Wednesday’s Daily Create was an exemplary challenge. As I understood it, it said “I don’t know what to do with this thing. Make something and figure it out.” It would be cool if you could generate an Anti-Tag Cloud from any text you submit, but that doesn’t seem to be an option. What was cool was that people took very different approaches, creating stories, visuals and typographic designs. It doesn’t look like anyone tried to make audio out of it, so…
I told it to make a sea shanty out of the anti-Moby Dick words. I guess sea shanties weren’t part of its training.
from across time and space. Many people enjoyed the assignment, although there was some frustration with not being able to save the responses locally. I wonder if there is a way to do this with Google Forms. I also wonder if there is a less tedious way to reformat spreadsheet information into a document. I’m sure there must be, but it may not be within the limits of my spreadsheet jockeying skills.
Nevertheless, we have a great group and it will be fascinating to see how they interact.
Jim and I had a discussion on the wonders of blog commenting earlier, and the recording is above. Commenting really is the glue of ds106, what makes a collection of bloggers into a community of creativity. It’s how we inspire each other and learn from each other and how we connect.
For comments to appear, they need to be moderated and approved, so we take a quick look at one way to do that. You can also approve comments, or not, in your WordPress dashboard. Akismet may be a useful plugin to add. It may ask for payment, but for personal use you can pay $0.
There is also some discussion of our friend, Dr. Oblivion, if he can be trusted and if his directives have been altered. This may need to be investigated further.
Dr. O seems to think “We don’t need Skynet records taking over the charts,” but perhaps that has already started.
I was curious though. How would Dr. Oblivion handle archaic English? So I asked:
Please recite this verse so I can hear it in your voice:
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
I had to ask a couple times before he would do it. I dare say his pronunciation is a little better than Suno’s, but what do I know. on a barely related note, I wonder if Suno could give a Middle English ska punk version of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto?
I’m sure to suffer in musical purgatory for that. I was trying to relate this to the Dr. Oblivion Intro assignment, but it went a bit off the rails. These AI generators can be fun in that they easily produce weird stuff, but then the challenge is to make something out of it. Sometimes it’s just a dead end.
and I thought, “This could be a cool way to visualize course characters.” Is there a trading card assignment though? If there wasn’t before, thanks to the magic of the Assignment Bank, there is now! It’s an easy and fun way to #MakeArtDammit
I watched the Michael Mann neo-noir classic Collateral last night. I was thinking about the idea of noir characters, and how this film shows a great example of the Innocent Bystander, a cab driver, a man with a plan, whose life is turned upside down by a random fare.
This segment, starting at 1:23 of the video, struck me as a metaphor for customizing our blog spaces: Taking the standard ride, seeing how the controls work, closing the door to focus, and adding the personal touches. As Jim put it:
Figuring out how to design the space wherein you live, work, and learn remains crucial and remains at the core of the ds106 experience.
I also wanted to do a visual or design assignment using the film. I told myself I would go to the fifth page of assignments and do one I found there. I was taken with the initial cab ride scene with Jamie Foxx and Jada Pinkett Smith and thought it would be good for the Storytelling Collage assignment. Pinkett Smith does an impressive job of communicating with eyes and expressions, so I tried to capture some of that. Here are the shots I used:
She tells him how to do his job
He suggests a better route
She barely gives him attention as she responds. The plexiglas partition is a concrete symbol of the divide between them
But she thinks about it. Note that she’s no longer behind the partition.
Exterior view of the tangle of roadways
There’s a seriousness and depth about him that she finds attractive
Another exterior, would not be out of place in a tech noir film
There’s an openness and connection between them – closer together horizontally and also depth-wise. Note how the background is completely out of focus, All that matters is the tow of them.
Love this shot, with the noir feel of shadow and light and the symbolism of the green light ahead of him and the red light behind
And here is the collage:
I was thinking of it in terms of a page from a graphic novel, so the layout is a little more formal than the average collage. I pondered cropping images, but the director and cinematographer had them framed so perfectly that I thought it better to use them as is. I did try to use the arrangement to show them coming closer together.
Fortunately for me the scene was on Youtube. I used yt-dlp to download the video. At first the command didn’t work, so I looked up some directions. They weren’t exactly what I needed, but they gave me the idea to put single quotes around the video URL, and that did the trick. I imported the video into iMovie and selected about twenty frames from the scene. Then I used PowerPoint as a canvas to arrange the stills, and exported the final arrangement as a JPG.
