Just about finished, except for editing, checking that I’ve covered all bases, and drawing a new map.
May I present for your interest: “Mapping Designed Space – Fun with Architectural Narrative
Warning: There are a few photos so it may take a little bit longer to load.
You know what I’ve just discovered?
America is just one big Point/Counterpoint TV Show.
Today’s New York Times article on political affiliations based on numbers/paragraph types of people that I mentioned earlier has also been picked up by Crooked Timber, in a much more intellectual way admittedly, but from another viewpoint as well.
Throughout this election, I am sure this pattern will establish itself clearer than ever before, mainly because weblogs and such sites offer the public a chance to argue media presentations.
This is a good thing.
Because some of you may be interested in New Media, I have been posting on it here (you already know I’m obsessive, hence the focus) and I’m still working on writing up a piece that describes a spatial awareness journey of an area such as a mall, church, museum.
I’ve chosen a church as my subject, one I am both familiar with from my past, but one that I have visited infrequently over the past several decades. I am also seeing it with new eyes—not as a communicant, nor as a student of art history as I looked at it several years ago, but as a New Media student seeking the narrative structure within.
One of the things that I find influencing my study of the architectural structure as well as the story structure is some experience with Interactive Fiction. I found myself looking around, examining, describing things in an I/F manner. This happened once before when I was reading a short story that was fed to us in increments and described a man hiding from his wife within their home.
I’ll post it here as a link as soon as it’s semi-complete. (That means, finished as a first draft.)
This article in the New York Times is very interesting in that it offers a new division of American politics.
We’ve already seen the old Republican/Democrat platforms weather and fall apart, and the liberal/conservative division comes with a scale from 1 to 10. But this, a breakdown by numbers versus paragraph people–it’s ingenious! This quote is an example, and one that as a college student I have been long very aware of: “Academics have had such an impact on the Democratic donor base because there is less intellectual diversity in academia than in any other profession.”
Only problem for me is, that I’m kinda, sorta of both minds…
How odd; in fourteen year I’ve never seen but once before a hang glider cross the upper space of my backyard. And now, this morning, September 11th, and just a day or two after posting about the local airport referendum, and the crashes I have been to there.
Along with four other flyers today, I think of a young man laying crumpled, still strapped in to some contraption that he believed would fly. His fiance, his mother held at bay; his brother screaming, sobbing, trying to wake him up although he lay deep in the grasses of a field beyond the woodsline of the airport.
Another prayer today, for him as well. He will remain within my space of memory forever.
Close your eyes today and see what I see; two towers rising high into a New York autumn sky. Are those clouds? No, I see it now; it’s smoke that billows out so oddly out of place within the image. Parallel story line, a pentagon with four undamaged sides. A Pennsylvania field in flames with twisted metal sculpture unrecognizable at first glance–contemporary art is like that sometimes, but the deeper, ghastly meaning dawns with vision.
Just three of many paths that thousands took that day. All stories woven in, we find, and leading back to one.
On the upswing here; don’t have to read that essay I moaned about, e-academy got right back to me on the MINI TAB software download for Statistics, and it’s already in place. This alone–being able to do the Statistics homework at hours other than computer-lab availability–will help tremendously with the workload. The program itself comes at a cost of $900 (no, of course I wouldn’t pay that!) but the 5-month rental at $25.99 is well worth it to me.
The New Media course isn’t all fun and games, but there’s a good dose of both even in learning the technical end of creativity. Myst, The SIMS, Syberia, Rollercoaster Tycoon ( I do have Zoo Tycoon, but you don’t want to know how I fared with it. Let’s just say that it is in a regressed state of jungle, gone back to nature so to speak, and all the people who visited the zoo one day have mysteriously vanished), are just some of the materials that will be studied in the course. It made me dig out a virtual 3-D puzzle game I bought years ago called Bavarian Castle where you construct a castle then go through it to “explore the rooms and discover the secrets of the castle.” There’s also a hypertext novel by Michael Joyce, “Afternoon, A Story” that just sent me over the wall with Amazon.com. Yes; I pressed that “BUY NOW!” button. All I can say is that I qualified for free shipping.
