Student Area

miniverse-timekeeping

In the 6 minute time keeping lecture, I was surprised that Einstein’s theory of relatively was proven experimentally only a decade ago. Books much older speak of it with such conviction, yet it was not observed yet.

The other fact that surprised me was how arbitrary the number of the days in the month was. Some Roman Caesar thought odd numbers were lucky and made each other month 29 or 31 days? The concept of weeks fit oddly in the 30ish day monthly calendar. These constructs that I didn’t pay attention to shape my life yet were chosen (to a degree) arbitrarily.

junebug-timekeeping

Reading and watching these resources really got me thinking. We know time to be a known fact, one that is – quoting Drucker – “uni-directional” and always continuous with no breaks. But to humans, the concept of time doesn’t follow that of science but is purely subjective and relative. And yet, we humans always strive to find the accuracy or the truth behind everything, such as the creation of the atomic clock – which I found really interesting about the science behind it all just to justify the accuracy of time. I wonder how it’d be if we were to relive ancient times when timekeeping wasn’t a known fact or a part of science, and just appreciate mother nature a little bit more with its natural timekeeping resources.

junebug-meander

I loved reading about Hodgin’s process of creating this work. Similar to my Looking Outwards on Manolo Gamboa Naon, I love it when artists attempt to recreate nature and mother earth with computation and technology. Breaking down how mother nature works by formulas, points, and vectors and the contrast of philosophy and process really fires me up in a good way. I learned a lot of things from his process because I feel like I lost a lot of my coding skills after taking a year break from coding, but watching his beautiful work come to life motivates me – such as his process of thinking through how to create oxbow lakes by isolating two collision points and turning it into its own curve segment or using Voronoi fracture to turn the background plane into smaller polygons. His background map was similar to what I wanted to create in my grid-plan city map but I couldn’t think through how I could code that out.

tale-timekeeping

One thing that struck me is that the temporal relations(i.e. time relations/time period) can be represented and analyzed by graphs by using interval logic and each relation has its inverse, which also can be represented by the same graph. However, analyzing temporal relations has to be made under the assumption that there exists only one straight linear timeline, without any parallel or branching out timelines (at least in the version James Allen and George Ferguson conducted).

lampsauce-Meander

I learned several things from reading Robert Hodgin’s documentation of Meander. Firstly, the documentation of the mechanism for the river’s movement and the road generation was really insightful; I had never considered that to create novel motion, each point can be assigned a direction vector (I think learning to think in terms of vectors and vector fields may prove fruitful for my future work). Also, Hodgin’s solution for generating unique placenames by referencing actual geographical data is brilliant.

tale-Meander

I learned that the river “deletes” part of itself in favor of a shorter path and creates oxbow lake, and Hodgin took in consideration of such phenomenon in his project.

Another part I really liked/learned is that the mixture of curving(representing paths that naturally developed over time) and non-curving(representing artificially made roads) vectors result in a resemblance of intersecting roads.

pinkkk-timekeeping

A repeating theme from the sources is that time is dependent on experience, and the division of time shapes the world by structuring our experience of it. I never thought deep about time and its relation with experience, which is a highly subjective, intangible concept. This is super intriguing.

pinkkk-meander

I. LOVE. THIS. WORK.

It’s so beautiful and elegant. Something I learned from it other than I wanna become someone like this is that math is so important. I am really contemplating taking more calculation-based math classes. Another key take way is his level of attentiveness to detail. Everything put on there has been thought out completely and he is still in the process of changing its logic to make it better.

 

yanwen-Reading02

Where do you locate your interests along this spectrum?

I see my interests and creations more aligned with the category of “last word art”. My design works are mainly created with tools and rules that are already set up by previous designers, and my digital media creations are also based on the established form of creative coding environments and forms of expressions. 

 

What are some ways in which new technologies shape culture? What are some ways in which culture shapes technological development?

In my view technology and culture affect each other and develop depending on the influences that they receive from each other. Technology developments in fields including entertainment, daily workspaces, living environment, all have helped shape how the culture is like in the digital age. Similarly,  feedback and preferences from people as users decide what types of technology would continue to live on for further developments.  

 

We might aspire to make stuff of lasting importance, but when our work is technologically novel, it doesn’t always age well.

To me “doesn’t age well” might be either the technology that was once novel became familiar (or much more widely used) so the work is no longer novel in contemporary view, or the novel technology went discontinued and became obsolete. For the first scenario, all works should be viewed within its context. Even if the technology is no longer new, the work could still represent a turning point or important experimentation within the history of digital technology. For technology that became obsolete, it still preserve a part of the digital history and a possible direction that technology might have taken.

marimonda – timekeeping

I really enjoyed the readings and videos for this week, I actually ended up watching most of Dr. Donna Caroll’s video and the part that really struck with me of her video was her description of the disruptive nature of Roman time-keeping and how time developed this system of arbitrary months, in part due to cultural pressures. I think this video specifically (though Johanna Drucker and lepw76 go into this as well) made me consider the relationship between ‘accuracy’ and culture . As humans we often have this drive to aspire for accuracy (through patterns we observe, especially in the case of yearly calendars) while imposing a vision of what we believe reality is (in terms of mythos, counting systems, creation), and how this enhances or builds into the narratives we make.