I think it works. I’m not sure if it says collage, but it conveys a version of the story. I’m not sure if the decision not to crop was the right one. I could have been more creative and expressive with design and arrangement otherwise, so perhaps I will consider revising it later. It was worthwhile though to give the scene a close reading and look at how the shots work internally and in combination.
Today’s Daily Create asked us to remake a Captcha challenge. I thought it might be evil to use a Where’s Waldo image. Then I remembered an old Flash game where you had to take potshots at Waldo to get him to shut up. Extra evil. As penance I had to sit and listen to him for several minutes until I could capture him in a screenshot. The things we do for art…
The point of the film review assignment was to get people thinking about the Tech Noir concept, how it has been portrayed in media, and what it means to us. It’s not meant to be a generic or conventional film review as much as a way for you to think about the theme and connect some dots.
It’s also an opportunity to practice some blogging skills like linking and embedding images and other media. If we’re going to discuss video, incorporating clips or screenshots of the points we’re discussing is a good idea. In some cases you can find usable clips on Youtube, which can be easily embedded in a post. You may be able to find images of scenes through Google. My Mac is giving me a hard time about taking screenshots of Netflix and some other services, but it appears that the Windows Print Screen function works. In order to get the shots I used in my post, I found the video on an alternate site and recorded a portion with Quicktime. Then I imported the screen recording into iMovie and saved relevant images. I really need to find a better process.
As evidence of the power of tagging, you can see our group’s film reviews at https://ds106.ai/category/film-review/. Tags are a great way of organizing posts, and allow us to bring them together. We can see how we as a group see the idea of tech noir in various media.
One review found a Black Mirror episode dealing with transhumanism ideas, which may be utopian or dystopian depending on one’s point of view. This review also adds images and links, exercising the power of digital media. The post from My blog (not my blog) discusses a Black Mirror episode which touches on issues of surveillance, identity rights and terms of service, and the dystopian possibilities of a corporation claiming ownership over one’s life story. Another person looked at a 90s classic, The Matrix, noting its twisted reality and impressive effects. I wonder, if a term made up for the movie makes its way into the dictionary, is that an indication of living in the matrix? These posts show a good start to blogging, but we can push it further – more links, more media, more connections. Keep the reviews rolling!
The other day friend of ds106 Grant Potter noted that the tech noir adjacent theme of surveillance is a theme on the Criterion Channel this month. One of the films on their list is The Anderson Tapes, which conveniently happens to be available on tubitv. I was drawn to it because it’s directed by Sidney Lumet (whose book Making Movies is highly recommended to anyone interested in the topic), and finding out that it has Christopher Walken’s first steps sealed the deal.
We noted that there’s a sort of retro-futurism to tech noir. This is definitely retro, dated by the photo of Nixon on the government office wall. Those weird computerish bleeps and bloops in the soundtrack and trailer are supposed give a pseudo sci fi feel, I suppose. It’s a conventional heist film, except that the viewer isn’t the only one watching. From the Wikipedia entry:
Unwittingly, Anderson is under pervasive surveillance almost the entire operation, from the earliest planning to the execution. This includes a private detective hired by Werner to eavesdrop on his mistress Ingrid; the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, checking on a released drug dealer; the FBI, investigating Black activists and the interstate smuggling of antiques; and the IRS, which is after the mob boss who is financing the operation. The various surveilling Federal, state, and municipal agencies all have different missions (and targets), so none is able to “connect the dots” and anticipate the robbery.
Throughout the story we see cameras, screens, wires and recorders. Everything is watched, everything is recorded. A big difference from today is that everything is siloed. I guess they hadn’t figured out the power of data fusion back then. In the end, everything gets erased because most of it wasn’t exactly legal. Oh to live in such innocent times.
One of the underappreciated highlights though has to be Martin Balsam’s toupee.
Today’s Daily Create instructions were to visualize The Scream, but since I saw Down by Law way back when, “scream” suggests a different image. If I were smart I would have realized that someone must have made this GIF before, but as it is I just dove in and made my own. I used this video clip with Imgflip to make the base GIF, then opened it in Photoshop and deleted 3 of every 4 layers to bring the size down, then inserted the type layers and merged them with the image layers, rather tediously. There’s a better way to do that, I’m sure, and if I did this more often I might know and remember it. In any case, I made a thing, and that’s the whole point, isn’t it? #MakeArtDammit, as they say.