Normally, the only games I play are Tai Pei, Slide Tiles, Scrabble, Freecell and Solitaire because they’re really used as relaxers between the bookkeeping, writing, and research which are the bulk of my computer use. Oh yes, and weblog-reading–but I consider that under the “research” category. For well over a year I “played with” an architectural program (okay, several) that I used to design an addition on our house. It was as much fun to me as any game; measuring, adding doors and windows, flying around the rooms from the top view to see where to add furniture and built-in cabinets, etc. Quite honestly though, the simplest, original program I started with was much more fun to use than the ones that included landscaping, bushes, and full color images.
New Media will be a fun excuse to spend some quality time on the computer. However, with the demands of this new workload, I may need to close my frameshop. Also, order more takeout dinners. All in the name of education, of course.
Uh-oh. Just dawned on me that my sphere of space has sound. Where does this fit into our theories of time and place?
Ssshh…listen….
Yep. It definitely includes sound. Cars go by, recognizable via memory imprint somewhere (I forgot) in my brain. A lawnmower. Not only that, the cars’ distance from me both coming and going are guessable as to their place. Do they leave my space when they are out of visual range, or auditory range? We know enough to measure sound in decibels–that’s how it’s tied into memory; still can hear my sister yelling at me forty years ago. The lawnmower goes by, pushed by my husband, which is okay, because he’s welcome in my space and knows it. Right now, he’s way down back. Five minutes ago, he was right by the shop, I even saw him.
New Media very often involves sound as well. Digitalized sound that complements the text and graphics to complete a story. In our last class we saw a brief film that was extremely powerful in emotion. Sound was necessary to hear the narrator tell the story, rather than using textual image. But another very important underlying sound that followed the drama, suited and adapted to its moods, was the background music.
Collaboration is obviously the key to New Media methods–if you want the very best of each element added in.
Found a place where for $25.99/5 mo. you can download a rented version of Mini-Tab, a program I need to use for my Statistics course. This sounded perfect. I went to register, first as a non-academic because it looked faster and easier. First a screen appeared that said it wasn’t valid. Fine. I went to register as a student, started filled out the form again, attached the copies of my student ID, and meanwhile, I get an e-mail notice with a password saying I’m registered (I suppose, as a non-academic.) Go again to download the software, and the site, supposedly one on the up and up, claims they don’t have that program. Fine. I finish filling out the student form and e-mail it out. Do you honestly think I’ll get an answer? And if so, don’t you just know it’s going to say that I can’t because I’m registered already as non-academic?
Then realized I’m supposed to have read an essay for New Media by Monday morning. There is no copy available online. I cannot order the book and get it by Monday. The libraries will be closed Sunday and I work all day tomorrow. (Why didn’t I see that part of the syllabus?) I did take out one of the movies to get a head start on that part, but saw it only halfway through before I had to run it back in on a two-day loan policy. Did purchase another hypertext novel online.
And, I have a Stat exam on Wednesday, for which again, I can’t do the hand homework and get in there when the computer lab is open. Meanwhile, I’ve gone to church and floated above it for an exercise in architectural space. God wasn’t home.
This isn’t working out very well. Oh, back to the good old days when homework could be done at home!
All the years they told you not to be afraid. Teased your own timidity with fear of your own shadow. Lies, because you need to be afraid.
Morning looks too peaceful, but you understand what’s going on. Shadows long and reaching from the sun. Twenty times reality, advancing from the east, they stretch across the lawn, claim what’s theirs no longer, what they’d stolen in the night. Specters of themselves, their blackness grey with morning light. Wearily, they weaken; you can watch them, they retreat. High sun at noon has all but killed them; bodies lying under bushes, trees, against a northern wall.
