired when I read something that is on the opposite side of the spectrum from rationality.

I will be weaving these threads from the back side of the tapestry, turning a disorganized mess of thread into an impossible to disentangle constellation of meaning, using sneezes from the muse as my source of inspiration. The typographic experimentation will come later, as will the thinking about the specific form this is going to take. What form is most advantageous to the concept I am trying to convey? How can I use the possibilities of the printing baseplate to make something happen by “making nothing happen?”

In the writing that follows I hope to shed light on the controversy of digital…

Throughout the research I have done in the field of 3-D scanning, I have noticed the struggle between large commercial scale scanning hardware pushing companies and the consumer driven attempts to eliminate the need for this seemingly redundant hardware. With the right technique and software interconnectivity, the average person could produce an accurate 3-D depiction of a real-life object with just a few images, claims software such as 1-2-3 D Catch. I have a growing belief through my mishaps and other research that this assemblage of software conversions could be a little more tricky, though. In order to tame this beast, one must first get to know it and all of it’s components. The scanning platform that I initially attempted to saddle up with was vastly inadequate for the task in which I set out, as I learned through trial and error. My original idea didn’t even consider depth of background, which is critical in mapping an object accurately, but this just intrigued me more. I want to know what to apply to my scanner in order for a person with no previous knowledge of the matter to be able to make use of this amazing technology without having to worry about any process beside scanning.

Fabio Remondino has been at the forefront of researching methods to accurately recover 3-D meshes from photographs, or photogrammetry,  as exposed to expensive scanner hardware. In his journal From Point cloud to Surface: The Modelling and Visualization Problem () from 2003, we can sort of see that his disposition also leans towards the cheaper, more accessible route to get to a 3-D model.He even goes on to state that the photographic mode has a higher measurement reliability in terms of photogrammetry, but lacks in detail due to less images.This intrigues me to know that not only is the method I’m pursuing more novel, it can even improve on mapped details of a more complex and costly scan. Another interesting culmination of cell phone hardware and existing topographical data is described in the work titled Mobile Photogrammetry by Armin, Gruen, and Devrim Acha, where they blend aerial data, GPS coordinates from a cell phone, and images taken by the cell phone to construct a 3-D map of an area.I am really excited to discuss this with my classmate, Forbes, as I hope that this could lead to a more convenient way to map Olympia. In the paper “Shape and Correspondence Problem” written by Abhijit S. Ogale and Yiannis Aliomonos, the battle between detail and accuracy is revealed. The introduction and list of previous works that are incorporated proclaims that there is an “energy output” threshold of compiled images, meaning that there is a give and take in terms of detail and accuracy. The article goes on to list the sub-types of the threshold causing calculations for compilations of images through this particular type of process. This set of congruent issues reminded me of problems that I encountered with my first phase of testing the capabilities of the 1,2,3,D Catch software, when I had no idea how the compilation process of multiple images worked. Because of this week’s research, I am glad to say that I can better understand the nature and history of research done in relation to 2-D to 3-D  digitalobject assemblies.

Based on the short history of 3-D scanning as described by myself and my cited experts, my thoughts and concepts have expanded to the point where my simple scanning platform has to take on new challenges. What shapes can I use best as topographical reference points for the compiling software to accurately assimilate depth in comparison to the target object? How can I best utilize lighting for gathering intricate details of an object? What angle do I fix these lights at? Of all the marketed scanning platforms currently available, why do none of them utilize the simple, powerful tools within a cell phone. Why do they push this costly idea involving lasers and expensive cameras? I realize that while these questions make their way to the forefront, they are only reiterations of the questions I had coming into this project, from a more educated point of view. Through reading of my chosen articles and journals, I learned the inner workings of how a scan is actually produced; methods such as range imaging (with and without laser supported systems), photogrammetrical assemblies, and LiDAR assisted 3D topographical constructions of large scale maps. Another bit of very pleasing information I discovered was that all this scanning (landscape, human, object) has a wide variety of applications that is constantly growing, as we discover new uses for old technologies .Another thing that the experts I have cited have piqued my interest about is: although expensive, new hardware exists to perform the tasks we pursue in this day and age, our older, or common hardware has not yet been fully utilized and re-evaluated, perhaps prematurely, considering the amount of time it has been around. This thought echoes through my brain with the mantra of our class. What new do we need to create in a world full of stuff we haven’t used to it’s full potential?

