Workshops: Kuhn

Workshop Flkr

2010-01-30T16:09:00.000-08:00

Cool VuVox Rolling

2010-01-30T16:03:00.000-08:00

10 minute VuVox

2010-01-30T14:07:00.001-08:00

Another Sample VuVox

2010-01-30T10:44:00.001-08:00

Demo with The Onion

2010-01-30T09:10:00.000-08:00

Demo with Rolling Stone

2010-01-30T09:07:00.001-08:00

YouTube Workshop

2009-09-18T08:05:00.001-07:00

Text Gone Wild Workshop

2009-02-13T09:37:00.000-08:00

Virginia Kuhn
Associate Director
Institute for Multimedia Literacy
vkuhn@cinema.usc.edu

Faculty Workshop
013 February 2009
Taper Hall Labs

Text Gone Wild:
Words in Digital Environments

While much of the hype surrounding digital media centers on its ability to deploy images - both still and moving - as well as sound, this workshop examines the role of text in spaces where it is easily manipulated and therefore able to do more than the standard 12pt Times New Roman static presentation. Looking specifically at Buzzword, Wordle and several blogging platforms, participants will see the ways in which size, proximity, color and font impact textual meaning. Participants will then spend some hands-on time experimenting with modes of text of their own.

Wordle: application for producing word clouds: http://www.wordle.net/

Sophie (open source e-platform) http://sophieproject.org/

HELVETICA: Full length film about typeface, font, graphic design: http://www.helveticafilm.com/

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods:
Fonts: http://www.1001freefonts.com/
http://www.dafont.com/

Generally fonts for the page are serif since the little tails help the reader by linking the letters (Baskerville, Garamond and Times) while sans serif is recommended for computer screens because their thick lines and rounded edges are better shown in pixels (Helvetica, Futura).

Kerning and Leading: these are typesetting functions. Most people use the spacing of typewriters (single or double spacing) but MS Word allows you to adjust leading (space between lines of text) as well as the kerning (space between letters and words).

CRAP: Contrast Repetition Alignment Proximity
Since browsers often distort pages, the way you choose font size and style becomes relational. For instance: This looks big.

This looks big. BUT NOW, LESS SO.

Repurposing:
http://www.spreeder.com/
This is a tool for speed-reading but it can be used in other ways.

Buzzword: a “beta” Adobe application that allows easy manipulation of text:

Interesting new book:
Mediapedia: Creative Tools and Techniques for Camera, Computer, and Beyond (Knack, 2008: ISBN-13: 978-1599214016)

Exercises:
Word Cloud using Wordle
Surf to Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/). Type in or copy and paste a paragraph or so of text and create! You can then randomize or set font size, style, color.

Kerning using MS Word:
Open MS Word.
Type in any sentence.
Highlight the sentence.
Go to Format>Font>Character Spacing.
In the dialog box, mess around with Character Spacing—which will adjust the spacing between letters. Make a phrase and “condense” it to 1.4 points. Then expand the same sample by 2.0 points.
(Exercise courtesy of Mediapedia, p. 110)

BANANARCHY

2008-09-24T17:41:00.001-07:00

Timeline for BANARCHY!

Sep 24th:
Work on Content. Web space purchased. Working title BANANARCHY. Researching. Obtaining Flash. Copyright information.
Oct 1st:
Learning flash, more content (approx 30%)
Oct 8th:
Homepage done, hopefully menu/sidebar animation as well, begin figuring out how to do the drag and drop animals
Oct 15th:
Most of content obtained, decide on final title, purchase domain name. Photoshopping and prepping images for use.
Oct 22nd:
More sessions with flash expert? Compile all factoids.
Oct 29th:
All content obtained, skeleton of website completed. Keep working on interactive maps with drag and drop animals, etc
Nov 5th:
Keep working on interactive maps with drag and drop animals, etc
Nov 12th:
Working
Nov 19th:
Working
Nov 26th:
Beta version ready to go
Dec 3rd:
Present

IML 440 Thesis Proposals

2008-09-04T10:45:00.000-07:00

Since I'm a little behind the curve, I figured I would throw these up here for some feedback. So here are the three ideas I'm currently bouncing around.

1. An interactive map of water quality in Southern California
“I am developing an application for the compilation of water quality, weather and surf conditions in an interactive, easy-to-use map. I hope to use this application to promote public awareness of beach water quality and encourage people to surf and swim in safe and fun locations.”

Pros

1. Possible collaboration with Heal the Bay, Surfrider, and/or Surfline
2. Possible development of an iPhone/iPod Touch application to update current water quality status (see Beach Report Card on Heal the Bay website)
3. Possible incorporation of surf reports and weather conditions
4. Vehicle for educating public (especially surfing population) about beach closures and bacteria limit violations.
5. HUGE potential for daily use and application beyond the IML
6. Practical application and widespread use

Cons

7. Difficulty of learning/applying iPhone SDK software
8. Would require continual (daily) maintenance if it were to continue/be used by the general public
9. Might require a mirror interface on a website in order to make it accessible to non-iPhone users.

2. An interactive map of the rainforest in Costa Rica
“I am developing an interactive, easy-to-use map detailing the current status of the rainforests of Costa Rica. Costa Rica is one of the most species-rich locations of plants and animals on the planet, and habitat loss is a constant threat. I hope to educate people on the causes and effects of deforestation in order to promote awareness and increase conservation.”

Pros

1. Could use aerial/satellite images of the rainforest in Costa Rica in the past and present to show the conservation status
2. Could highlight the problem of encroaching banana and pineapple plantations and make the user more aware of the current situation
3. Could provide interesting details and factoids about the species found in certain areas and the ideal habitat size they need – concentrating on threatened or endangered species.

Cons

4. Possible difficulty of obtaining enough data – in the form of maps, GPS points, and species habitat size
5. Possible difficulty of identifying the causes of particular deforestation events (ex: if 1980 there was a huge patch of forest that disappeared in the satellite photo taken in 1985, how do I know what happened to it?)

3. An interactive map of bike racks in the Los Angeles metropolitan area
“I am developing an application for the compilation of bike rack locations in the metropolitan Los Angeles area in an interactive, easy-to-use map. I hope to solve the problem of finding safe bicycle parking in LA and encourage commuters to ride bikes.”

Pros

1. Possible collaboration with organizations like LA Bike Paths, LADOT, LA Bicycle Coalition
2. Practical application and widespread use
3. Ability to users to contribute content
4. Personally, when I use my bike to get from Point A to Point B, I worry about where I will safely park my bike while I am at Point B. LADOT and Metro indicate whether bike racks are present or not at major transit centers and rail stations, but I would like to extend bike rack locations to other destinations in metro LA, as well as putting them in an easy to access interactive map form.

Cons

5. Difficulty of learning/applying iPhone SDK software
6. Would require continual maintenance/updates if it were to continue/be used by the general public
7. Would probably require creation of a mirror interface on a website in order to make it accessible to non-iPhone users

Welcome!

2008-08-27T15:32:00.000-07:00

Welcome to 440! We anticipate a great academic year. This blog will be populated by you and for you, and we have left a trail from last year's senior class, should the posts prove helpful.

CONGRATS, SENIORS!!!!

2008-05-06T21:38:00.000-07:00

Dear IML Honors in Multimedia Scholarship Program Inaugural Cohort,

In short, you guys rock! Seriously, you have been the most incredible pioneers and have done the IML proud; give yourselves a pat (or several) on the back.

But while you are patting, please stay tuned to the details we need to tidy, in order to finalize your accomplishment/s. See items as follows (and email from Janein, no doubt, will solidify this post):

- sashes: come and sign for yours if you have not yet received it. they are yours to keep but we saved them for you commencement so they didn't get lost!

- google spread sheet for thesis parameters/tagging data: be sure to have this completed; if there is a question, email vkuhn@usc.edu (and copy anne@freewaves.org for good measure) and we will handle as needed.

- project transfer/submission: there is a large hard drive devoted to senior thesis projects to house them (at their optimized best) until the hard coding. Kuhn's 444 have uploaded or are in the process of, Bray's 444 can do so until commencement. see VK or Mike Jones for more info

- open house for you and your parents/families/friends is set for Sat, 5/17 noon to 3 pm. we will put an invite together to send you soon (by 5/7 or so)

Nice Work Y'all!

Veeeeeeeeeeee

Filmic Interview Schedule with DJ// WED 4/30

2008-04-28T13:49:00.000-07:00

And here is Wednesday's (4/30) schedule:

10:00 am Olivia Everett

10:30 am Ana Shepherd

11:00 am Andy Hogan

Noon: Cameron Parkins

1:00 pm Cynthia LeFevre

2:30 pm Sara Epperson

3:00 pm Mike Allison

3:30 pm Freddie Wong

4:00 pm Evan Bregman

4:30 pm Leanne Joyce

5:00 pm Matt Jung

5:30 pm Isomi Miake-Lye

6:00 pm Erik Gieszelmann

Filmic Interview Schedule with DJ// TUES

2008-04-28T12:23:00.000-07:00

Hi Gang--
As promised, here is the interview schedule which DJ will conduct with you on Tues for my class, Wed for Anne's. He will do all of them in the podcasting room (which is also the sound room, next to Mike Jones's office). Again, MY CLASS MEETS 5/6 @ 5 PM Blue Lab and no formal meeting tomorrow (4/29):

TUES 4/29

11:00 am Tiffany Ikeda

12:30 pm Rachel Kerry

3:00 pm Jessica Janner

3:30 pm Xing Chen

4:00 pm Matt Lee

4:30 pm Ash Hsieh

5:00 pm Matt Gerhardt

5:30 pm Sonia Seetharaman

6:00 pm John Visclosky

6:30 pm Pat Skelly

7:00 pm Alexis Lindquist

7:30 pm Dustin Johnson

8:00 pm Beth Nakasone

cleaning up your thesis project...

2008-04-28T07:51:00.001-07:00

Hey gang. Please go over your projects with the following advice in mind. Dave Lopez looked at each and gave me this list of common issues. We will discuss the final upload/date this week and Dave will be available to meet with you if you have issues/concerns.

(Tues class, remember we don't formally meet this week but you see DJ for your appointed interview--schedule to be posted soon--and then we meet next Tuesday, May 6, at 5 pm).

Also, I shared a Google spread sheet with everyone which is set up to take your thesis parameter sentences. A few of you have completed it already but it needs to befinished by the end of this week. (If you didn't get it, ping me--they were shared with the USC addresses from our roster.)

(from Dave)
Optimization is basically making sure your project isn’t huge.

IMAGES:
-Some websites have images which don't look as sharp as they can. Try using JPGs

-Some Flash projects have imported large images which are driving the SWF's size up.

