back logged blogs

the following is a group of blogs that were created for MS149 and were never posted onlide due to technical issues:

IPod Video, and the potential for revolution

Since the announcement of the new video IPod on October 12th the apple stock has been turbulent but sales are strong. The impact of the product has not been fully felt by the public. The capabilities of this new media extent far further then just as a portable movie viewer for airplane flights. There is a feature that allows the image and sound to be played through a television. This feature allows the owner to travel with the IPod and share video with friends and family. This also means that the days of bringing one’s DVD collection with them are over. There is no longer a worry that a disk will get scratched or that you will leave it behind in the player. It also means that there are future capabilities for larger scale media piracy. It is possible to load over 100 feature films onto the new IPod. That it a lot of copyright infringement. I am looking forward to checking out the new technology and am greatly anticipating the coming months of sales as their stock hopefully rises higher.

TiVo the pirate of the T.V. cabinet

Since there was a VCR there have been people recording television for later enjoyment. With this comes many capabilities for the viewer to copy and reuse the footage. The viewer becomes in control of the content and this leads to the capabilities or redistribution and re-editing. As time and technology has progressed so have ways in which the viewer has taken control. With the creation of TiVo there has been a flux in the content and in the amount of digital media accessible to the home viewer. This leads to a flux in the amount of digitally pirated material that is available on the internet. This has only recently come to my attention when I was watching the downloaded television show, MTV’s Daria. As the show started I thought nothing of opening QuickTime and pressing space bar. But when it was tiem fo the first commercial break, instead of just having it fade back, I was greeted by the bopping sound of a TiVo. The illegal file had been acquired through a TiVo system. I think that this technology is being used for more then the intended use. It makes me happy that if it weren’t for this new technology then there would not be so much material available for the average consumer.

Eye TY is for ME

As a media studies Major my job as a student has been greatly eased by new technologies that are being unveiled and implemented. At the beginning of my sophomore year I decided that if I was going to be a successful media studies major and filmmaker then I would have to invest in a device that took a video signal and digitized it. I did the research and purchased an Eye TV system. This miraculous piece of technology has solved so many problems and has proved to be invaluable through my college career. Not only am I able to straight up copy DVD’s in real time, I am also able to take a television signal and convert my computer into an TiVo. I am able to create movies and copy’s of television shows that I can have on a disk a half hour after it airs. This has given me the ability to record the OC and a half hour later be able to watch it with 5 girls over at Scripps commercial free. Currently I have all of the episodes that have been aired for season two of LOST. And although I could download them from the apple store the next day, I take certain pride I being able to create my own copy’s and have them that night.

With a new month comes a new WIRED magazine and a new slew of questions and ideas. While flipping through the wired I came across the term WEBLOGISTAN. It is defined as: “The Iranian blogosphere, where activists go to vent anonymously in the face of Iran’s oppressive regime. Weblogistan is now so vast that Persian is the fourth most widely used language on the blogs.” This term is new and it leaves me with questions. In theory a person could be traces through their blog name and ISP. Although Blogs seem relatively anonymous, the government is still watching. If there is a person who the government might see as a dangerous radical who is posting in weblogistan that person might have to deal with real world repercussions if the government finds it necessary to investigate them.


Is a blog a Web-based application or a statistic file?


Nanotubes have been hinted at for a while and not until recently has this new technology come into available use. The practical applications of nanotubes are far to numerous to yet be seen. This technology is a glimps of the future and allows us to get one bit closer to the next step, the carbon age of buckytubes. What does this mean for new media, well imagine computers smaller faster, cheaper, more durable, screens and systems integrated so closely that the systems are entirely self contained and fully integrated, and that is just the beginning, Not only will computer technology continue to grow, there will be the availability of a new sources of material and power and this makes way for potential new media.



Blog on blogging:

This class was a pleasure attending. I have a new understanding of the digital world of the internet and have a better concept of what the internet is really capable of. When we were first assigned to keep a blog for the class, I was skeptical of the whole BLOG thing. As I read and listened to class discussion and attended lectures I began to gain a greater respect for the blog. As we progresses through the weeks I began to understand the purpose and after I attended a lecture on blogging that Professor Fitzpatrick held, I understood.
Before this class I had never visited a blog and never wanted to, but now that the class is over, I actively search for them for information. I was blog phobic but now I am blog friendly.

Come to Daddy

After reading the section in “Connected” about the music video “Come To Daddy” by Aphex Twin I was compelled to see the music video. The video was like just as described in the reading. It was a satanic wasteland where all of the little children had the same face. The music video was more then just a miniature horror film, it is a disorienting and disconnected world where there is very little left that has not been incorporated by the drones. The last bit of innocence that is left is the elderly woman and her dog. The reading does not discuss the minute and ten seconds of silence in the beginning of the video. This beginning suspense is what leads to the furiousness of the video. The beginning is of equal importance to the end where the daemon is demanding the woman’s soul because it creates a tension that the ending stretches and tightens.