In my first iteration, I asked what could be useful to scan. Not yet backed by data, I was struggling to find a concise answer to this. After various scholarly insight, information, and experiments I can say that a scanner is not only hand in hand with a printer, but it can be used for facial recognition, preservation of artifacts, and even building upon our knowledge of trees and tree systems, large and small scale. I have also learned refining techniques for capturing and smoothing 3-D objects, as well as insight on the mechanics and mathematics of assembling that object from multiple 2-D images. I would say that this week’s research has allowed me to be knowledgeable enough to build my scanning platform, while having confidence that in can make a change in the clarity and easiness of capturing an item.

“Our stories are about the world, so our stories are about people figuring out what’s causing their troubles and changing stuff so that those causes go away.” (Doctorow 176-177)

 

This week in class was interesting. I learned a lot more about 3D printing and what I need to be preparing for when I am actually ready to print. I realize that I need to start thinking about time and how long its going to take to make my print. I also need to decide what color of filament I will use. I was really excited to learn about adobe illustrater, and I’m excited to begin testing with my project.

“That’s the point. You can’t print or fab these. They’re wonderful because they’re so well made and so well used!” (Doctorow 188)

We have talked a lot about what we gain in the shift to desktop industrialization. But what do we lose?

And is there anything more beautiful than a sweater? You wash it once a season. It collects smells. It gains holes and loses buttons and the cuffs stretch out, but it is never really trash. This is so unlike three-D printed objects for obvious reasons I need not even recite.

So are we going about our projects wrong? Should we take Katie Hatam’s lead and make items that involve true craftsmanship, and use three-D printed objects only for the parts that could never otherwise come to fruition?

A ranting inspired by Sitting, Writing, Speaking, Yearning: Reflections on Scholar-Shaping Techniques

“The human body can no longer be figured either as a bounded entity or as a naturally given and distinct part of an unquestioned whole that is itself conceived as the “environment.” The boundaries between bodies and their components are being blurred, together with those between bodies and larger ecosystems” (Smelik, Lykke x)
-Bits of Life

In seminar last week, I noticed the way we talked about the technological community at a distance- “they” and we spoke about American culture as a whole, a broad America, and about the relationship between technology and human interaction in pedagogy. The only thing missing in our conversations was our own presence, our own insertion of self and therefore self awareness, into the dialogue. We spoke as if we were not in the technological community ourselves dispite our constant engagement with it in and outside the classroom, as if Americans were animals in a zoo we had recently visited and not in fact our own culture, and we spoke of learning as if we ourselves are not students. It was quite strange.

You may have notices that sometimes I roll around on the floor. I stretch my legs over my head, I twist my back and reach my arms up and up and up overhead.  Sometimes people stare at me. Maybe they don’t know why I am rolling on the floor of the classroom? Well I am doing it because it feels good, it circulates my blood, it brings energy into my brain. Referencing the body so overtly in a room designed for intellectual exercise only- seems to make people uncomfortable, embarrassed, or at the very least, interested.

This comes back to the moment where a man holding a scanner, leashed to a computer dutifuly held by another (man) circle my body in the corner of a computer lab. Circling while I stand with out moving. Circling while others stream over to watch. Circling while me behind, where I am aware of my body in the classroom, my body on the screen, that I am a woman, the contours of my ass, the shape I am becoming, the fact I didnt brush my hair. This is the literal process of creating plastic reproduction- the DNA of my miniature 3D plastic self. There is something uncomfortably physical about the copulating of digital and physical world to create another person- the lifeless and plastic mini self that is birthed through 3D printer. My classmates, witness to this dance, are drawn to reproduction in the way, and get scans of themselves in turn.
Sources:

Lykke, Nina. “An Introduction.” Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology. Ed. Anneke Smelik. Seattle: U of Washington, 2008. X. Print.

When using Adobe illustrator I found it to be more interesting and fun to create something. I loved being able to draw something super fast and more freely. It felt less complicated to create something the way I saw it in my mind versus having to make exceptions over Tinkercad. After drawing my piece and placing it on Tinkercad all I had to do was adjust the size of it and then see if I could print it. I was super exited to have it printed , but found out that it wasn’t actually going to be able to print. I would like to experiment more with Adobe illustrator to see if I can figure out a way to print the object that I wanted to print. I like very detailed things and it seems like it might be more complicated than I thought to get all those detailed lines printed out over the machine. I figured it wouldn’t come out exactly how I saw it on the screen because there were certain parts that were not all connected together but I was curious how it would turn out at all.