From what I've seen, there shouldn't be a single Flash project over 2 MB.

-In Photoshop, open your source images, resize them to the appropriate size and do a File > Save for Web. Press the 4-Up tab and you'll be able to compare different compressions, choose the one that gives you the

best size to quality ratio.

-You don't want something pixellated anywhere (unless that's part of your design)

-You don't want a thumbnail that's over 500 Kb

VIDEO:
-This is the biggest resource hog in projects. H.264 and AAC compression is great, but not always enough.

-Videos should be resized (dimension-wise) to the appropriate size before being imported or streamed into projects

-Sometimes it is possible to successfully upscale a video in your software, further reducing your project's size.

-720x480 video is way too big for anything online (read: no one does that....anywhere). 400x300 is usually good.

-The biggest determining factor in all video compression is bitrate. You'll have to play with this number to get good results.

SOUND:
-MP3s at 48,000 Khz and 128 kbps sound great, but so do MP3s at 44,100 Khz and 96 kbps

-If its an interview or narration, play with smaller numbers to see how well things sound, i.e.: 32,000 Khz and 80 kbps, Mono

TYPOS:
-Read over your project, then ask a friend to read over your project since when you have worked so hard with these screens, you tend to read right over typos. A second set of eyes helps to catch these.

FONTS:
-Some projects had inconsistent fonts. For instance certain fonts in captions on video were different than fonts used in the video's

shell project

-A few projects had fonts that were pixellated. That can be fixed by simply outputting those images of text at slightly higher quality.

TITLE/ACTION SAFE:
-Some video projects had issues with chyrons (captions) not being set to Title or Action Safe

-Make sure your captions, titles, chyrons, etc in videos always fall within these boundaries otherwise, they will be cut off when the project is transferred in any way to a TV.

-Avid, Final Cut, After Effects, Motion and all other NLEs have toggles for Title/Action Safe boundaries

CET: Online Presence

2008-04-23T10:19:00.001-07:00

Posting Projects

2008-04-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

From Willy: Instructions on posting your project to your IML account:

Students can show their work publically using the root of their ftp space. The url they will use is:
http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/portfolios/ (i.e. http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/portfolios/gparedes/)

As far as FTP Settings, the instructions are on the wiki ( https://imlwiki.usc.edu:8443/display/student/FTP+Server+Instrutions)

1. Open your FTP client (i.e. Fetch)
2. Type ftps server address (imlftp.usc.edu)
3. Set the Connect Using to FTP with TLS/SSL
4. Type your UserName and Password (same as IML portal)
5. Done

Schedule for Students for Thesis Show Week

2008-03-29T16:51:00.001-07:00

Student Schedule for Thesis Show Week

Monday, 4/14 3:30-6:30 pm
Sonia Seetharaman
Casey Levental
Matt Lee
Rachel Kerry
Andy Hogan
Matt Jung
Cameron Parkins

Tuesday, 4/15 3:30-6:30 pm
Leanna Joyce
Jessica Janner
Tiffany Ikeda
Alexis Lindquist
Ashley Hsieh
Adam Church

Wednesday, 4/16 3:30-6:30 pm
Isomi Miake-Lye
Mike Allinson
Xing Chen
Dustin Johnson
Patrick Skelly

Thursday, 4/17 3:30-6:30 pm
Matt Gehardt
Beth Nakasone (after her class)
Paul Gee
Evan Bregman
Erik Gieszelmann

Thesis Show Program

2008-03-26T20:04:00.000-07:00

Hi Gang--
Here is a drafty-version of the program. Please let me know if there are errors and we will fix anything that needs it before the designer is finished.

-V

Thesis Show Program
28 senior projects; 3 previews of the class of 2009: 31 projects total.

1. Simplifying Complexity//Complicating Simplicity

The projects in this group reveal the ways in which digital technology, like any technology--writing, for instance--is inherently ambivalent as Andrew Feenberg argues in his seminal Critical Theory of Technology; as such, it can be used to illuminate or to obfuscate concepts with equal ease: in other words, technology can be deployed to help us to understand things more clearly, or it can muddy our thinking about ideas that have become naturalized and taken for granted. The ability to deploy sound and image (in addition to text) clarifies complex ideas by demonstrating their features textually, imagistically and aurally, particularly in terms of scientific inquiry; at the same time, the ability to harness and "speak" in the language of audio and video allows the sort of sustained critical engagement with a highly mediated world full of ubiquitous advertising and entertainment. Using these images against themselves, one begins to see nuances that are not apparent when these fast-moving messages flood our environment.

In The Role of Toxin-Antitoxin Pairs in Cell Death: Cell Survival in Escherichia coli, Elizabeth Nakasone animates the interaction of these toxin anti-toxin pairs in e-coli bacteria, showing the implications of programmed cell death for antibiotic resistance, for instance, or tumor growth in cancerous tissue. Complex biological systems are better understood when one can read text, see visuals, and hear an explanation. Moreover, in keeping with the idea of clarification, Nakasone created a "clean" web site to house her information in order to keep the focus on the science, using the encyclopedia nature of the computer which allows her to add as much information as she is able, while also pointing viewers to further sources. A fifty page thesis paper simply could not contain this work.

Xing Chen also exploits the digital space and computer processing in order to explain brain research on laboratory mice with which she works; in Cerebellar Conditioning in Mice we find a clearly constructed web site which adds film clips of research protocols and procedures to textual and oral explanations. Chen wants to show viewers the way in which
"learning takes place as cerebellar connections are modified over numerous trials, and changes in proteins of the deep nuclei of the cerebellum are studies to compare effects of learning in trained mice with the absence of learning in control animals." Not only does Chen explain such complex articulation by using multiple registers (text, sound and image), she also explains the research protocols themelves. In this way, she not only shows her knowledge of the content of neuro-scientific research, she gives a meta level view of the field itself.

At the other end of the spectrum, Alexis Lindquist explores the language of the musical score in cinema, noting the often subliminal ways in which music is used to impose not only mood but interpretation of the visuals of film. Her project The Language We Don't Talk About: Hearing Time & Place in Film Scores consists of a visually stark web site which foregrounds sound, along with and a visual/textual companion site that lends theoretical and scholarly weight to her argument, Lindquist even suggests that music in the world has actually changed based on common views of the way they should sound, notions brought about by popular films.

Dustin Johnson believes in the need for an approach endeavors toward a cinematic theory linked more directly to the practices of cinematography. Rather than simply some vague intuition guiding cinematic choices, in Cinematography Articulated, Johnson shows cinematography to be a language that is internalized by the technical staff on film sets. In this way he troubles the seemingly simple and arbitrary nature of aspects of color, grain, exposure, latitude, contrast, composition, shot, angle, depth of field, all subject to technological limits and possibilities, and show how they constitute and fully articulated semiotic system.

At the IML we believe in disrupting binaries almost as quickly as we identify them in order to retain reflexivity. As such, we close this section with a hybrid effort that troubles the simplicity/complexity binary established here: Andrew Hogan's Multiperspectival Examination of Alexander the Great prevents us from ever seeing this historic figure in simple terms. "Sadly, the course of time has left us only fragments of any primary sources" of his life, Hogan notes, surviving secondary sources are wildly divergent in their "facts." Therefore, Hogan contends, the only way to really understand Alexander is to confront these sources "in concert"; Hogan reveals this complexity by narrowing his focus to multiple accounts of a single event: the decisive Battle of Gaugamela. He hopes his viewers can mount an informed view of this intriguing figure.

A core text for the Honors program is Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. In it, Janet Murray describes four essential properties of digital environments. They are: procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. The first two, she claims, contribute to the vaguely defined word "interactive" while the remaining two contribute to the notion of an "immersive" component. These projects use the appropriate characteristics of the digital to serve their rhetorical purposes, demonstrating the type of critical engagement championed at the IML.

2. Just Gaming?

In their 2006 working paper “The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind,” USC Associate Professor Douglas Thomas and Annenberg Visiting Scholar John Seely Brown used the term “conceptual blending” to describe the ways in which players of massively multiplayer online games are able to take into account multiple worlds simultaneously, and in so doing, find “new and unusual opportunities for learning.” One key to the success of these games, the authors argue, is that they are eminently social, but perhaps more importantly, the rich social fabric of the games “blurs many of the boundaries that we tend to expect such as the distinction between the physical and the virtual, the difference between player and avatar, and the distinction between work and play.” The essay is part of a growing body of work that highlights the potential of games for learning and educational practices, a project undertaken by several Honors Program students who use interactive game structures in order encourage an engaged response to serious issues.

Pierson Clair’s Regulating National Security allows user to test the national security of the United States by asking, “Can you rearrange the budgets to create a better security structure that keeps the United States as is or more secure?” Clair notes that the project maps “over 400 points of national security, including major cities, ports, airports, defense installations and other key points of interest” and allows users to shift finances among 16 divisions within five federal departments. Using the Google Maps API, Clair has created a fascinating interactive experience that demonstrates some of the challenges in crafting a national security system.

Sara Epperson considers consumerism in her interactive game Dream Weddings! In this case, users move through a series of scenarios typical of contemporary wedding planning, and thanks to the game’s power, they quickly become immersed in the need to buy the best. It’s your wedding, after all! At the end of the game, users get the bill. Epperson stays well within the realm of non-fiction here, but the results are startling, and prompt users to consider the ways in which the game of spending aligns with the reality of spending. “Because of their involvement with the game, users are implicated in the practice of consumerism,” Epperson explains. She adds that she hopes that users “walk away having learned about wedding culture,” and that become invested in trying “to reconcile the cognitive dissonance the game, a coy reflection of reality, will inflict.”

While some students have used games to immerse users in complex ideas, others use games reflexively, as a means to interrogate the very structure of the gaming experience. Such is the case with Erik Gieszelmann’s Sliding Agency: A Study of the Balance Between System and Agency in Game Design. The project is a game simulation that demonstrates how game designers must negotiate a delicate balance between player and system agency: too little agency for the player and the game doesn’t encourage his or her creative exploration and interaction. Too much agency, and play bogs down. But if a designer can find the right balance between the two, then the game will be satisfying. Rather than merely tell us this, or make a convincing argument that proves his point, Gieszelmann lets us experience this process directly as users become, for a little while anyway, game designers deciding on how to find that perfect balance.

