Weekly Writing
Week 7
Pigmalion's Ugly Season, Jacoby Scatterwhite
A narrative about someone healing by accepting all the parts of themself’.
In Jacoby Scatterwhite’s work “Pygmalion’s Ugly Season”, he disensembled his body into a world lying between joints and bones, and then “redefining” the belief of Christianity, justifying the sexual orientation of homosexuality.
By the time the two performers in the screen started dancing with feminist movement, along with the animated human models perfoming voguing dance, an iconic dance of the gay community, with sophisticated arm-rolling movement with an emphasis on body curve, softness and feminism, I feel like I can related with him more. His search of self-identity through the physical performance of feministic act is a kind of self-expression of the part of him that may not be accepted by the social standard, and the sexuality he distributes through the voguing is a way of outlet, or a way of healing.
Life Without Matter, Rebecca Allen
Like the project I mentioned above, this project by Rebecca Allen is also about self-exploration. It set up a scenario of a meterial-less world, and we see our inner figure in the mirror. By saying "inner figure", it means we are disgarding our biological characteristics and understanding us based on our spiritual identity.
I think the set up scenario is very important because it helps the audience to understand the purpose of this project and get immersed into the story more easily. I also like the idea that "the spiritual identity of a human being can not only be classified as male, female, but also animal." Sometimes when we disregard gender and sexual orientation, we see our other characteristics, our temper, our painpoint, our vulnerabilities. Then we will realize that gender or sexual orientation is just one of the very ordinary characteristics that tells something about you on the spiritua level.
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Since the beginning of my memory, I’ve been living in Shanghai, China.
As a local Shanghainese, I witnessed the transformation of the Shanghai city, from a less developed town-ish region into an international city of business and trading, as well as the economic center of China. Because of the economic development of Shanghai, the style, structure and layout of the city also changed in the past 10 years. I remember when I was little, I would see street vendors selling local cuisines on the sides of streets. These days, it is no longer common. The town vibe has been replaced by skyscrapers in the daytime and neon lights in the nighttime.
One of the iconic spot in Shanghai is the Nanjing Road. Over the past ten year, however the city changed, this road has never changed. The large physical ad boards that hangs on the side of the street building are vintage and iconic. It adopts the style of the Hong Kong streets in the 90s, yet it blends well with the french-styled towers in the background, the building that were built during the period of french concession.
I thought Shanghai was such a unique city, that no other cities would look like that, until I went to Saigon for traveling.
There are a lot of motorbikes in Saigon. When you were walking on the street, you can hear the “vrooming” of motors and vehicles a lot. It reminded me of the Shanghai in my early memories, when the street was busy, crowded and noisy.
However, I was amazed when I saw the same physical ad boards that are hung on the sides of the streets. It was as if I suddenly traveled back to the Nanjing road in Shanghai. Looking at those ad boards makes me homesick.
Week 3
World-building
For it to be effective, the virtual reality experience must seem real, to be real for its players or users. The immersion experience must trick the brain into thinking it’s in a world that contains multiple dimensions and multiple aspects. Thus, a great deal of virtual world-building must take place in order for this to happen.
For example, in the video Telling Stories in Spaces Without Saying Anything Out Loud , the presenter took the example of the classic American TV show The Office. In the show, there is no one introducing the scene. However, viewers immediately know it is an office area by the layout of the environment(piles of documents), and the sense of boredom in the environment(through plain color and the layout, which is making me anxious).
2. The Real Body in a VR Space
The players, either as characters or interacting with virtual characters, must navigate through different spaces while immersing themselves in the storyline. For example, the interactive film, Hunger in Los Angeles, made by writer and director Nonny de la Peña, projects the embodied visitor into different spaces within LA.
You walk through the streets of LA while every turn of your head shows you a different view. The film incorporates the storyline of an accident on a normal day: what do you do when you see someone in trouble? This immersive journalism method projects VR storytelling into a new sphere: with you, as the audience, right there when the breaking news happens.
Week 2
I get a sense of nervousness and uncanniness while experiencing the Virtual Leonardo Da Vinci.
I think I get feeling mainly because of three reasons. First, the woman background voice sounds very unhuman, which gives me a feeling of being in a department or a computer system. Also, there is long pause between each lines. Basically it feels like it’s a machine speaking.
I think it results to the argument from artist Hito Steyerl. She explored the “Bubble Vision” in VR: The audience are obviously at the central of the artwork, but wherever you look, the audience are not present(or you cannot see/feel one).
Second, what the floating man is wearing makes me very uncomfortable. At first, I was just wondering why he wasn’t wearing diving glasses. As he floated closer, my nervousness grew, since he looked like a soldier that is wearing a military-used vest.
After doing research on the artwork, I’m sure that he works for the military. This artwork is originally from Leonardo Da Vinci’s invention of an underwater weapon. However, he eventually tossed his documentation and burried it in the deep sea, “concluding that human brings are too evil to handle such a destructive technology”.
Third, I get a bit frustrated because there is very little I can do in this virtual environment. It seems like an immersive space, but I feel like my ability is limited. It starts when I tried to move around. I am confined in this little dune at the bottom of the sea, not being able to float or swim to the surface. Besides, when the screen started playing, I could only gain a few of the information, since the video’s color was adjusted(or maybe that’s how it should look like under sea).
Week 1
By saying VR is additive, I argue based on Murry’s point that VR “is still in its early stage of development” and is quite dependent on the forms of existing and mature media and technologies, for example, film and television. If we say that film is a visual additive to newspaper and radio, and television is an interactive additive to film (by adding a remote control that users can click on), then virtual reality is an additive to television with the function of sharing. On one hand, with several people present in a shared spatial area, they are sharing the same experience simultaneously. On the other hand, virtual reality can serve as a documentation tool by putting one’s experience into a set-up space. By experiencing the space, users are living the life of another person and expanding the experience of their lives.
VR also falls in terms of being an expressive form. Firstly, as mentioned in the speech What I Learned By Spending A Day in Virtual Reality, the VR equipment not only allows users to share but also provides a way of more natural human expression. This is achieved by embodying hand gestures, body position, and even facial expressions in the virtual space. This is a more natural way of communication compared to traditional digital communication, where we share information mainly by text. In this scenario, physical communication is absent.
Murry explained the four principles and I quote: “When we stop thinking of the computer as a multimedia telephone link, we can identify its four principal properties, which separately and collectively make it a powerful vehicle for literary creation. Digital environments are procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic”.
I think it will be a great idea to embody the procedural part into VR. By saying procedural, it refers to the computer’s ability to identify users’ inputted information and make a reaction accordingly. We can see when we are playing video games when there is a dialogue going on, sometimes users can maje different responses, which lead to different endings. For VR applications, it can be a procedural generation of a maze while users are walking in a VR space.