My Visit to the Hirshhorn Museum

This was my first time to experience such a strange, pleasant, smart, and artistic experience. The Visual Music exhibition at the Hirshhorn was a unique exhibit that was based on the link between the two phenomena of sound and sight. The show explored the phenomenon of the Synaesthesia (the unity of the senses in terms of synthesis of the arts. Arts include photography, paintings, digital media, installations, light art, and videos. Synaesthesia basically is the induction of a sensory experience through the other and then both interact to elicit a high state of consciousness, and music is the most powerful source to elicit such a sensory reaction. The sound is experienced through an image and an image is experienced through a sound as artistic experience. There was a lot of famous artists' work that was joined with certain pieces of music that evoked amazing feelings and different visceral responses, such as Georgia O'keeffe, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Fischinger, and Jennifer Steincamp. One of the most beautiful sections was the experimental film and light show where they displayed work by Oskar Fischinger and the whitney brothers. They switched the form of the static rigid abstract paintings into a new world of movement and motion with the use of film and music. For example, Fischinger's piece of the visual motifs that resemble sound motifs, where you see the lines and colored shapes and circles move with vibrant music to give a feeling of unity and action. At the end, the show was amazing and I'm glad that I was able to go to it on its last day in D.C.

Alan Kay "User Interface, A Personal View"

Based on the reading of Alan Kay " User interface, A personal View" I realized that multimedia is a whole new world of art, science, technology, and communication. Multimedia is not just a simple tool as most people think. Multimedia can be misinterpreted because it is usually associated with many communication tools, but it's not a tool. Multimedia is a concept process tool, we use it to express and deliver this concept visually, intellectually, and typographically. Multimedia is a far more complex medium than just a simple tool. There is a clear and obvious relationship between the form of multimedia and the message it's delivering. Through a combination of tools one can communicate his message, and be able to enhance his own experience, a process that enriches one's experience. The way this medium operates allows the individual the opportunity to think, collaborate, communicate, achieve, and be creative. It also allows users to reason, solve problems and form distinctive relationships between objects and what they symbolize. Multimedia as a practice existed decades ago and can appear as a single form or as a collaboration of forms interacting together. Because multimedia emphasizes on the concept of collaboration and communication, it is supposed to be usable and accessible to all people men or women, adults or children, americans and non americans. The "Personal Computer" or the laptop as Kay mentioned is a good example of a mediated, accessible, and usable tool.

Janet Murray "Agency"

Janet Murray is a professional designer in computer interactivity especially for games. One of her main theories is the idea of the agency behind the pleasures that the audience, or as she called it the “interactor”, gets when participating in games. The agency is the power that takes proper actions towards the audience’s options. As Murray states, this agency does not exist similarly in all situations or games because it does not depend on the action of interactivity or participation only, but also depends on the idea of multiple decisions and choices that can be made between the creator and interactor. One of the main forms of agency is spatial navigation, which allows the player to navigate through virtual landscapes. This kind of virtual space adds more pleasurable and aesthetic feeling to the interactor because it is not real so there are no limits and there is more freedom where in real life that could be physically not possible, but virtually is.

Two of the spatial navigation examples are the maze and the rhizome. The maze is based of the Greek myth in which brave Theseus kills the beast inside the maze and gets the treasure located in the center of the maze. The relation between the agency and the maze is that the maze is a path in a virtual space that leads to multiple choices the player should make to get various outcomes. The rhizome is a form of hypertext that can be never ending which continues in the form of a tube that has one path, but multiple decisions. It can be frustrating but at the same time comforting because the participants of the game’s story will not disappear by any chance. Murray gives examples on how hypertext and images in games can add suspense and complexity to the feeling of gaming. Another advantage of the computer navigational space is the pleasure of the journey story and problem solving where the journey and its participants are examples of real world people and the many possible solutions for impossible situations. So basically it is the pleasure of navigation and finding the solutions at the same time. Murray states that games involve in our real lives where they can be pretty dramatic. Games are not just about winning, but also losing because games reflect our real world with its hopelessness and weakness, which adds more excitement and an example for this is the earliest form of gaming, the agon between competitors. Murray explains how the interactor and the environment are the main elements in a game which she called “procedural authorship” in which the interactor controls the rules of the game.

Hi Fall05 Fresh New Start

This is a new blog for my multimedia 400. I will be posting my new summaries for Fall 05 in it. My old summaries are in another blog in movable type under the same username and has the summaries of Spring 05 Multimedia 200.