Evan Bregman also interrogates video games, in this case examining the relationship between the pleasures of storytelling and those of interactivity; the two, Bregman points out, would seem to be at odds. Immersive Flow: Narrative Through Interactivity considers how games incorporate elements of cinematic narrative along with game play that has some impact on the narrative, allowing players to experience a sense of agency within the story itself. Bregman takes this idea a step farther by creating the project as an interactive book that, in Bregman’s words, “uses text, video and interaction to position its creator as a sympathetic protagonist in a narrative argument.” Bregman created his project in the Institute for the Future of the Book’s new application Sophie, which Bob Stein, Institute for the Future of the Book founder (and frequent denizen of the IML) describes as a tool that allows for the creation of entities that exist somewhere between the book and the movie. Sophie easily brings together text, audio, video and more, and accommodates time-based actions within text-based projects. Bregman takes full advantage of these possibilities, and his project nicely enacts his thesis argument.

3. Science//Technology//Life

Anne Balsamo, the IML's Director of Academic Programs from 2004 to 2007, evangelizes honing the "technological imagination," an approach to innovation used by the "technohumanist." Balsamo argues that the divide often experienced by the hard sciences and the humanities is fatal in an ever more technologically sophisticated world. And indeed, at the IML we practice an integrated approach to tools and concepts, for we believe that while technologist can imagine what can be, humanists can reminds us what should be.

Marrying neuroscience with the tenets of mediation and yoga in her web site entitled Change Your Mind, Cynthia LeFevre shows the brain to be an "adaptable ever-changing organ" that can be positively shaped by the focus that comes from practicing the sort of mindfulness that counters the deleterious effects of stress on both mind and body.

Sonia Seetharaman takes this connection to another level by investigating the dualities apparent in science and religion in To Be or Not To Be. a Flash-based environment that leads viewers through screens with image and text, each of which explains a concept from physics before showing its corresponding concept in religious theory. Revealing the scientific dualities and their counterpoints in religious myth, Seetharaman not only indicates the numerous overlaps between the two fields, she also suggests the human impulse toward binaries--a very fitting project to find it's way into computer code.

Jessica Janner investigates the ways in which teens get news of the world around them. Using extensive statistics gleaned from online surveys of high school students, interviews with high school journalism classes, as well as film footage of scholars, Janner presents her findings in the various places youth visit--YouTube, Facebook and her own web site, Janner presents My News as a broadcast news story updated for the 21st century. In this way, she hopes to spark discussion between traditional newsmakers and the next generation of (cyber) citizens.

Tiffany Ikeda combines economics and social psychology, creating virtual experiments that gauge self-reported levels of happiness as well as informing users about cutting edge research in this area. HAPPINE$$ adapts traditional experiments from each field into a digital interactive site where users can try these experiments themselves before receiving a thorough explanation of the significance of the test, along with statistical information about its results. Ikeda highlights the "discrepancies between anticipated and experienced utility" in order to help users gain appreciation for such work but perhaps more profoundly, to make help them "foster more knowledgeable personal decision-making."

Cameron Parkins interrogates the hype surrounding the potential of digital media to provide an egalitarian spcae that eliminates the socio-political inequities of life in the real world. With the rise of virtual worlds such as Second Life, a space in which people log in and interact from around the globe, Parkins finds it crucial to see if the promises of "digital utopianism" are anywhere close to being realized. The project is informed by both International Relations and Digital Communications theory, Walden III "attempts to understand whether virtual worlds can overcome the confines of cultural imperialism, providing global citizens a new arena for identity creation and cultural exchange, or fall into the same trappings of traditional Westernization."

We might think of Leonardo da Vinci as the epitome of this techno-humanist approach--from working on cadavers to oil painting to helicopter design--da Vinci reminds us that humans are very flexible and resourceful, and there is much to be learned from crossing disciplines in pursuit of innovative thinking. The projects in this group are likewise cross disciplinary, investigating knowledge bases from seemingly disparate fields.

4. Getting Meta:
The Role of the Database

IML Honors Program students begin their four-year introduction to the history and theory of scholarly multimedia with a class titled “The Languages of New Media I,” which borrows from Lev Manovich’s seminal book The Language of New Media, published in 2002. Manovich covers a lot of ground in his text, but one of his key insights concerns the role of the database, which becomes a fundamental component in contemporary media practices and marks a shift away from a culture dominated by linear structures – such as traditional narratives – toward those that call attention to the processes of selection and combination, the two processes that are key to structuring any kind of story. Filmmakers experiment with database structures – remember Memento and its emphasis on the film’s backwards structure? – but as a medium, film remains linear. New media allows us to play with the database structure in new ways, a fact argued at great length by Professor Steve Anderson in the first iteration of IML 101, which culminated with the exploration of the Korsakow System, an application that facilitates the creation of interactive database projects. Several Honors Program students conjoined critical analysis with interactive structures that call attention to the database, if not as a central component in their projects then at least as a mode of thinking that responds to the database structure.

Welcome to the Hong Kong Express: The Relationship Between Local and Transnational in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express by Ashley Hsieh dissects the beautiful cult film by offering users a way to move through several spaces in which they encounter close textual readings of the film’s major scenes. The film is, in a sense, mapped across several screen spaces, paralleling the film itself, which too traverses a city, as well as the rift between old and new, and, according to Hseih, between local and transnational.

Katie Berenbom pursues a similar form of analysis in Do the Right Thing: Examining a Thoughtful Representation of Race in Film, which looks at Spike Lee’s 1989 classic independent film about racial violence. Berenbom highlights the fact that the film arrived when racial tension in the U.S. in general, and in New York in particular, was extremely high, especially with regard to issues of police brutality and racial profiling. Indeed, many pundits accused Lee of inciting racial violence with Do the Right Thing. In her Web-based interactive analysis, Berenbom invites users to move through seven scenes in which she demonstrates links between actual events and Lee’s narrative, in the end allowing users to consider the slippery boundary between fact and fiction.

A similar kind of scrutiny takes place in Michael Allison’s project [title tk], an examination of the Radiohead track “Everything in its Right Place,” from the Kid A album released in [tk]. The Web-based project is a close textual analysis of the song, but the analysis is staged within an unusual interface, which, in Allison’s words, lets users enter “the site by virtually deconstructing visual (as well as aural) noise to reach the information behind it – a metaphor for the thesis itself.” He adds that the “project intends to demystify music technology for the average listener and promote critical listening” and incorporates not only a historical approach to music technology, but an informative approach which “tutors” users in the act of critical music analysis.

“Like Totally Eww”: A Bodacious Adventure in Deciphering Textual and Cultural Implications of the 1980s Teen Science Fiction and Fantasy Genre While Charting the Evolution of Camp Films from ‘B’ Billing to Blockbuster by Olivia Everett tackles an entire film genre, namely that of the teen science fiction B-movie from the 1980s. Everett not only claims these critically neglected films as legitimate objects of academic study, but reveals how they inform the modern blockbuster. Everett fittingly uses vlogging (video blogging) to make her case, as well linking, creating a critical site rich with annotations while also allowing for the incorporation of user feedback. Indeed, if the audience for these films is hardcore fans, it will be these same fans that make the site smarter with use.

Casey Levental brings together the histories of art and cinema in Cubism and Cinema: Paralleled Explorations of the Old “New Media,” arguing that cinema played a powerful role in the formation of cubism at the turn of the last century. Noting that the group known as “La Bande Picasso” was comprised of both artists and film enthusiasts, Levental traces the significance of motion, mechanization and composition on these painters, insisting that “it is no coincidence that the ‘moving picture’ had played a role in the development of these movements’ ambitions.”

Manovich argues that the database has become a symbolic form, one that privileges collections of materials and encourages users to view, navigate and search. Each of these projects in some way conducts a form of critical analysis through the tools of the database structure, giving users access to an array of materials through which they can navigate, developing an understanding of the maker’s argument along the way.

5. Reclaiming the Physical:
The Virtual IS the Real

Although increasing attention is paid to the differences between virtuality and reality, the virtual is the real in more senses than are immediately apparent. For instance, recent scientific research discovered mirror neurons, those that that fire in the prefrontal lobes of the human brain when one acts as well as when one only sees the act. Under certain circumstances, the brain cannot distinguish the experiential from the imaginary. Given the highly visual and visually-mediated nature of life brought on by high performance computing, the design, articulation (via visualization) and construction of life becomes a crucial consideration. Recalling that vision itself is mediated we must also remember that a physical object is a medium as much as a digital one.

Matt Gerhardt demonstrates the ways in which theories of engineering operate in our everyday lives, using a combination of a Rube Goldberg machine, digital media to explain natural occurrences such as kinematics, freefall, chemical reactions and fluid dynamics. Enlightening Engineering uses a Rube Goldberg device--a large, complicated machine that uses multiple, semi-arbitrary steps to accomplish an exceedingly simple task such as switching on a light bulb. As the actual machine churns through its tasks, Gerhardt uses digital media to explain the complex theories that account for each process before the user is forced to use the knowledge gained to keep the machine ‘operating.’

Rachel Kerry uses multimedia effects to enhance the dramatic structure of her original play Seven Fragments, a "dark" love story that illuminates the ravages of matters of the heart. Poetic text, story and character, mask performance, live music, and digital media animations integrate on stage to create a uniquely unified multimedia production. Kerry contends that emergent technologies "reshape today's notions of theatre," such that "the artist's voice evolves." She directs her actors to challenge traditional models of performance by using story as well as innovative interpretation of the visual media she has created for their interaction. Aided by a grant from the USC School of Theatre and IML technology, Kerry's play ran at the Village Gate Theatre for several performances during the first week of April. The multiple screens here document those shows, as well as the making of the performative materials. The "virtual" and the "real" inform each other throughout this thesis project.

Isomi Miake-Lye creates her project in two main parts: one mimics the physicality of a medical waiting room and the other is a web site whose interface is modeled on the 1950's Game of Life updating it with video clips from research projects and links to further information. Getting Ahead Later in Life: Insight into Older Adult Lifestyles and Their Implications for Health Care examines the very pressing issue of the swelling population of older adults in America and the health care issues they present. Miake-Lye argues that this "drastic demographic changes at present dictate a vital shift in our traditional health and wellbeing paradigm: the United States cannot afford to continue our costly present track." Thus, she hopes to educates viewers about the ways in which healthy living choices can impact the quality of their own "game of life."

Leanne Joyce offers a nuanced view of the relationship between garments and their cultural articulations from an economic standpoint. Her project "company" Whitees often a faux store front complete with blank tee shirts and bar code scanner. "When customers scan the barcode on a tee from Whitees, articles of clothing become articles of fact," the "ad copy" to Joyce's project maintains and offering various tee shirts to explore, she provides an interactive learning experience.

In Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy, Gregory Ulmer contends that the computer is a prosthesis of the human brain. Thus, at the IML we frequently ask what emergent technologies allow us to do that we could not do otherwise. Indeed, given our provenance in cinematic and critical studies, we ask students to think through the technologies they use: How do digital technologies and the knowledge they generate (as well as acting as a vehicle to), impact our intellect and our lives? How doe we harness them to enhance the human experience? How do they help us to understand our motivations and behaviors? This group of projects explores the relationship between innovations in science and technology with the quality of human life.

