direct address!

I'm taking a 1 unit seminar class on interactive media, from the dept. of Design and Media Arts (omg so much secks already). I thought it was going to be about media that facilitates human interaction, like the internets and whatnot, but it's actually about media -- that is interactive! Fancy that! I don't know why I'm being all sarcastic. Like, media that involves both the human and the system in mutual, simultaneous activity, in that the system responds to the human and the human likewise responds to the system. So we're talking about computers, video games, experiment art/installations, etc. It's really cool.

Ugh long intro. FROM THE READING:

[...] Another solution [for interactivity] that aimed at using the specific nature of television broadcasting was Oliver Hirschbiegel's Morderische Entscheidung - Unschalten erwunscht (1991), a murder mystery broadcast simultaneously on two television channels. The channels looked at the same events from different points of views (linked to the movements of the two protagonists), so the spectator was expected to zap constantly between the channels. His/her understanding of the story depended on this alternation (having access to two TV sets would have spoiled the idea).

omg badass. BADASS. IDK why I wrote up all that background stuff; you don't need to read it to know that this idea is BADASS.

In 1991, the French artist Alain Fleischer presented his "unfinished film" La femme au miroir (The Woman in the Mirror) in an exhibition called Les Arts Etonnants. A 16mm film was projected directly at the audience, who used little pocket mirrors to bounce it piece by piece to the screen. This extremely low-tech solution, obviously a late echo of the "expanded cinema" of the late 1960s, produced one of the most effective experiments in audience interactivity the author has experienced. It created an 'organic' mosaic-like image that was constantly fluctuating between order and chaos, shifting from representational to nearly abstract and back again. The continuing effort to align the mirrors correctly led to intensive interaction between anonymous audience memebers. Instead of trying to change the course of the narrative, the purpose was the reconstruct the 'lost' unity of the film, a goal that was possible to achieve only momentarily. The mode of interaction chosen by Fleischer was perfectly suited for a work that dealt with the fragility and instability of identity - obviously, not just of the protagonist, but of the spectator as well. The identity itself is a 'projection', always in flux and at risk of losing its integrity.

OMG SO MUCH SECKS. JUST SO MUCH. OMMMG AMAZING. I don't know wtf the ~obvious~ "expanded cinema" of the late 1960s is but ommmmmg if it's this amazing I want to. People are so rad.

The reading btw was written by the prof. teaching the class and he's really nice and it's all just super-cool.

sound off

LJ's "Writer's Block" question of the day:

It’s the Day of German Unity, marking the 1990 reunification of East and West Germany. In our current period of global instability, do you ever feel nostalgic for the seeming simplicity of the Cold War?

What the jesus is this bullshit? It's like something that would be on the Yahoo front page.

My Friday night while roomie (need a codename) goes off to a party with her boyfriend: sitting at my desk wearing a srsly giant red pizza t-shirt, rewatching s1 of Dexter on my laptop and peeling off the silver foil on gum wrappers and pasting them on an index card. I am board.

That's my cue to talk about my cerebral thoughts on Dexter. Geez this show is good. The opening sequence is one of the best ever on television, super brilliant. This show is so effortlessly engaging, and not in the way most serial killer media is (sick morbid interest). It's genuinely fun to watch. I love Rita; Julie Benz is so good. Michael C. Hall goes without saying. Deb is awesome. SUDDEN DOWNTURN: Doakes is like a textbook example of a good character ruined by a TERRIBLE ACTOR. That guy plays him like a fucking cartoon commercial, what the fuck is all that ridiculous posturing? It is so over the top, it can't be attributed to the character. It's the fucking actor. I HATE HIM.

A conversation I had with my mom today:
Mom: I met [person at church] the other day and she complimented you!
Me: What? I don't know who that person is.
Mom: She said she met you once when she was working at a church event and you offered to help her.
Me: That doesn't sound like something I would do.
LOL it really doesn't. Sorry, person at church, you got it all wrong.

I was pulling in the library (it's just kinda shelving in reverse, no matter how euphemismy it sounds) the other day and I saw a book called Circles Move In and I thought, "oh that's kind of clever, I like that kind of thing actually, because you can automatically finish that in your head as 'circles move in circles', and that's both a neat image and a neat wordplay thing. And since the phrasing is ambiguous, you can also read it as circles closing in on something or someone blahrrrrmaglelkewjr;ls", I went on this whole thing in my head. But it turned out that the book was actually called The Circles I Move In. What a cockblock. Anyway I wrote that all out because I want you to waste your life.

I'm thinking about being more adventurous in my clothes. Well 'adventurous' in that I'm thinking about wearing skirts in public and stuff. It would be a sizable difference for me though. Pretty scary stuff.