. Spinning .

From: Comments on Posting, “Reality & New Media: Late Autumn Morning”

“No more New Media darn it – I like the first picture better.”

Posted by: Neha at October 30, 2004 09:41 AM

But Neha, the two are inextricably one…

Admittedly, I do tend to go off the deep end on the flavor of the day, but that is something that is both me (obsessive) and an innoculation of age that pretends to either ignore the passage of time, or becomes so very aware of it by circumstances that it is finally, finally given the allocation of itself to understand it.

Our lives are ruled by time–it is the one constant and the one thing we can do nothing to halt its forward movement–we die, yet it continues beyond us–except to maneuver the paths within it to reach the spaces it provides in opportunity. To understand space and time, is to understand life. And more; to viably believe in the possibility of something outside of physical life.

How does New Media fit in? It is an attempt to control space and time using technological knowledge. Sound exists, yet only by using audio equipment can we hold onto it in its original accuracy–rather than being dependent upon memory. A camera captures a moment; very cliché, and yet the truth. It is not in its original form, it is not it–the moment itself–yet it is a better representation in its efforts to replicate the moment. How else can we combine the layers of sound, visuals and movement but via technology? As the natural world is the basis for new media efforts–digitalizing what exists and dreaming past it to create–the learning of the new media concepts can serve to teach a new way of looking at what is around us, touchable, smellable, tastable, as well as seen and heard.

So there. Your comment prompted yet another post on my most current obsession. I still write, but with more than text in mind. The images are sharper; the morning is dissected with clumsy fingers, but to include those things I might–in a space I lived in just two months ago–have missed. I have let so many haywagons pass by in my lifetime; spent the time in spaces where perhaps I should not have been. I have learned to use what’s left to me to learn what it’s all about. Which wagons, I suppose, to hop aboard and ride at least halfway into the sunset.

Yes, I know; I’ve been going on and on about the New Media course I’m taking–would your rather hear about Statistics? I am evidently a person of the moment, wolfing down what is served at the dinner table, embracing the chef to wheedle out the recipe, returning yet again an hour earlier every day with knife and fork in hand, gluttonous and greedy.

But as I’ve said before, the process of the learning goes beyond the main course. The appetizer just prepares one’s palate for the meat. There are the residuals of calories that last with one in layers built up within the body, sometimes with luck burned off in energy spent in greater things. The carbs provide the sugar highs that push us further into exploration that we might have slept through had we not partaken of dessert.

The daily single meal of knowledge, then, stays with us forever; becomes a part of us that cannot be seen or separated out. Fulfilling at the hour of feeding, yet satisfying only for a space in time before the appetite returns to drive us back to sit and eat again.

Perhaps because the winter threatens, perhaps because what’s served is fine cuisine, but I find this: I’m very hungry.

New dryer works no better than the old; still finishes its own life cycle hours, sometimes days, sooner than I’m ready to take the clothes out. The propane heater in the frameshop went out; petulant because I shoved a chair at it, and insisting that I get down on my hands and knees in supplication to hold the pilot light button down for five minutes before it would relent, relight.

Things, like people, need their time. Require your own involvement in their space if they’re neglected. The heater took me five minutes out of my own time and space to spend instead within its own. I was not here then, but there at that time in my life. Those five minutes are irreplaceable, irretrievable because they’re gone into the past. My path within that span of time and space was changed. The dryer too, will now require my own time spent in ironing because the clothes have sat in tumbled pile and grown wrinkles in that time–the same time segment I spent elsewhere. But the ironing will require a different path into a space and time I hadn’t planned on being in and on, sometime in the future.

Funny, isn’t it?

This is your brain:

(Credit: Neuroanatomy)

http://www.neuroanatomy.hpg.ig.com.br/brain6.htm

This is your brain on New Media: http://newtek.com/products/lightwave/product/highlights2.html#NewLayerTools
(Credit: Newtek)

Off on another track…

And yet, a perfect example of where I’m heading in the previous post; the mind working as a powerful computer network of software programs.

After all the whining I’ve done about learning Algebra and now, Statistics, my English professor made the remark that English students seem to do well in these subjects regardless (of their stubbornness and rebellion against the non-creative aspects?).

But there may be a reason: The writer of words has a deep love and respect for words, for language, how everything fits together, the formulas for perfection in revealing a story, an idea put in the simplest yet most complex arrangement of narrative. Statistics is in fact an explication of an idea, manipulated to show any possible viewpoint of a given set of facts. It’s creativity with numbers–set in a narrative structure (often ten steps to reach a conclusion), that builds up to a story.

Seeing some of the software used in New Media production in yesterday’s class, there is an awesome amount of technical situations to work through to produce what we end up seeing as a combined audio visual “story.” Is the mind somehow trying its best to replicate the workings of itself?

I used to wonder how a creative mind can handle the technical side of writing. Maybe it’s because the technical side is the epitome of creativity.