6. Remix, YouTube, Second Life and More:
Pop Culture Meets Academia

February 24, 2004 – just a month into the second semester of the existence of IML Honors Program – is now known as Grey Tuesday. Over 100,000 copies of DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album were downloaded from hundreds of sites across the Internet. An estimated million copies of this celebrated remix, which creatively combined the Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album, were traded over peer-to-peer networks within 24 hours. This was a symbolic gesture perhaps, but the electronic civil disobedience of Grey Tuesday eloquently spoke to both consumer frustrations with increasingly restrictive copyright laws and the growing power of peer networks to subvert their enforcement. And it spoke to a generation of university students ready to test the potential of remix, along with a host of other so-called amateur media practices, within the confines of the university. It should come as no surprise, then, that several of the Honors Program Thesis projects reflect these cultural practices, which have been “hacked” to function within an academic setting.

Perhaps the most direct reflection of this ethos is Matt Jung’s interactive game Mashupoly, which he says parallels the music mashup in which two songs are combined in order to create a new and different song. “Mashupoly combines elements from the board game Monopoly with information about the progression of the mashup artform into a fast-growing, independent and yet still illegal genre,” he writes. Within the game, different squares represent different songs, or, as Jung points out, different intellectual properties. These properties are in turn organized along a timeline, which demonstrates the evolution of musical appropriation across several decades, going back to early jazz and moving forward. The game nicely illustrates the ways in which this kind of borrowing is codified differently relative to historical context, and coyly references the frustrated efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America, which seeks to punish college students for illegal downloads. The association figures in the game directly in that players must carefully orchestrate their listening habits by listening to as many intellectual properties as possible before incurring the RIAA’s legal wrath.

If deploying pop cultural media tools was the only criteria for graduation, Freddie Wong would have moved on to grad school months ago. With over one million viewers to his credit [check fact?], Wong is a YouTube sensation, and that was precisely his goal. Titled The 10/6 Project, Wong’s thesis tackles a deceptively simple question: What does it take for a video to become viral? Through the analysis of other successful viral videos on YouTube, Wong isolated the key characteristics, created a series of projects that included those characteristics, and watched as his videos spread like wildfire across the Web, with the numbers of viewers skyrocketing. His project charts his various experiments, inviting users to consider the strange viewing predilections of the world.

Second Life, the multi-user virtual environment that has grown increasingly popular over the last four years for everything from gambling to art to even education, is home to Matthew Lee’s Rivenscryr, a space that allows users to explore a particular aspect of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Lee argues that the invisible character Sycorax plays a key role, despite the fact that his most important actions take place prior to the play’s start. Lee takes us back to those actions, “allowing users to travel through a remnant of the island, encountering fragments of the past.” While many have considered creative uses of Second Life, Lee takes full advantage of the virtual environment’s immersive features, crafting an entire world rich with texture and detail.

If 2004 brought us one of the most popular instances of remix culture, 2005 formally introduced another key moment when Henry Jenkins wrote, “Welcome to convergence culture” in an essay about the growing array of media platforms. He was describing the “flow of media content across delivery channels to expand revenue,” as well as the ways in which increasingly active consumers demand more options in ways to enjoy media. “Convergence is both a top down corporate-driven process and a bottom up consumer-driven process,” Jenkins wrote, but Patrick Skelly shows how convergence affects narrative itself. His project, media://hack, is an interactive examination of Project.hack, a Japanese multimedia franchise that moves across several media platforms, including anime, manga, novels and video games. Skelly dissects the ways in which the different media elements converge and diverge, allowing the story to mutate in different directions depending on the affordances of various storytelling devices.

Anastasia Shepherd delves into another pop cultural phenomenon – the cinematic remake – with her project Face to Face: A Blind Remake. Noting the prevalence of remakes in contemporary cinema, Shepherd ponders the elements that make a particular story worth revisiting, and notes that she’s less interested in what stays the same as works get remade than in what’s different. To explore ideas of the remake, Shepherd gave herself an assignment: she read Ingmar Bergman’s screenplay for Face to Face, and without having seen the film, selected two scenes to remake. Her interactive project compares Bergman’s project and her own version, and in the process, becomes a sly commentary on several key themes both in contemporary pop cultural media practices and those that take place in academia, namely authorship and authority, as well as on notions of originality and “the original.”

Perhaps one of the strongest shifts that occurred during the four years of the Honors Program’s first cohort was a movement from a Web 1.0 ethos in which users encountered relatively static Web sites, to a Web 2.0 paradigm in which sites became platforms encouraging user creativity. The IML’s Honors students cheerfully seized these tools and the corresponding mentality, and their projects reflect their ability to merge academic goals with participatory media.

7. Preview of Class of 2009: Thesis Show 2.0
As we celebrate the class of 2008--the first cohort of students to earn honors in multimedia scholarship--we also take time to reflect with these students, using the insights acquired to benefit our next class. This group of "preview" projects hints at what is in store for the class of 2009's show. These projects, created by students who wanted a head start, are well on their way to becoming solid theses in the world of Web 3.0. From showing the internet as a platform for civic dis/engagement and political activism, to emerging forms of web entertainment or "webisodes," to the sort of 3D animations that can be created to narrativize virtual worlds and their inhabitants, these projects collectively point the way toward the new generation of mediated life.

Adam Church explores the rather seamy world of Anonymous, the internet-organized subversive group originally thought to be nothing more than a set of vandals playing with people's lives. However, In LULLZ We Trust finds Church suggesting that groups like Anonymous, having come of age, are now more politically active and socially responsible, targeting the powerful Church of Scientology for instance, as they leave the desktops and come out to picket in the world. In this light, their anonymity is as much a survival tactic as a vandalistic impulse.

The purpose of Paul Gee's thesis is to examine several production pipelines for 3D animation in order to document and evaluate their efficacy. Gee does this by creating multiple versions of the same project and evaluating each on its speed, facility, and the quality of the final result. Using an original children's story about a duck and his less confident chicken companion, Gee is able to concentrate on issues of lighting, movement and texture. Digital literacy includes the most effective means to an end, and we look forward to being illuminated by this project.

John Visclosky writes, directs and often appears in his webisode which he will deploy at carefully chosen intervals: released in weekly installments on YouTube. The Reunion is an innovative—but light-hearted—new webisode series that aims to combine narrative, stylistic, technical, and marketing commonalities shared by pre-existing web serials, such as Red Vs. Blue or Getting Away With Murder. As the segments are they will be supplemented by an accompanying blog-site detailing every facet of each episode’s creation. Visclosky envisions that project as a "multi-disciplinary exercise that will combine elements of technically sound filmmaking, creative story telling, and shrewd, innovative marketing," and we look forward to seeing the finished product.

Thesis Parameters

2008-02-28T08:04:00.000-08:00

Instructions for Bio & Abstract Upload

2008-02-27T08:54:00.000-08:00

Dear Seniors:

As a reminder, we need you to get your bios and abstracts onto this server so the designer (that we are engaging at present) can begin work as soon as we have the details in place.

You are asked to submit Word files with your text (no more than 200 words) and then upload a picture that's 800x800 and in .tiff format. Please create a folder with your name so all your work is grouped together for those unfamiliar with our program. You can use Cyberduck, the ftp platform on the lab machines if you do not have an ftp client. We will start with the bios and work on the abstracts last so we can get recent screen shots et cetera. Below is the diagram the tech folks made for us:

(I had to remove this picture since it had the password and login and therefore was not secure. Janein however, sent it to all of you in an email 7-10 days ago so check your inbox or ask Janein to resend to you--thanks!)

Erik Gieszelmann's abstract and bio

2008-02-06T15:39:00.000-08:00

Sliding Agency:
A study of the balance between
system and agency in game design

While the author would argue its classification as a “game,” Sliding Agency is a game simulation that allows the audience to dip their collective toe into the waters of game design. It does not give the audience complete creative control, but allows the audience to make one of the many key decisions a game designer must make when creating a game.

While a player is running the simulation, it initially seems to the player that he or she is playing a simple side scrolling platformer. The addition of a slider at the bottom of the screen (or in the case of the wall screen, the screen itself) changes the experience from a simple game to a study in game design. The slider allows the player to dynamically alter the balance between system and agency in the game they are playing.

Agency is the feeling of control over their environment that the audience feels while playing a game, and system is (in this case) defined as the amount of control the game has over the same environment. System can be alternatively defined as the set of rules that the audience allows to control their actions during play.

The author hopes that the addition of this slider to an otherwise unremarkable platformer will encourage the player to inadvertently discover how system and agency interact in this game, and by extension, any game he or she plays, and bring the player to a greater understanding of the intricacy of game design.

About Erik Gieszelmann

Erik Gieszelmann was born November 8, 1985 in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended St. Louis Priory High School before moving to Los Angeles for the undergraduate study of computer science with an emphasis in games at the University of Southern California.

As a senior in the aforementioned major, Gieszelmann has worked on several game projects since enrolling at USC. Examples include That Dam Game, a beaver inspired puzzle game, and Errantry, an innovative new take on story-telling in games, using the Wii remote to implement a gesture system which allows the player to take direct control of the narrative of a story. Gieszelmann’s most recent game-related project is Sliding Agency, a game simulation that allows the player to explore the delicate balance between agency and system in game design.

Aside from game projects, Gieszelmann is a presidential scholar at USC and enjoys playing video games for “research purposes,” making fun of his housemates, and writing, directing, and acting in his sketch comedy troupe, the Big Game Hunters.

John Visclosky's Bio

2008-02-04T21:07:00.001-08:00

And here's my bio, open to critique. Remember though, we're critiquing the bio, not my crappy life itself.

John Visclosky Bio
John Visclosky is a Junior at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, working toward his Bachelor’s Degree in Film & Television Production. He is an adept writer and cinematographer with a fine grasp of many different media formats, including film, television, print media, and numerous forms of internet-based communication. Visclosky also harbors a keen interest in broadcast and print journalism, the performing arts, and marketing/public relations.

Visclosky has worked as a Production Assistant at Complete Pictures, a small commercial production company in Washington, D.C. specializing in political ads and PSAs. He has also served as an Intern and Production Assistant at HGTV, and plans to pursue a career in filmmaking as a writer, director, or actor.

John Visclosky's Abstract

2008-02-04T21:03:00.000-08:00

So, here's my abstract for my thesis project.

“The Reunion”
John Visclosky

The Reunion is an innovative—but light-hearted—new webisode series that aims to combine narrative, stylistic, technical, and marketing commonalities shared by pre-existing web serials, such as Red Vs. Blue or Getting Away With Murder. As the segments are released in weekly installments on YouTube, they will be supplemented by an accompanying blog-site detailing every facet of each episode’s creation.