The day wears on, lost in sunlight confidence, unaware of plotting, planning, scheming to attack. Regrouping in the west, swelling back to power, the shadows infiltrate and slowly march back on the battlefield. At dusk another struggle, fierce and quicker with the seasons. General Sun directs his troops who vainly grip the earth, losing ground, withdrawing with the fight. The shadows are much stronger, backed by Moon, and daylight must surrender to its foe. The battle cry of whippoorwills rings out in sad refrain.
Sometime between the dusk and night, the shadows claim the earth.
Well I’ll say one thing, if I’da known that this was going to get me so involved, I’da had the foresight to arrange something like bonus points towards my grade with the professors for all these New Media posts this week alone. But then again, I’m not real vocal in class so this participation maybe makes up for it.
But a thought: On our next Exercise for class, we are to prepare a visual and textual picture of a building from a bird’s eye view. Just had this idea pop into my head that from a point of view within a room, windows are living images on the walls.
Cover your eyes if you’ve already given up on my little journey into space as reported in a few previous entries. Otherwise, follow me in (and simultaneously, out) this trail:
My description of the immediate space of my backyard, bordered by what was within my range of sight, was an attempt to confine a space that was manageable to use as an example. By the same token, I mentioned that the sky, for one, went up into infinity. What I didn’t mention, was while my house was behind me, what went beyond that, as well as beyond the treelines and into my neighbor’s space was infinity as well.
From here we can go to a post at The Great Lettuce Head, “Scales and Image,” regarding The Aleph, a story by Jorges Luis Borges that describes a small sphere that contains pretty much the universe.
Admittedly, this is a difficult one to swallow. However, in trying to comprehend at least a glimmer of this mystery, which is indeed never going to be totally conceivable, I can at least relate it in a small way to this post on the space of my backyard. While this small space can be imagined on a flat plane, it can also be imagined as a spherical world, and along with the sky and peripheral vision, it can also be extended downward into the earth. The center or core of this space would be where the viewer is sitting, and could be imagined as extending into the sphere we call the earth. After all, the infinity of the universe is just as much a part of my backyard, as my backyard is a part of the universe.
Going back to The Great Lettuce Head with this: “…just as Schopenhauer tells us that the Will expresses itself entire in every man and woman . . . if one were to believe Tennyson, everything would be–everything. . . “
It reminds me of a post I wrote in a more poetic mood that said this: “Because in truth, with all that you see, there’s so much more beyond it that it’s everything yet awesomely nothing at all.”
So maybe, little bites at a time, I’m coming to taste just a tiny ort of the feast of knowledge that’s offered us.
ADDENDUM: A tune that Willie sings, with lyrics by Mike Newbury of Supergrass (which kind of explains it), called “Condition” was going through my mind the entire time I wrote this post, so I broke down and add it here:
“I pushed my soul in a deep dark hole,
And then I followed it in,
I watched myself crawling out,
As I was crawling in,”
A spider is bungee jumping in front of my monitor. (I’m in the shop, working of course.)
In my “Placeholder” post below, I mention a book by Douglas Hofstadter called Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
Actually, it’s not just merely on my wish list, but already in the cart and ready to press that little “BUY NOW” button when I am either in the money or feeling frisky. Because there are a couple books and items of interest in there that come to about $150.
But as my mama learned me, gotta finish what’s on my plate before I get any dessert.
Shoot. Someone must have put a jackpot of quarters into my slot. I’ve posted more this month than I have in the past two months I think.
The above statement is in fact an example of the topic of this post.
My tendency (usually ass-backwards in all areas of life) has been to not apply old principles to new, but just the opposite. Likewise, I apply new values or discoveries to the old, such as invention to nature.
Example: I would not describe a car running like a cheetah, but would easily come up with a cloud formation moving with the speed of a Ferrari.
This perhaps explains my post below wherein I apply the principles of New Media to my backyard space, which in effect, has been here billions of years. I’m not sure what this means, (again, trying to apply the new discoveries to the old in self-analysis) but it may be deduced that I in effect have a tendency to cling to the old, and attempt to comprehend the new by updating the old to exist under the new guidelines.
Man, this thinking too much is gonna land me within a lush-lawned, anchor-fenced institution some day.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology