Notes

- GIFS
- Images
- YouTube videos
- These are all elements that can be found in an interface
- Questions enhance curiosity
- Use of many repeated images -- captures viewers' attention and leads the eyes to where the creator intends to look at
- You can find out a lot about a person through the interfaces they create
- miniature universes inside each one which can tell the audience what a person values, is interested in, etc. -- reminds me of the "filter bubble"
- information is filtered to try to enhance interactions on a page (ex. FaceBook)
- What is the role of a background?
- How do the elements guide movement?
- Offers a personal outlook on the world -- we can tell a lot about a person and what they are interested in based on these interfaces
- Elaborate further on these elements
- How do different backgrounds feel like and change the way we move through these spaces? Focus on the experience.
- Describe these relationships between the elements and the interface itself

Marshall Mcluhan: The Medium is the Message:

- Some media are cool and some are hot
Uses media to understand what we do and to understand the world that we live in
- Best known for his work in electronic media (radio and television) which he sees as the extension of our nervous system
- Professor of English at UofT, director of the center of culture and technology
- Does this leave any room for criticism of the medium?
- The environment affects everyone
- Printed word is structured and it doesn't matter what you print as long as you follow this structure
-TV does not make people illiterate but it forms an awareness and creates strange effects on people
- Only beginning to know what those effects are

- Literacy as a form of awareness is highly specialist and objective
- TV is subjective, totally involving
- Thinks radio people are far more literate than TV people
- Reading is a game of guessing

Spaces, Shapes, and Breaking Linearity - 10/04/2022

- Interfaces are essentially sculptures because we are building them
- These are "flat sculptures"
- Space is the most important concern
- A medium we should pay attention to

-Stephen Wolfram: Has he discovered a new fundamental theory of physics?

- Famous, brilliant, and influential mathematician who has since the 80's pioneered the development and application of computational thinking
- He is responsible for many discoveries
- What am I actually good at doing"
- Big complicated thing and trying to drill down the essential elements of it
- When you break things down, what are they? And how do you describe them?
- Opposite of a linguist
- Circular process
- A thing that will eventually happen in the world
- Once you describe it, it is easier to have more of it
- In some sense, this process is a relationship between what us as humans are interested in and how we figure them out
- Finding a language of what humans feel is important
- The task of the artist (in this case, a mathematician) is finding a way to describe the things we care about
- The interface is our language, it is something very familiar to us
- It is a language we are already immersed in
- Parallels between magic and the creation of language to describe a reality
- Known in the popular culture for many things -- made Wolfram Alpha
- "Arrival" - Movie
- The extraterrestrials bring a language so humans and aliens can interact

What is an image?
- Machine (photographic camera) shows us a new world
- A world in which machines erase human life
- Capturing the slow takeover of machines during the 20th century
- New world is emerging

- What is the world that the interface is showing us???
- How is the interface showing us the world? What information is the interface showing us?

- Many signals in an interface, multi-stimulating place
- Words are broken into pieces to create a new world
- Using a language to describe reality that is so confusing and diverse -- in a way, predictable
- Fundamental way in which interfaces changed the world
- Photography is now insufficient when describing the world

- Space is a fundamental category of reality
- Made up of small networks that can be quite basic or quite complex as well

- Stephen Wolfram's attempt to describe the world
- Graphics that describe physical realities
- Arbitrary representation of this new reality that we are living in

- Spaces as poetic spaces

- The Knight's Tour
- Sequence of moves a knight on a chessboard such that the knight visits every square exactly once
- Common problem given to computer science students
- Dates back to the 9th century AD
- Shows that there are many historical examples of artists woking with spaces as poetic devices
- Jacques Roubaud
Literature pointelle
- Creating physical spaces in their books
- Move from one chapter to another and then jump from place to place
- Experiencing the space in a particular way
- For sale: baby shoes, never worn
- Six-word story by Ernest Hemmingway
- How do we read a story from that starting point?
- 6 spaces to convey a story
- Opens possibilities
- Previous actions affect future ones

- An ongoing collage that we participate in every day which forms our knowledge -- this is how we learn and create stories
- We live in networks -- networks of knowledge

-
Video on Mathematicians
- Helps us understand the very nature of human existence
- Proved in 1959 that the transition happens like a face transitions
- This is a magic critical moment that physicists call a face transition that creates the network

- The ways that trees and nature interact is exactly the same as how networks work online
- Has roots in nature
- Even in books, these mathematical networks exist

- Take this language and turn it into an object -- a micro-network, micro-world, or a micro-universe of its own
- Create a magine -- a process of appropriation of a new technical system by society and the development of new modes of psychic and collective individuation based on this technical system
- Inventing a word for the class for us to understand

- Create a magine that creates a short story about the shoes
- Start with the 6 words and figure out where to go from there

- What is the world that the interface is showing us???
- How is the interface showing us the world? What information is the interface showing us?

For sale: baby shoes never worn.

Option 1: Placed behind yellow tape, parents handcuffed.

Option 2: Truth is, she was never pregnant

Option 3: Baby wrapped in cloth, going bankrupt

I don't want to mess up.
I am sorry if I do.
I just want to be the best
For you, it is always you.

I want to be the best,
Life partner, mother, and best friend.
I am sorry they didn't live.
This is all my fault... why?

Maybe, we can change the narrative
We can give another family joy
These shoes meant for our baby,
Can be given to another soul.
Rest in peace our sweet angel.
I am sorry I failed you.

15 years old, I met you
Only knew you as an acquaintance, nothing more.
Our friend circles merged with time.
We grew closer through band exec,
COVID resulted in calls over HouseParty,
We stayed up late together daily,
We joked about everything and anything.

A movie night, watching Princess Mononoke,
You fell asleep on the call.
I felt butterflies fill my chest
Not noticing my own feelings then.
I brushed it off as drowsiness
Only for my feelings to grow
It only grew as time passed

Summer passed, leaves began to fall.
Senior year is commencing, new beginnings,
Perhaps, a beginning starting with us.
During a pandemic, everything seems unknown.
You gave me a wonderful surprise,
A dinner by Western, eating Thai Tai.
From then on, life became you.

I started to learn about you,
Every passing thought was about you,
You became my life, I knew.

I could picture our futures together,
An old married couple growing old
That is all I ever wanted.
In a year, dreams came true
We live together, the same roof.

Now we ponder about whatever's ahead.
Our family: a couple of kids
Perhaps, we will also have pets.
As long as I have you,
It doesn't matter what comes next.

In a few years, we'll be
Married, it will be the start
Of parenthood, a little one growing.
I want to be the best.
I will be a good mother
I do not want to fail
The biological task I was given.

I am so sorry I failed

- Start with a search

- Search for shoes and look at the list of sites related to the term and write down every website address that we visit in a minute of browsing

Websites:
- How we move from place to place is a fundamental condition of today
- Everything is a few clicks away
- Make a flow chart in the shape of the "microverses" diagram by Stephen Wolfram
- Make it so that we have to navigate multiple places to find the answer
- Tell a story in this space -- six sites
- have to go from one place to another to receive all the information
- ex. reading the news
- sometimes we need to browse several websites to get the answer

- Making sense of space by making connections
- These trajectories are fundamental elements in how we gain knowledge of the world
- Hyperlink navigations
- completely changed our mental habits of learning and what used to be linear learning now becomes multidimensional
- Constantly looking at these trajectories to know who we are
- How can we create new stories and narratives
- it is different when all the information is in one place vs. having to find the answers ourselves

- Navigation is fundamental

Magines
- Way of connecting ideas
- Series of relationships
- Focusing on the MOVEMENT
- Distribute your story across the spaces and figure out how to move from place to place
- Navigation gives us the potential to tell new kinds of stories
- Hyperlinks are very powerful tools
- Questions we have will always be connected to other ideas

Beautiful movement?
- Hard to tell with other art forms

Epochality of Technics
- People who do not have technical expertise can use interfaces
- Ted Nelson - one of the earliest pioneers of interface design in the 50s
- They are good at writing code but do not have much information on image design
_ Interfaces are now in the hands of designers, engineers, etc.

-Be mindful of spaces

- The Unfinished Swan Walkthrough Game
- provides an experience of space

Magic in the 21st century - next week

Magines - 10/11/2022

Video Games - 10/25/2022

Guest Speakers
- UBC Game Development Club
- Digital art is very critical to games
- Sometimes, games become popular because of the artwork
- Don't Starve
- Interfaces
- All the ways the user can interact with the program
- Can be a menu, a touchscreen, etc.
- Aesthetic experiences of video games

- Creating interfaces without being able to code
- A dominant language
- The Internet is dominating us
- Everything is an abstraction
- How do we communicate in this language? How do we structure information?