By following the formation of the series from inception to publication, the project attempts to reveal functional marketing tactics, and effectively establish a paradigm for future webisode success. The thesis further aims to serve as an academically viable teaching tool that will instruct upon both the creative process and a developing new form of media.

The series revolves around the various members of a family who are coming together for one fateful weekend at an annual family reunion. Shot in a mockumentary style—with shaky hand-held camerawork, first-person documentary style interviews, and an improvisational script—the project will adopt a quirky, off-color sense of humor. Each episode will be no more than five minutes in length, and will be packed to the bursting point with jokes, innuendos, and oddball relatives.

The main character is Ben, a normal guy who hates his job as a greeting card writer, and who constantly yearns for something more. The main dramatic thread of the series will be Ben’s attempted love affair with the token girl next door, Jen. The two were childhood friends, but have not seen one another for quite sometime. When they meet again at the reunion, Ben finds that Jen is newly single. As he begins to romantically pursue her, we learn more about the other members of Ben’s family, including his steadfast and stalwart cousin Claire, his newly gay brother Dan, his desperate cousin Suzie, and her non-English speaking fiancé Alejandro.

The Reunion is a multi-disciplinary exercise that will combine elements of technically sound filmmaking, creative story telling, and shrewd, innovative marketing.

P. Skelly's Abstract and Bio

2008-01-29T19:31:00.000-08:00

media://hack
Media://hack examines “Project .hack,” a Japanese-originated global multimedia franchise spanning anime, manga, novels and video games.
In a Sophie document/book, “media://hack” breaks down the elements of “Project .hack” and determines what each form contributes to the overall story, and how the various types of media converge. It does this by analyzing the various media that “Project .hack” consists of and either revealing or demonstrating the ways in which those media contribute to the overall story.
The project is targeted toward anyone with an interest in the convergence of media or contemporary Japanese culture.
“media://hack” is a cross-disciplinary project at the University of Southern California from the School of Cinematic Arts’ Institute for Multimedia Literacy and College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, developed by Patrick Skelly, a senior majoring in East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Project type:
Interactive…
Analysis???

Project creator:
Patrick Skelly

Advisors:
Virginia Kuhn (IML)
Anne McKnight (EALC and Converging Media)

About Patrick Skelly:
Patrick Skelly is a senior majoring in East Asian Languages and Cultures, specifically Japanese, with a minor in Global Marketing.
Born and raised in St. Louis Park, MN, Skelly has always had an interest in entertainment and storytelling.
He has been exposing himself to entertainment media by working at both the Daily Trojan newspaper, where he is a columnist and staff writer, and Trojan Vision Television, where he is an executive producer, editor and host, among other positions.
After graduating, Skelly plans to get into the entertainment industry, most likely in television. Later, he plans on becoming an entertainment mogul, working with TV, film, video games, comics, music, books and art.

Bio and Abstract

2008-01-29T19:25:00.000-08:00

Dustin Johnson - BA Critical Studies USC School of Cinematic Arts '08

Johnson has done a bit of everything from music creation, graphic illustration, photo manipulation, and web development to motion graphics and compositing, video editing, 3-D animation and 2-D vector animation as well as familiarization with SEO, CMS, and other broad-spectrum Web 2.0 applications. His strongest emphasis has always been visual storytelling through both photography and cinematography. Over the past ten years he’s been fine tuning his skills with both film and video, working professionally on freelance corporate and special event gigs while volunteering as a student director of photography on projects within USC's cinema school as well as many independent projects. In 2006 he became a founding member of an informally incorporated new media consulting agency currently dubbed AeneA Media.

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Cinematography Articulated

Cinema from both a theoretical and post theoretical perspective is analyzed as a form of communication. Despite its polysemic nature, scholars and artists alike try to deconstruct films into a semiotic language for the purpose of more meaningful study or more controlled and emphatic expression. The dilemma has been from a variety of perspectives the fact that although cinema emits a strong feeling that it can be understood as a language, it rejects denotation and definition in exchange for vague patterns, undefined conventions, intertextual connotations, and generic associations.
Cinematographers to the best of their ability have some understanding of the visual language in terms of the ways in which they are able to use their technical skills to reproduce patterns of style that can be applied to different syntaxes to act as a visual language, suggesting that whether or not audiences receive their interpretations the same way, there is some unspoken consensus among cinematographers that over time, patterns in cinematography emerge, almost like slang, stereotypes, and clichés that can be used to intensify a variety of ideas on screen. This project will attempt to recreate, from a cinematographer and theorist’s perspective, the way in which theory and practice interact with cinema to create a codified language.

Ash's Bio and Abstract

2008-01-29T18:19:00.000-08:00

Ashley Hsieh
Critical Studies, Cinematic Arts: B.A., 2008

Ashley Hsieh has a major in Critical Studies, Cinematic Arts and a minor in Business Administration from the University of Southern California. In Spring 2006, Hsieh had the opportunity to study abroad in Beijing, China at Peking University.

While Hsieh was in China, she developed an interest in East Asian cinema. Her study abroad experience as well as Professor Hyung-Sook Lee’s seminar on East Asian Transnational Cinema and Stars inspired her interactive thesis project on the relationship between local and transnational in Hong Kong.

Hsieh not only enjoys film analysis but also film production. She has written and directed a number of short films. Additionally, she has interned at many film and television companies including MTV Networks and Fox-Walden Marketing. She has gained experience in development, casting and creative marketing. In the future, Hsieh plans on working in entertainment industry and wants to be a film producer.

Welcome to the Hong Kong Express: the relationship between local and transnational in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express

Project by Ashley Hsieh

Welcome to the Hong Kong Express is an interactive, experiential website that explores the relationship between the local and transnational in Hong Kong as represented in Wong Kar-Wai’s film Chungking Express.

As the viewer enters the website, they will watch a brief video on the history of Hong Kong. The video will then ask the viewer to decide whether or not the elements in Chungking Express reflect the erasure of Hong Kong local culture or if it is merely reflecting the transnational, modern culture present there.

Throughout the website, the audience will be able to navigate and explore different spaces – a bar and a hotel. Within these familiar spaces, meant to make the viewer feel more connected to the project, the viewer will look for “hot spots”. These hot spots will lead the audience to pages that critically analyze scenes and themes from the film.

At the end, after viewing the hot spots, the audience will choose whether they believe Chungking Express erases local culture or merely reflects a modern, transnational culture. The viewer will then realize that both choices play a role in shaping the history and culture of Hong Kong.

Project type:
Experiential, Interactive Research Project

Advisors:
Dr. Virginia Kuhn (Associate Director, IML)
Dr. David James (Professor, Critical Studies)

Tiffany's Bio and Abstract (Draft-ish?)

2008-01-29T09:55:00.000-08:00

Bio:

Tiffany Ikeda is an Economics major at the University of Southern California. A Southern California native, Ikeda’s broad interests are influenced by the dynamic diversity of the West Coast. Interested in learning more about the world around us, Ikeda is specializing in Cyber Security and completing a minor in the Natural Sciences; her current research examines coupled tectonics and pluton emplacement in the Sierra Nevadas.

Ikeda has worked as a computer technology teaching assistant for three years at Mount St. Mary’s College and at USC. She is a strong believer that technological adeptness is a necessary skill to remain competitive in the workforce, and enjoys helping her students learn how to use software to incorporate multimedia into their presentations and projects. Applications covered in her classes include PowerPoint, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, and even the enterprise resource planning program SAP.

Ikeda has been accepted to law programs at NYU, Columbia, Duke, and USC, and plans on specializing in Cyber Law.

HAPPINE$$: An Economic Perspective

HAPPINE$$ draws upon concepts from economic theory and social psychology to examine how everyday personal and social decisions affect self-reported levels of happiness. Adapting traditional experiments from these two fields of study, the project allows the user to be an active participant through their own multimedia experiences.

Throughout the project, the user has the ability to navigate and play with various experiments that highlight the discrepancies between anticipated and experienced utility. Participation in these experiments if followed by a thorough explanation of the significance of this experiment to understanding the broader concept of how we view our own decisions and its impact on happiness.

The goal of this multidisciplinary project is for the user to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the application of economic principles to well-being, and thereby foster more knowledgeable personal decisions-making.

Rachel Kerry's bio and abstract:

2008-01-28T14:03:00.000-08:00

Hey guys! Ok, I changed some stuff. Not sure how it works. Let me know!

Bio:

This semester, Rachel Kerry will graduate from the University of Southern Calfornia with a BA in theatre. Her main emphasis is in acting and performance art. Last spring she studied at New York University's Playwrights Horizon Theatre School where she was part of an ensemble of actors who created When Things Stopped, a stage adaptation of Dorris Lessing's novel, Memoirs of a Survivor that incorporated multimedia, dance, and text on stage. She has also studied at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sydney, Australia and interned with the Los Angeles-based Center Theatre Group. After this summer, she plans to see where the wind will take her.

Abstract:

What does it mean when love affects the very fabric of your reality? A mysterious figure known only as "#3" weaves verbal spider webs around the stage. Two high-school aged girls tap into the unsettling passions of youth. Surreal tableaus melt onto the stage, characters begin to warp, and the audience experiences a dark, visceral ride.

Seven Fragments explores the dreams and delusions of individuals shattered by matters of the heart. Poetic text, story and character, mask performance, live music, and digital media animations integrate on stage to create a unquely unified multimedia production. As new developments in technology reshape today's notions of theatre, the artist's voice evolves. Challenging tranditional models of performance, the actors have developed their characters not only through story but through the imaginative interpretation of visual media. Seven Fragments is an exploration of the new transitions in the creative process made possible by multimedia.

Matt's Bio and Abstract

2008-01-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

Biography:
Matt Gerhardt is a senior at the University of Southern California, graduating in May 2008 with a BS in mechanical engineering. Born and raised in Redondo Beach, California, he discovered his love of both multimedia and engineering at an early age, something he has carried to this day.

Gerhardt has worked at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy for two years as a peer mentor, assisting other students with their own multimedia projects. His summers were spent working as an intern at the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, applying what he has learned in classes to real-world environments. His multimedia skills include Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Final Cut Pro.

Abstract:
Aspects of engineering are all around us; we interact with them everyday. The reasoning behind why these interactions occur, though, isn’t necessarily evident.

“Enlightening Engineering” aims to reveal the man behind the curtain, by utilizing a Rube Goldberg machine to explain different aspects of engineering and science. A Rube Goldberg device is a large, complicated machine that uses multiple, semi-arbitrary steps to accomplish an exceedingly simple task. In this case, the task at hand is to understand engineering.

