Sketch 3

The Blackmail Sketch. Be nice to your computer or else....

Sketch 2

The above is the Self Defense sketch--a.k.a. Death By Automatic Window.

Final Storyboard 1

Our video is a series of sketches bound together to look like an old monster movie--"When Technology Attacks!"--complete with the dramatic music and the dripping letters font.

This is the board for the Mad Elevator Sketch.

--The Wombat

More Video Research

So now that we've narrowed our topic down, most of my earlier research is inapplicable. What I really think I need to be looking into now is AI (artificial intelligence), since our series of sketches revolves around the idea that the everyday technologies that we interact with have their own conciousness or sentience. We as humans want to make machines that can do things on their own to make our lives easier, but the more complex and effective they become, the more likely we are to fear them. I want to look at our ideas about AI, both realistic and fantastic.

The first thing I think about when I think about machines that can think is Isaac Asimov--more specifically his three laws of robotics. I'm posting the Wikipedia link giving a good overview of his concept here. They reveal something important about what we as humans want out of technology--servants that can't complain and can't hurt us. If we were to give the things we use everyday the ability to "think" so that they could interact with us, it would be a bit like making slaves. It's not unreasonable to imagine that things that we created to think the way we do might grow to be unsatisfied with that role and revolt.

Here is a link to a nice FAQ sort of thing regarding AI today--what it is, what it might be used for, and so on:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/

Here are the results of an informal survey (on somebody else's blog) regarding the fear of intelligent machines, and the dialogue in the comments afterwards is pretty interesting:

http://www.thinkartificial.org/web/the-fear-of-intelligent-machines-survey-results/

And lastly for now, here is an essay about human fear of intelligent machines in literature which I thought was interesting.

More later.

--The Wombat

Storyboarding: The (Very) Rough Drafts

Our group has narrowed our video topic down to everyday technology going bad as a result of (somehow) having a mind of its own. We want to put together a series of small sketches of varying length and complexity, but all dealing with the same overarching topic.

We went home from our last group meeting with the assignment of roughly sketching out our best ideas and putting the storyboards up here on our blogs. I don't have a scanner and tried to just photograph them with varying results......

The three sketches I've come up with are "Self Defense", in which a poor, abused car fights back via automatic window; "Elevator Music", in which an elevator traps its victims between floors and drives them mad with awful musical selections; and "Blackmail" in which a computer gets what it wants by threatening to send its owner's scandalous vacation pictures to all and sundry unless.....

--The Wombat

Video Brainstorming

We got our third assignment for ART 74 on Monday--we're to get into small groups (done) and make a 2-4 minute movie with the the general theme of technology gone wrong.

My group decided we'd all spend a day or two making list of things that we thought would be interesting and doing a bit of research on our favorites. We're all going to post our research links on our blogs so we can easily show them to each other in class today. Hopefully we'll be able to narrow down our focus and pick a topic.....

The three things that I think are most interesting as possible video topics (trying to keep in mind the actual feasibility of filming said ideas) are:

Nanotechnology, as applied to medicine--the idea of tiny little machines running around inside of our bloodstreams has so many possibilities, some wonderful and some horrible. It is a field that is being actively researched and developed--ittty bitty robots altering our bodies may not be that far off in the future.

One of the things I found was speculating about nanotech being used to rewrite DNA and reverse aging--sounds impossible, but could make for a great tech gone wrong video....

Anyhow, here are a couple of started links regarding the subject:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7288426.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3920685.stm

And a really long link to a google book that I'll shorten by doing this.

Next up on my list is robots/androids--human looking and acting machines. Japan has been doing a lot of work in this field with some amazing results. I think it would make a good video because people can be used as our props and there is a whole lot to explore--benefits, dangers, ethics, etc.

Here are my robot links:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,279383,00.html

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.bbd53bd17a5713678ea8bea533d92910.1bc1&show_article=1

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/robotics/2008-03-01-robots_N.htm

http://paro.jp/english/index.html

Definitely watch these two videos of the robot baby:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE2VCwYDjx0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyIHzCsbA_w

Lastly, I love the idea of the everyday stuff that we surround ourselves with getting a little bit more complicated and developing personalities of their own. I mean who doesn't argue with their computer, yell at their microwave, curse at their VCR, etc.? Now what if they talked back? Wouln't that be fun to watch?

I had been thinking it would be fun to do a scene in which a toaster was arguing with its human--turns out it has already been done (and in a Red Dwarf episode I've somehow never seen too!). But this is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZslRQvv5zM

http://www.the4cs.com/~corin/cse477/toaster/FAQ.shtml

Right, that's all for now folks,

--The Wombat

It begins....

Welcome to the witterings of a wee wombat. As wombats lack opposable thumbs and have difficulty typing, we are not traditionally associated with blogging. However, this particular wombat wants an art degree and therefore must do its best to muddle through a Digital Media Art class. Said class requires said blog and here we are......

The blog itself is actually the second class project, to be added to throughout the term. The first entry is meant to display the first class project--a bit of internet research meant to expose our general interests to our instructor. It was aptly enough entitled Expose Yourself (yes, it’s funny--now pull your mind out of the gutter and keep reading).

Part one of the project asked that we select our favorite Media Art project from the following list and give a brief explanation of what we liked about it:

https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/marktribe/new+media+art

I was most drawn to a project entitled Pedestrian by artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar in which a tiny black and white urban world with tiny people is projected down onto the floor of a gallery, scurrying about their business amongst the feet of the viewers. The still image provided strongly resembled the works of any of several famous photographers and the write-up states that this was intentional. The movements of the animated figures was carefully researched using models in special motion suits reminiscent of Marey’s and Muybridge’s motion studies in the late 1800’s. It’s just a charming idea--a tiny little animated city swarming about your feet, looking like Modernist photographs and moving as realistically as possible. However, I do wonder what happens if they are stepped upon....

https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Paul+Kaiser+and+Shelley+Eshkar

Part two of the project called for three things:

a) A news article reflecting a concern that we have about today’s social environment:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/31/online.internet.therapy.cbt/index.html

I chose this CNN feature about online psychotherapy on the basis that it instantly provoked me to a strong negative reaction. I do not care for the idea of online health care--especially for mental health. Isn’t the whole point of therapy that one talks to somebody about their issues? Our society seems to have this need to put everything online--banks, retail stores, public services, customer service, school, anything and everything. It strikes me as dehumanizing somehow.....or at the very least horribly impersonal.

b) A You Tube video that we found to be shocking or fascinating:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glUnzzoFUxg

Watching this creepy Japanese robot crawl across the floor was definitely fascinating, in a morbid sort of way. Throw in the artist in the nurse’s outfit, the maintenance hatch/butt, and the confused little Australian boys and we’ve got a winner....what a great piece of performance art.

c) A piece of technology being developed for the future that caught our eye:

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?Search=parviz&articleid=39094

These little contact lenses look just like something out of any number of my favorite science fiction movies, tv shows, and books. The idea of granting humans super-human vision through the use of technology (and tiny, unobtrusive technology at that) is highly appealing. I like it when I see fictional devices becoming reality--now if only they could start perfecting the holodeck....

Overall, my selections exposed an interest in “People, illusion, online life, scale, mechanised people, future super human components” to my teacher. We'll see where these interests take me over the course of the semester.

--The Wombat