Games
- Ori and the Blind Forest
- Light interface, the background is very dark but characters are still visible
- Very artistic, made by a small team

- Don't Starve Together
- Doodle aesthetic
- Not as many lighting effects
- Everything was drawn on paper
- Kept the style for everything
- Works well with the theme

- The Unfinished Swan
- Programming with how to figure out how things like splashes look are known as technical art
- Need to look at 3D models and know exactly how the splashes would reveal details

Steps in Game Development:
- Talking about what experiences we like
- What actions a person can perform
- Before you have an idea of the game, it would be impossible to decide what to do

-

Learn to Command The Spells of The English Language with Laurel Airica

Ego translates to “I am” in Latin, but is actually referring to the opposite
- Part of us that is not us
- Egocentric to geocentric
Evolution of man from homo sapiens (mental, logical man) to homo amor (man of love)

Words are the obstacles
In the way of what we are trying to say

Articulating the ineffable
- Words that have no words
- Finding the words ourselves to fill the blank
Meta, trans, supra = Above
Hedonism, pleasure
Erotic mystics --> Not reduced to sexual but used in every context

Reawakening this impulse to live provocatively
- Who cares if we end up in Hell?
- Fighting for our feelings

Pretending there is scarcity where there is an abundance of ecstasy

Sun in sky needs the “o” – big circle in the sky
Son needs “u” – part of you
From worshipping the son, man grew to worship the son
Rearranging letters to create new meanings

Theocracy – the union of personal soul vs. theocrasy ('c' vs. 's')

Mythopoetic lens
Storytelling and poetry reading as a means of self-understanding

Inteliki – Aristotle
An actuality vs the potentiality

Visionary trips, powerful

Getting in the flow – gets better with iterations
Getting lost in the techniques of creating poetry at first
Can’t just make a poem, needs to have a feeling and a transmission
Cannot feel like a project

Pyrion – island in Macedonia, home of Muses
Unpredictable delight

It’s not that if you use iambic pentameter, you are a great poet
It is just practice
Tap into the feeling and meaning of what you want to say in order for it to be great
Very strong when the sound and lyrics match

Overlooked the importance of language when it comes to shaping our mind and the world – can apply to interfaces
Everything she is saying is about English but it applies to interfaces
- Languages have this power

The interface is the operating system
We know that this is a YouTube video so there are a certain number of expectations we have
It will play a video, it has comments, the layout etc.

All of these meanings contaminate each other
Language is manipulated to create a meaning
Language reflects and propogates a certain culture

The interface shows a coalition of several languages
It becomes a new space, a new home
This language modifies our mental habits
In this case, she talks about how the English language is intentionally modified that keeps us in a particular mindset

She talks about the church
Propagated by the Ancient Church as a tool of mind control

Language keeps us in the past
Echoes to keep us in a space

In every language, it is possible to find moments of light
Can be magic

Breaks the language to find its secrets of it and uses these secrets to communicate

The English language has become so plain
These secrets have been covered because everything is just about communicating
Our minds work in very simplistic ways

Octavio Paz – Mexican Poet
“Between What I See and What I Say”
Definition of poetry
Our inability to communicate experiences
Profound gap in communication
Language is insufficient
Poetry is playing with language to make our experiences clear
The only way we can do this is continually playing with language
Poetry is concerned with the impossibility of communication
You will never be able to capture something fully
The constant pursuit of finding a way to communicate better
Celebrating this impossibility and this freedom

What is the point of the artist statement?
Very restrictive
What we are writing cannot fully encapsulate what is shown in the artwork
Game where we pretend we know what is happening but still do it because things like our grades depend on it

Breaking meaning so a word doesn’t have a fixed meaning anymore
Ex. Tree – we see something specific
Destabilizing the meaning of words in a non-direct relationship
The reductive use of language reduces us as human beings

The metaphor of things (ex. Photoshop uses old school practices) keeps the language in the past
Books were the operating system that changed humanity in the 1600’s
Printing press
The paper lost its central role when the interface took over as the operating system

“The medium is the message”
Books created a structure of awareness
Changes our brain
Our memory starts working differently

Linearity
There is a beginning and an end
Linear sequence of events

The book created a sense of linearity in everything we do
With the book, we had truth (ex. Bible – word of God)

The digital interface negates linearity
Writing in Microsoft is not the same as a typewriter
No copy and paste – this broke the linearity of writing
Profound change in how we write

Photography was thought of the be drawings because people did not understand what it was
People did not have the framework to understand what it was
It took time to realize that it is something different

Frederico Campagna “The End of the World(s)”
Reality varies with each era of the world
What we referred to as the structure of awareness earlier
Shift in structure of awareness because reality is changing
If we change common sense, reality will change
For the philosopher, magic is what is excluded from this structure
Reality expands to include these new things (magic)
Any object can have an infinite amount of information
Practices of world making

Anarchism – trapping

Manifestos
Do not last because there is a pressure to make immediate change
Not getting rid of the past but just expanding on our reality to something we did not see before

Futurism – creating broken realities
Used the reality around them to create these – sounds

Dadaism – breaking rules that existed at the time
How do we break the visual environment? How can we think about the connections between us and the world? How do we describe the new world and open up to new possibilities?
We still use conventions of art that were created in the past
Part of what people did is still alive
They opened up the world so that we can see it differently – experimentation

We are moving in a spiral
Encountering the same issues but now, with added information
Magic exists in the world, we just need to find it

Look through the magic page on the website