There are two components to this project: the machine itself, and a website. The machine will be on temporary display in the IML building. The website expands on the machine, providing the necessary facts about the machine to give a greater understanding. Multiple options are given to the viewer; they will need to use the knowledge they have learned to keep the machine ‘operating.’

This project is targeted towards high school students, as an educational tool.

Casey's Bio and Abstract

2008-01-28T11:47:00.000-08:00

Cubism and Cinema: Paralleled Explorations of the old "New Media"

In 2007, the PaceWildenstein Gallery in New York presented an idea that added a twist in the study of Modern Art History. Film, an art medium rarely mentioned by art historians, could have had an integral role in the development of cubism, the modern art form developed by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso around the turn of the 20^th century.

“La Bande Picasso” was a group of not only artists, but also film enthusiasts, and though it is not the primary influence of the art form, the similarities between early film and cubism are definitely viable, if not unmistakable.

This thesis goes beyond the period of Picasso and Braque and explores the art movements that arose from Cubism, such as Futurism, Orphic Cubism, and even Surrealism, and how these newer movements also paralleled cinema. The studies of motion, mechanization, and composition on a static surface were outright goals of Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger and the Italian Futurists. Certainly, it is no coincidence that the “moving picture” had played a role in the development of these movements’ ambitions.

The study concludes on the reversal of inspiration, when the inspirer becomes the inspired. Cubist film, such as Fernand Léger’s Ballet Méchanique is an example of film, which helped inspire the development of cubism, now draws upon cubism to create a truly abstract film.

“Cubism and Cinema” is developed by Casey Levental, a senior Film Production student at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy.

Casey Levental

Casey is a Film Production student at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He has been an IML Honors Student since its inception, and also holds minors in Business Administration and French.

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Casey has lived in Toronto, Ontario; Vancouver, BC; San Francisco, California and Denver, Colorado. In the fall of 2007, he spent a semester living in Paris, France to finish his minor degree in French, a language he has spoken since preschool. As a Production student, Casey has learned industry-standard programs such as Avid and ProTools, and is currently a Sound Designer on a senior film, set to be completed at the end of the semester. As a director, he has made around ten short films of his own.

On the side, Casey is an avid musician. A classical pianist since the age of five, he has also delved into jazz, rock and composing. He is a founding member of the USC Trojan Men, the university’s all-male a cappella vocal group. Music is a constant passion of his, and he hopes to include it in his future plans. After graduation, Casey intends to work in "the industry", and plans to study intellectual property and entertainment law as a fall back career.

Alexis' Bio & Abstract

2008-01-23T20:18:00.000-08:00

Alexis Lindquist is a Cinema-Television Critical Studies major at the University of Southern California. Hailing from the Quad Cities Area in Illinois, Lindquist was able to become active in the arts at an early age through Quad City Arts. Her early experience with photography, documentary filmmaking, manipulating graphics in photoshop, and multi-media presentations fueled a fascination with new media. After teaching herself HTML coding, Lindquist began working as a lab assistant for a class on Dreamweaver in the Internet Technologies Program at USC and building websites for business professionals in Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, she was commissioned as a photographer and videographer in the Digital Media Department at the prestigious Camp Laurel in Maine. Currently, Lindquist contributes to the new media department at Warner Brothers, Telepictures Productions. In the future, Lindquist plans to incorporate multimedia into all her career endeavors. She is interested in real estate and fiction writing as hobbies and intends to focus her career on the frontiers of new media and the film industry.

The Language We Don't Talk About: Hearing Time and Place in Film Scores delves into the world of musical color, specifically in relation to the creation of the sensation of a time and place in cinema. It is an in-depth exploration of this aspect of film music and its relationship with American culture. This project argues the musical color in film scores has become a national language. To challenge this point, a pedagogical flash website will provide users a myriad of interactive experiences to test their own score “literacy.” It is targeted for any film listener (even the blind) with basic explanations for casual theater-goers and links to detailed research for scholars.

Frontline: Growing Up Online

2008-01-23T16:23:00.000-08:00

Here's something that might be of no relevance to your thesis, but I think we're all interested in it: PBS's Frontline had a whole show last night dedicated to what the heck kids are doing online these days.

"FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about just how radically the Internet is transforming the experience of childhood," says the show's press release.

Link

Cameron Parkins - Walden III

2008-01-23T16:04:00.000-08:00

Walden III: Digital Utopianism and the Virtual World

Digital utopianism has long herald the rise of the virtual world, a mythical place that would theoretically eliminate the ills of meat space, identity and class inequality in particular. In recent years, what was once an idea (sometimes loosely executed) has become a reality, with people all over the globe signing on and living in, specifically to Second Life. With the rise of the virtual world in our midst, how then has it performed in relation to its philosophical lineage? To specify the question further, how does it function in terms of its cross-cltural pervasiveness?

Walden III is an attempt to understand and further these questions. Based in both International Relations and Digital Communications theory, Walden III attempts to understand whether virtual worlds can overcome the confines of cultural imperialism, providing global citizens a new arena for identity creation and cultural exchange, or fall into the same trappings of traditional Westernization.

Creator Bio

Cameron Parkins is an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, He will be graduating in May 2008 with a BA in International Relations and a minor in Cinema-Television: Critical Studies.

Beyond his academic pursuits in global politics and film studies, Cameron has taken a keen interest in copyright law, specifically in relation to new methods of thinking regarding digital technologies. For the past 6 months he has worked as a Cultural Program Assistant at Creative Commons, a San Francisco based non-profit that works on progressive approaches copyright.

Outside of this, Cameron also is an active musician and blogger, posting new music and opinions to www.superhumanoids.com, a group he plays in with his close friends.

Paul Gee Bio

2008-01-22T19:47:00.000-08:00

BIO

Paul Gee is a senior at the University of Southern California, studying towards a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications with a minor in 3d Animation. As a graphics employee for Heat Seeking Multimedia, Mr. Gee worked extensively with image editing, compositing, motion graphics, and 3d Animation software. As well as being versed in new media technologies, Gee’s skills stem from an extensive background in classical arts, primarily two-dimensional art (but including experience in sculpture and music). As a 3d animation student, Gee has acquired knowledge and understanding of traditional animation techniques and principles, as well as current computer graphics software. Upon culminating his college career, Gee plans to utilize the skills he has gained through his education in art, animation, and graphics to pursue a career in 3d animation.

Matt Lee's Abstract and Bio

2008-01-22T19:40:00.000-08:00

Rivenscryr:
Shadows of “The Tempest”

“All the World’s a Stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
– William Shakespeare, As You Like It

What is a play? In the spirit of the dramatic literature tradition, most would simply define it as dialogue between characters, as their sole exposure to the world of a play has been study of the written work. And while this is a part of the theatrical experience, one cannot fully understand a work of theatre by simply reading the text.

As Shakespeare alludes in this well known quote, there is a link between life and theatre, each a reflection upon the other. Both are inherently multimedia experiences, and reducing either down to a textual component is difficult, at best.

Rivenscryr bypasses this issue by exploring of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” through the memories of the invisible character Sycorax, whose actions prior to the play have a profound effect on the others. Set in the virtual world Second Life, it is an interactive experience, allowing a viewer to travel through a remnant of the island, encountering fragments of the past.

About the Content Creator:

Matthew Lee is a 4th year student of Theatre and Interactive Media at the University of Southern California, with skills in 3d modeling, sound design, storytelling, and image manipulation). In addition to student projects, he works on the Center for Public Diplomacy’s Virtual Worlds project, exploring and engaging in virtual societies to increase awareness of potential uses, and facilitating others’ participation in virtual space.

About the Author:
Matthew Lee

“…life isn’t about beginnings, but random encounters, and how you shape the world…sometimes the scrawniest weeds do better than the finest pedigree roses.”
– Matthew Lee, The Vivarium

Matthew Lee is a 4th year student of Theatre and Engineering at the University of Southern California, with skills in a number of areas, including 3D modeling, sound design, multiplayer environment design, storytelling, and image manipulation.

His previous work includes a multimedia investigation on the history of music technology, and “Cante Florezca!”, a student produced game in which a player nurtures a flowering plant to create a musical score.

Lee’s past experiences have been rather varied, his engineering background giving him familiarity with programs such as Solid Edge, 3D Studio Max, STK, AutoCAD, and Autodesk Inventor, with Adobe Creative Suite and Flash learned through multimedia.

Lee’s expansion into Second Life (an Internet based virtual world), began with working on the build team for the 2007 SL Relay for Life, a reinterpretation of the American Cancer Society’s premier event combining traditional design with new elements in the online social platform.

Currently, Lee works with the USC Center for Public Diplomacy’s Virtual Worlds project as an in-world designer, responsible for both building interactive environments in Second Life and running in-world events. In this capacity, he has worked alongside members of the MacArthur Foundation, the US Department of State, the Brookings Institute, and the International Criminal Court.

Xing's abstract and bio

2008-01-22T19:37:00.000-08:00

abstract:
Cerebellar Conditioning in Mice
Presentation of experimental research in field of classical conditioning in mice with focus on changes in cerebellar proteins.

Mice subjects undergo training with the administration of an electrical shock to the eye (unconditioned stimulus) and an auditory tone (conditioned stimulus) to elicit involuntary eye-blink response (conditioned response). Learning takes place as cerebeller connections are modified over numerous trials, and changes in proteins of the deep nuclei of the cerebellum are studied to compare effects of learning in trained mice with the absence of learning in control animals.

Delivery in the form of a website created using Dreamweaver, with detailed explanation and illustration of all steps, from Introduction and Methods to Results and Conclusion, through a combination of media clips, drawings and text. Provides comprehensive introduction to goals of research and previous findings in this area, as well as supplementary information on issues such as animal testing, occupational and lab safety, and personnel training. Intended to allow insights into activities taking place in the lab, building specifically upon this particular experiment and its nitty-gritty details, and accessible to a reader with basic background knowledge of neurobiology. Most useful for undergraduate or graduate students conducting research in a similar field.

bio:
Chen Xing, Singapore
Neuroscience, B.A. University of Southern California
Background in cellular, molecular and systems neuroscience, with knowledge of basic computational, cognitive and research design concepts in neuroscience. Taken undergraduate courses in neurobiology, gerontology, neurological disease, neuropsychology, as well as graduate-level courses in advanced neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. Will be completing her degree in May 2008 with classes in computational neuroscience and computer programming.

Previous lab experience: Summer 2006, in a molecular biology lab dealing with STAT proteins, at Biopolis, Singapore, in the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Following that, Fall 2006 in the Finch lab, under the Gerontology department at USC, analysing gene transcription levels of the Ncf1 subunit of NADPH oxidase in LPS-infected mice. Spring 2007 at Peking University, Beijing, China, to truly understand what it means to be of Chinese heritage. Studied at Cambridge University, UK, Summer 2007, to learn about art history and social welfare issues.
An artist who delights in portraying the atmosphere, buildings and culture of cities that she visits, through evocative pen drawings.

