I saw Bryan Mathers’ Trading Card Remix on Mastodon:
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.
How’s that for an unexpected coincidence?
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:
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 didnât work, so I looked up some directions. They werenât 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. Iâm not sure if it says collage, but it conveys a version of the story. Iâm 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.
Weâre working with a them of Tech Noir in ds106 this semester, and as I mentioned before, we canât really expect the class to know what weâre talking about, so Jim and I recorded a half-hour discussion which hopefully brings some clarity. We discuss meanings, themes and history, where we are and where we may want to go.
We have a list of Tech Noir/Cyberpunk media to help people get familiar. Is there anything that should be added?
Jim had talked about doing a Tech Noir themed course many years ago, and now weâre looking to revisit the idea. It feels appropriate to the times. I canât expect everyone to be an aficionado of the genre though, so Iâm thinking about ways to be expansive with it, to offer people more ways to connect. Incorporating cyberpunk is an obvious one. I also want to add Technopoly to bring a philosophical lens to the idea.
Continue reading
I was intrigued by Bryan Alexanderâs book club proposal to read the Project 2025 document. Unfortunately I have too many summer projects competing for time and attention to participate meaningfully. But in the spirit of AI106 I have taken passages from the document and fed them to AI song generator Udio to make death metal tracks.
Restoring Limits
[Verse]
Ruling class, they slash and tear, they take away our rights
Centralize their power, far from American sights
Supra-national treaties bind us, never let us be
In the grip of bureaucrats, we lose our sovereignty
[Chorus]
Restoring limits, bring back the fight
Accountability, letâs make it right
Reclaiming Our Rights
[Verse]
Rulers climbing high, they canât hear our cries
Treaties bind our hands, as the Constitution dies
Career pawns, unseen, they tighten the chains
Power games they play, and weâre the ones who pay
[Chorus]
Slash through the lies, expose their deceit
Tear down the walls, take back our streets
No backing down, weâll stand and weâll fight
United weâll rise, reclaiming our rights
The prompt for these was:
Properly considered, restoring fiscal limits and constitutional accountability to the federal government is a continuation of restoring national sovereignty to the American people. In foreign affairs, global strategy, federal budgeting and policymaking, the same pattern emerges again and again. Ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them. They centralize power up and away from the American people: to supra-national treaties and organizations, to left-wing âexperts,â to sight-unseen all-or-nothing legislating, to the unelected career bureaucrats of the Administrative State, heavy metal, death metal,
Iâm not actually a death metal aficionado so I canât give it a proper musical or lyrical critique. My guess is the site is mapping words and phrases to a statistical model of death metal lyrics to come up with the song, so Iâm not surprised that âslash and tearâ made it through. I think the songs get at a sense of the passage, while perhaps giving it more extreme coloration.
Challenge the Power
[Verse]
Restore our thinking to thrive
Establish truth, let it revive
No more interestsâ clash, weâll drive
Strength in analysis, weâll arrive
[Chorus]
Challenge the power, break the flood
Independent minds, through the blood
Challenge the power, stand and fight
Free the thought, into the night
Revive the Mind
[Verse]
Restore the mind, eradicate the lie
Build a fortress, let the truth arise
Break the chains that bind, dismantle the guise
Return to the essence, intelligence revived
[Chorus]
Through the fire, through the night
Restore the truth, the guiding light
Break through walls, shatter might
In this battle, wisdomâs flight
This prompt was:
Restore DIE critical thinking. Establish mechanisms to restore analytic integrity and return to true intelligence-driven operations. The next Administration should eliminate the conflict of interest in the current customer-based model (in which the customer is always right) by enforcing time-tested procedures that guarantee independent analysis, even if it means challenging policymakersâ assumptions. The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Securityâs leadership role should be expanded to include providing analytic top-line views and improve DIE transparency by highlighting diverging views., heavy metal, death metal,
I was wondering how it would interpret DIE â as an acronym or the word die? But given the context maybe it didnât know what to do with the word. Or maybe the whole passage just doesnât compute. It looks like Udio picked up some words and ran off in its own direction.
Torch of Integrity
[Verse]
The USAGMâs a story, a tale we missed,
Of faith and hope in shadows kissed.
A chance to shine, in worldâs eyes wide,
Lost in the dark, where ideals hide.
[Chorus]
Burn the torch of honest days,
Journalistic light must blaze.
Shadows of Promise
[Verse]
The promise was bright as the sun
But shadows darken, and now itâs gone
Unbiased truth we failed to keep
A chance lost deep, in silence we weep
[Chorus]
Lost opportunity, our ideals are torn
In the darkness, will we ever be reborn?
The passage used here was:
The USAGM is a story of a lost opportunity both to help restore the worldâs confidence in the promise and ideals of America and to set a high mark for journalistic integrity and unbiased reporting. , heavy metal, gothic metal,
These stayed a little more focused, probably because I only used one sentence as a prompt. So far, my intuitive feeling is that it is molding the inputs on a metal model. How would the character change if I made it dream pop or big band jazz? But I donât think I want to go for an ironic tone here. A cut-up poetry approach might yield some interesting results. I could extract evocative or provocative phrases and put them together as prompts or use them as lyrics and see what the system does with them.
None of this gives any insight into Project 2025 or its relevance to education, but it is something of a pseudo-creative outlet.
Yesterday’s Daily Create involved using one of the Photofunia effects to put text in rust. As usual, I did the most obvious thing and made a GIF from a verse of My My, Hey Hey. Maybe that’s only obvious to people of a certain demographic though. But since nothing exceeds like excess, I decided to do the whole song. I’m not sure if it was worth the effort. I like the idea in concept, but in practice it’s probably as tedious to watch as it was to make. A kinetic typography approach might have worked better, but definitely would have been a lot more work.
Photofunia has many interesting effects, some of which have shown up in Daily Creates before. What interests me is not so much the effects in themselves, but how they can be used as building blocks, and contribute to a bigger story. Not unlike our experiments in AI106 – we played with generative applications to make stuff, but where the course really succeeded was in what we made out of that stuff. They give you this but you make it that, to paraphrase a song of the past.