The Cybracero program

While reading, THE VIRTUAL BARRIO @ THE OTHER FRONTIER by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, I was reminded of an artist, Alex Rivera, who came into a media studies class last semester ( Media and Migration, taught by Jessie Learner) and talked with us about his cyber-art. Through his art he comments of border issues between the U.S. and Mexico and he deals with the immigration problems with his ideas of the Cybracero program. Like in our reading he is trying to “find innovative grassroots applications to new technologies and link all community centers through the net.” He has set up a fake web-site devoted to the program in which only the labor is imported to the United States. The workers themselves are left at home in Mexico, as they Tele-commute to American farms over the high-speed Internet. On the website there is a five minute movie devoted to the explanation of the Cybrecero program. This type of new media and new internet concepts serve as an example of a context that is being shown of the new push for Mexican and Chicano digital art.

For more information or to understand what I am trying to say please visit:

www.cybracero.com

Virtual Africans and the Technology of Empowerment

On Thursday I went to a lecture entitled “Virtual Africans and the Technology of Empowerment” it was given by Chika Anyanwu and during the talk he discussed the fact that he wanted to create a digital database that would encompass all the information and story’s about the African people. Working with the Labyrinth group and with the Annenberg school of communication, he wants to develop a database that is accessible by all people from their own home systems and who’s information is controlled by the African people themselves. The information will be extrapolated from existing databases search engines and African related websites. He suggested that people would navigate the sight by constructing databodies or profiles for the transfer and sharing of information.
By doing this he hopes to achieve some sort of a hold in the Internet for the African People and Nation. He spoke on the fact that the white man rules the Internet and through the colonialism of technology through the Internet. He said that in Africa has accepted the idea of foreign ideologies. Media, literature, educational techniques, even a shift away from old languages and levitation towards English. He wants to capture a history of Africa because the memory of Africa continues to change because the society continues to shift. He wishes to be free from colonialism but because of the oppressive white and English nature of the internet, he still feels that the African nation is still chained.
One part I didn’t understand was when he talked about idea that there is now a new digitized virtual Diaspora who were the new age aliens.

Database Media, So What!

I believe that I have discovered a use for the idea of a database of media. Not only does it help in the creation of a soft cinema with the computer generated narrative form it is also a database for filmmakers to acquire footage. This year I am enrolled in two separate media production courses, Advanced Editing, and Documentary Fact and Fiction. For each class I have needed to create a film composed of found footage. In each class I was not allowed to use mainstream Hollywood movies or television shows for material I was forced to rely on the Internet for the bulk of my material. This is when I came across the Prelinger archives. The archive “contains approximately 1 petabyte of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.” The files and movies that I was able to access and download proved to be extremely useful for both of my classes.
This site mission and goal is intended to help collect, compile and preserve artifacts of our culture, which are reflections of our heritage. “Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.”


http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger

Special effects are cool

Last week I attended a lecture in the Technology In Entertainment series. It was a Lecture by David Hardberger who is a modern day special effects artist who works in real special effects as well as digital. His lecture was based around the idea that even though we are using Computer Generated Graphics in most movies to get shots that we would not normally obtain, that there is still room on the movie set for old fashion special effects. He emphasized the fact that computer effects are getting better and better and the rendering times are getting shorter but also that there is still a need for a practical special effects artist in many of today’s big films, such as “Lord of The Rings”, and “Star Wars.” He specialized in miniature destructions. When there is a movie where there needed to be massive destruction, such as “Dante’s Peak” he is called in to supervise and assist. According to him, the fact that digital effects area becoming so widely used is a good thing and that the popularity is still growing and that the potentials still have not been fully tapped. He is glad that the computer is taking many of the long tedious hours out of set building. While at the same time, the new digital wave is leaving havoc behind with countless jobs being lost to efficiency. There is now only room in Hollywood for a handful of key special effects supervisors and although every once and a while there is still a major motion picture that is heavily reliant on models, most are moving away from the real and getting into the digital.

I asked David afterwards if he had any tips for special effects with fire and he said that if I liked fire that I should try rubber cement and that create a great fuse and it burns quickly.

iTunes + Quicktime = The Dynamic Vi-Duo

As we continue to push forward in the fields of music and entertainment technology, new fields are being created and new markets are forming around products. Recently the good people at Apple have released a new version of their popular music application, iTunes 6.0. In this new version they have begun to integrate video into the application so that a movie may be accessed and displayed just like any song in your Library. With the new version of Quicktime 7.0.3 Pro, the user now has the opportunity to export movies through quick time and mount them into the iTunes application. On the website, www.apple.com, it says, “Watch iTunes do for video what it did for music. Now that the iTunes Music Store offers more than 2,000 music videos and select TV shows along with 2 million songs (and counting),” This is a large step for the intermingling of different mediums of media technology. We are at the cusp of an era of digitalization, and what we choose to digitize and mediate and how we go about doing it is important. For my generation there have always been music videos and it was just a matter of time before they became fully digitally integrated. The music is there and now we are just beginning to see what can come out of the personal video integration.

www.apple.com
www.quicktime.com