She is currently applying to graduate school programmes to obtain her PhD in Neuroscience, to study the neural correlates of vision.

Lab techniques:

Surgery in mice, perfusion, sectioning
Immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence, ELISA
PCR, primer design
Extraction and purification of DNA, RNA and proteins
Western, Northern and Southern blotting
Taking care of HeLa and macrophage cells
Plasmid recombination
Microarray analysis

Software skills:

StatView, SPSS, Oligo, Opticon Monitor, Eyeblink 5.0 (used in classical conditioning training, created using LabView)
Dreamweaver, Photoshop, FinalCut Pro, Logic, Excel
will be learning shortly: C++

Sonia's Bio and Abstract

2008-01-22T19:10:00.000-08:00

BIO

Sonia Seetharaman is an undergraduate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She will be graduating in December 2008 with a B.S. in Biophysics and a concentration in French.

In addition to her coursework in both theoretical and applied science, Seetharaman has taken an academic interest in scholarly multimedia, using applications such as Adobe Flash , FinalCut Pro, and Adobe AfterEffects to animate, visualize and present academic subjects. She is currently working on an interactive, interdisciplinary research project on the concept of the garden in Western Europe.

Seetharaman has also worked as a peer mentor with the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, teaching and helping other undergraduate students to use multimodal approaches in an academic realm. In the summer of 2007, she was a volunteer with the PBS production Wired Science, a television show which uses visual media to present recent technological innovations. Seetharaman hopes to apply these experiences to future jobs by utilizing visual as well as textual approaches in scientific study, in both the research and educational communities.

To Be or Not To Be: A Study of Duality in Science and Religion

Duality is an inherent concept in the human mind. When we create, we create in twos; everything has an opposing counterpart. To Be or Not To Be is a presentation of this fact, which manifests in both the practicalities of science and the intricacies of religion.

The project is a visually engaging presentation of dualities that have occurred in various sciences and religions. The user navigates through a series of short videos, which elucidate the complexities of each duality presented. The information, while thorough, presents the material in a way that is relatively easy to understand without alienating the user through complex mathematics or the like.

After the user has navigated through all of the information, they are presented with the final conclusion, but not before answering various questions relating to the researched areas. The conclusion brings to light, through the user’s answers, the common thread which unites these diverse dualities and the nature of human cognition.

A Few Logistical Issues

2008-01-22T15:00:00.000-08:00

All 440/444 students should register/login to the IML portal (the screen of which opens on all the lab machines) and we will post work there. For now, the abstracts and bios will go there--soon we will have space for the beginning of the thesis projects. The thesis project parameters will be posted here below.

Also, don't forget tomorrow's open house: 3:30 - 5:30 pm in IML lounge. There are PRIZES as well as food and drink.

Finally, please register for the 24/7 conference (and if anyone can volunteer to help out, extra brownie points):

If you have any issues/concerns/questions, feel free to contact either of us....

Virginia & Anne
______________________________________
Honors in Multimedia Scholarship Program
Senior Thesis Project Parameters

As you know, the certificate of honors in Multimedia Scholarship carries with it a mandatory thesis project that demonstrates the facility you have gained over your time in the program. Although you have (or will have) guidance and approval from both your IML and subject area advisor, the parameters for a passing thesis project are important for you to consider while you are creating it. Although there is no direct correlation between a written paper and a multimedia thesis, your project should cover the sort of scope that is roughly equivalent to a 50-page research paper.

The whole of your senior class sequence at the IML is devoted to carrying out this project, which must include the following considerations:

• Conceptual Core:
- The project’s controlling idea must be apparent.
- The project must be productively aligned with one of more multimedia genres.
- The project must effectively engage with the primary issue/s of the subject area into which it is intervening.

• Research Component:
- The project must display evidence of substantive research and thoughtful engagement with its subject matter.
- The project must use a variety of credible sources and cite them appropriately.
- The project ought to deploy more than one approach to an issue.

• Form & Content:
- The project’s structural or formal elements must serve the conceptual core.
- The project’s design decisions must be deliberate, controlled, and defensible.
- The project’s efficacy must be unencumbered by technical problems.

• Creative Realization:
- The project must approach the subject in a creative or innovative manner.
- The project must use media and design principles effectively.
- The project must achieve significant goa

Welcome Back!!!

2008-01-15T11:33:00.001-08:00

We hope you all had a fabulous break and are now ready to work hard on your stunning projects! Your faculty team is hard at work acquiring the resources you will need to finish and get your pieces onto a group web site so all the world can see how smart you are. We are also planning the thesis show and, should any of you like to participate, please let us know.

Please check this blog often, since we will post numerous updates and logistical information here as it becomes available. To that end, feel free to post items of interest and/or advice on platforms and the like. We are a team in this endeavor!

There will be a spring "meet and greet" event next week on Wed (1/23) for all Honors students--you can instill horror in the younger group and show your battle scars. Oh, and also, there will be food and a raffle for prizes. The event is from 3:30 to 5:30 in the IML lounge. We hope to see you all then.

Your fearless leaders,
Virginia & Anne

Website Design Templates

2007-12-02T20:47:00.000-08:00

I found this website when checking out lifehacker.com, and I thought this would be really helpful to a lot of people who're doing their projects online.

It's a bunch of free website design templates, and a link to a few open-source WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web site builders.

Lifehacker

Weekend Hours Redux

2007-11-27T17:11:00.000-08:00

Honors Intensive Weekend Labs:

Sunday, December 2 noon to 6 pm. Dave Lopez will be available for Flash Help. Student workers will be here. No meals but I may be able to cough up snacks and drinks.

Saturday, December 8 noon to 6 pm. I'll have a student worker, all labs open and again, likely snacks and drinks.

Spring Thesis Show Dates (4/10-4/19)

2007-11-27T16:39:00.000-08:00

Hey All Honors Seniors:

Although all of the planning is not yet complete, I wanted to get you the information we do have so far: the thesis show will have two events--a preview for seniors and their advisors on Thursday, April 10 from 5-8 pm; it will then remain up and be open from 4-6pm each day the following week M-Th (students will have to switch off running it for those two hours daily) and there will likely be a VIP/Dean/Provost night mid week (around 4/16 or so). This will all culminate in a big bash on Friday, April 18th from 5 to 8 pm after which, it will close.

Of course, we hope to then put all the projects into an online journal before graduation. Further, we welcome your input on the planning and execution of this--it is your thesis show, after all. If you would like to join the planning committee or have suggestions, email Virginia at vkuhn@cinema.usc.edu

-VK

The Ultimate Rube Goldberg Machine

2007-11-26T10:16:00.001-08:00

I am posting this mainly for Matt but thought you all might like to see it:

Congrats to Rachel!

2007-11-24T08:44:00.000-08:00

... for her $2000 grant from the School of Theatre to finish her thesis project. Below are some clips from her planning. Nice work!

Web page with tips for us

2007-11-20T13:24:00.000-08:00

Here is some script to help some of our projects: https://tiger.iml.annenberg.edu:8005/web.html

YouTube Custom Player

2007-11-15T16:40:00.001-08:00

Wanna watch a root canal operation?

2007-10-30T19:50:00.000-07:00

Looks like every possible procedure in almost every profession will eventually be filmed and placed online. People inevitably want to know more about what goes on.

This enterprising dentist has live demos of root canal, crowning, denture and air abrasion techniques on his web site, he spent a few thousand dollars, hired professionals to shoot the procedures, and apparently more and more patients have been coming to have their teeth done by him after watching his videos. Knowledge and increased disclosure do inspire confidence!

http://www.dentalcomfortzone.com/techniques.asp

Thesis Project Weekend 11/3-4

2007-10-24T14:11:00.000-07:00

Nov 3rd, 9 am - 2 pm
Nov 4th, 10 am - 5 pm

The IML will host a weekend "boot camp" for senior Honors students to work on their thesis projects. There will be help with and access to:

- Video Editing
- VoiceOver (w/Pro Tools)
- Dreamweaver
- Second Life
- Flash (custom with Dave Lopez--must arrange ahead)
- Sophie
- Feedback
- Camaraderie
- Commiseration

Come before the Homecoming Game Sat and/or all day Sunday and build your shell. This is a good time after mid terms and before finals. Lunch will be served. Both labs will be open and tech staff will be standing by.

For more info contact Virginia Kuhn (vkuhn@cinema.usc.edu)

Sweet Interactive Sketch Site

2007-10-21T18:47:00.000-07:00

Hey guys...

I know this doesn't really have anything to do with our class, but I thought it is a great example of what the internet and user interaction can come up with. See for yourself:

http://www.zefrank.com

See ya in class!

Olivia

Rachel Kerry Story Board Movie

2007-10-17T12:40:00.000-07:00

Here is the youtube of the storyboard I showed everyone last week.

Comments?

The Right One

2007-10-16T16:18:00.001-07:00

21st Century Students

2007-10-16T14:04:00.001-07:00

This is a new video from the creator of The Machine is Using Us:

Second Life project (machinima)

2007-10-09T11:50:00.000-07:00

Check out this machinima of the Second Life event held on IML's island last month. It may be a way for a few of you to represent your projects (or a portion thereof).

Vectors: Objects of Media

2007-10-04T10:41:00.000-07:00

This project, designed by Amelie Hastie and Raegan Kelly, is an interesting take on the multimedia experience. Conceptually it is multiple projects in one; a group of scholars produced their own “biography” of a material object, and then connected that object with a theme they wished to explore within their specific field – for example, an embroidered condom represents the marginalization of Asian gay men and their subsequent attempts to stand out. The project engaged the viewer by allowing him/her to pick an individual approach to the content. It explains in the beginning pages that the project is intended to be similar to a conversation rather than essay-istic. Like a conversation, the viewer is able to veer off on tangents (or longer explanations of a particular object).You can wander through the projects in any way you choose, however, whether by the objects themselves, their histories, or their scholarly reflections; or, one can choose to go through each project one at a time. What is unique is that all these exploration options are present on the screen at the same time, allowing the user to have their own experiences with the projects and not just a linear, text-based experience. The navigation of the project works well with the design of the
project itself. The main objects that appear in the design are circles and pluses. When moving between narratives you are able to move right, left, up and down... much like a plus (+) sign. Yet like a circle, the ever changing content keeps the viewer interested and eventually takes him/her full circle through the entire discussion, but is not so rigid as to make the user feel trapped in the project. We particularly liked the use of color to identify each narrative. Although the navigation became complicated at times, color identification for each subject was incredibly useful.

As the project’s introduction states, this technique allows each essay and its related object to “represent multiple threads of an exchange,” and as “segments of a broader, collective conversation.” We thought the project was engaging and seemingly random at times, mirroring a real-life conversation. Pictures for each topic was the closest the viewer was able to get to each physical object. Each object was mentioned as a starting off point to a later discussion of another related subject. It was effective in producing a very non-linear reading and learning process. At the end of the experience, we felt that we were looking at objects around me in a more global sense, so I felt that the project was not only effective in establishing the sense of a conversation but also in promoting this scholarly exchange in the users’ own settings.

Vectors: Dead Reckoning

2007-10-02T15:52:00.000-07:00

by Sonia and Tiffany

Caren Kaplan and Reagan Kelly’s Dead Reckoning is a very innovative project which details the historical significance of visual perspectives in military operation and their impact on visual culture. The project chooses four topical areas, Perspective, Chronophotography, Edge Detection, and Targeting. Within each segment, the user performs simple tasks, such as dragging an airplane across the screen or zooming in on an aerial photograph from World War II. The task, however rudimentary, serves as a visual introduction to aerial perspectives. During this process, text boxes appear with more detailed information about the action the viewer is performing. By allowing the viewer to virtually experience the perspective before reading about it, the viewer can contextualize the subject matter. Furthermore, Dead Reckoning rewards the user for interacting with the interface, displaying additional information as the user moves the airplane across the screen and succeeds in effectively engaging the user’s attention.

The multimedia aspect of Dead Reckoning is highly visually stimulating, using floating text boxes as yet another medium to communicate their controlling idea. The text boxes appear in sometimes rapid succession, obscuring one another and blocking the line of sight of the viewer. This forces the audience to manipulate the text boxes so that they can comprehend the screen layout, which speaks directly to their idea of visual perspectives. The only flaw in this setup is that some of the text boxes which are obscured cannot be brought forward, thus making it difficult for the viewer to fully experience all of the text and image.

The information presented within the text is not only about the history of perspectives and vision, but also about the application of these concepts to specific historical situations, such as Hiroshima and Desert Storm. While the material presented shows a wealth of research and effort, the diversity of the material seems to confuse the main idea of the project. The supposed topic is aerial perception and construction of targets, but these ideas are interspersed with portrait-like stories and other pointed political statements which, though of interest, serve to distract the viewer from the main thesis. Nevertheless, Kaplan and Kelly ultimately present a thoughtful and engaging experience for learning about the multiple portrayals of visual perspective through the context of military operations.

Panorama Ephemera - Reviewed by Olivia and Beth

2007-10-02T15:46:00.000-07:00

Plants to food to compost to soil to plants to food. Oceans to vapor to clouds to rain to rivers to oceans and back again. Ideas to pictures and sounds and words then to books and movies and music and then to shelves. There they lie, unseen, unheard, and unused.
– Rick Prelinger

In 2004, Rick Prelinger wrote and directed the feature film Panorama Ephemera, a “collage” of ephemeral films produced in the United States of the 1920s through 1970s that uses images both familiar and mythical to depict the fears and hopes of the American populace during these times. His contribution to the Vectors Journal is an extension of this film that serves to further explain his theories and reasons for archiving ephemeral films. On the one hand, this project is a straightforward intellectual piece that directs the user to Prelinger’s three main topical considerations. The first is his declared project Manifesto where Prelinger flatly declares the work of the archivist as a modern savior to an overpopulated and over stimulated popular culture. The second aspect of his project, where the most substance lies, is in the delineation of the four aspects of archiving ephemeral films. Here he delineates the events in media history that have dictated the career of the ephemeral archivist. And, lastly, Prelinger concludes his work with a short essay describing and defending the role of the archivist as a position perpetuating and expanding the possibilities of art. On the other hand, Prelinger moves away from a completely argumentative thesis with his chronological exploration of significant events in his life alongside advancements in his archiving of ephemeral films. The juxtaposition of this element with a non-linear collage of ephemeral films from the feature film Panorama Ephemera serves well to lay out the various aspects of Prelinger’s interests and theories in a comprehensive study of the ephemeral archivist.

Vectors Project "Malperception"

2007-10-02T15:44:00.000-07:00

Perry Hoberman & Donald Hoffman's project "Malperception" explores the way in which the human brain constructs reality based on data collected by sensing organs, and that while sometimes wrong takes are caused by failure to collect information about reality, quite often malperception occurs during the brain's translation of that information.

This controlling idea is apparent in an engaging and pedagogical context. The research is clearly extensive and the multimedia format allows each phenomenon to be divulged in its own respective manner.

The web exhibition is proportional to the project in that one can easily jump around from a static menu bar. Each link leads to a considerable amount of textual information that has been boiled down from its original state and broken up into short paragraphs and surrounded by images that keep it from feeling uninviting or daunting.

Overall the project does a great job at taking a large amount of information and making it easily browsed and digested. The one problem is that its supplemental interactive Shockwave demonstrations of the malperception principles being discussed are incompatible with new Mac computers running on Intel chipsets until Adobe updates the old macromedia plugins or Mac updates its OS.

- Dustin, Alexis, Xing

"Virtual Vaudeville" Vectors Close Reading

2007-10-02T12:36:00.000-07:00

By Ashley Hsieh, Rachel Kerry, and Matt Gerhardt

“Virtual Vaudeville” is a Vectors project by David Saltz, which tries to recreate the experience of historical vaudeville theater. The project is pedagogical, teaching laymen what vaudeville is, and introducing key vaudeville figures. Additionally, the project is experiential. “Virtual Vaudeville” recreates famous acts by Frank Bush in 3-D animation and allows the viewer to change audience perspectives. There are a variety of vantage points, including that of the performer. Additionally, the project includes a dialogue box with interesting facts about the performance.
The principle failure of the project is that the viewer does not feel connected to the performance. Because animation is used primarily to create a fantastical world, the audience is drawn in as a spectator, but not as a participating member. The viewer is never actively engaged in the 3-D performance recreation. Perhaps if it were done in live action, the project could be more compelling. Also, we believe that making the laughter surround-sound would be beneficial. With laughter coming from all around, the viewer will experience a more organic project (instead of the current artificial, laughter).
The project is set up for easy navigation by the viewer, but the program is not. The Performance Viewer cannot be viewed on a Mac. The viewer can watch the recreations as a QuickTime movie, but the experiential aspect and scholarly asides are lost.
The project is very interesting and makes a good point for the scholarly uses of video game design, etc. However, with a more user-friendly platform and a stronger attempt at viewer connection (perhaps an actual plot leading up to and after the performance, or an interactive game element) the project would be more engaging.

Article on MSN: Online community Second Life becomes venue for recruiting, interviewing

2007-10-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

From the article:
A few major companies have begun experimenting with this virtual world as an additional tool to find employees. In May TMP Worldwide, a recruiting firm, hosted its first virtual job fair called Network in World on Second Life.

“To date, more than 1,800 candidates have either registered for a NiW job fair and then applied for open positions, or have expressed interest in a position and then left their contact details for employers,” says Russell Miyaki, a vice president of the recruiting firm, adding that about 214 interviews have taken place and about four people have gotten jobs as a result.

Companies that have interviewed candidates at the virtual job fairs included Sodexho, the food management company that hired Giordano, as well as Microsoft and Verizon, among others.

"Competition on a global scale is forcing companies to look at innovative ways of both marketing and recruiting,” says Andrew Mallon, executive director of the Social Research Foundation, a consumer research firm that conducts opinion polls of Second Life members.

“Some industries will have a greater advantage or relevance in a virtual world like Second Life." he says. "For example, a high-tech recruiter in a virtual interview gets to see the initiative and interactive skills that job candidate put into creating the look of their avatar. But candidates should study the company in advance and come to the interview knowing what value they can bring to the employer. Following that standard rule still is a big plus. Then, instead of the old ‘Dress for Success,’ an avatar must ‘Impress for Success.’”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20588553/

Updated proposal

2007-09-21T15:20:00.001-07:00

hey guys,

I just put my proposal up but since I made the first draft a while ago it didn't show up as the most recent. So...unfortunately you have to scroll down a bit to see it. Sorry :(

Matt's Proposal

2007-09-18T21:09:00.000-07:00

Title: Roundabout 'Rithmatic - Expressing Engineering in a New Light

Abstract: Many facets of engineering arern't readily obvious to a non-engineer. This project hopes to lift the veil of engineering, by showing real-life examples of engineering in a Rube Goldberg-type machine. Different aspects of engineering will be portrayed as the machine progresses, and as it performs each task, the machine will explain the theories occurring. The segments of engineering that will be examined are kinematics, fluid dynamics, electricity, magnetism, light, and possibly chemistry and heat transfer. The machine works its way to the final task, which is turning on a light bulb. This is to represent both one of the more significant pinicles of engineering, and also to, hopefully, represent the lightbulb that goes off in the head of the viewer.

Media Presentation: This project will have two separate media components. First, there will be a tactile exhibit, which I feel is integral to the project, as it will show cohesive examples to those who will be able to view the project firsthand. However, this doesn't have as great a reach as I would like. Therefore, I will also be creating an internet component, which will have the entire project filmed, along with the theory behind each individual component explained online.

Alexis' Proposal in Short

2007-09-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

“Music is the universal language of mankind.” ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Title: The Language We Don't Talk About: Hearing Time and Place in Film Scores

Abstract: This project delves into the world of musical color, specifically in relation to the creation of the sensation of a time and place in cinema. It is an in-depth exploration of this aspect of film music and its relationship with American culture via YOU (any American). This project argues the musical color in film scores has become a national language by comparing score motifs internationally and within American pop culture. It is targeted for any film listener (even the blind). It will be a pedagogical, interactive website (flash or html) that, if time permits, may launch a multi-layered, interactive game (flash).

Media Presentation & Justification: This thesis will include a flash website with film clips, sound clips, visual images, and game devices to allow decision making in order to let the user to declare their own connotations when they hear score motifs. This project should be in multimedia because "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" -Zappa. Also, this project requires the allowance of users to make decisions in a way that cannot be done in an essay. It is a personal discovery best revealed through interactivity.

Sonia's Newest Proposal

2007-09-16T12:15:00.000-07:00

I am studying the relationships of the concepts of duality within science and various religions. In science, especially physics, many of the important driving concepts have been forged using the idea of duality. This is how we discovered antiparticles, normal forces, and gravitational forces. I would like to explore dualistic relationships within religion, and find any correlations between those of religion and those of science. It is my belief that our reason for viewing our world "in pairs" stems from the ancient religions of our ancestors, and religion has always had a very important influence on scientific progress.
The religions that I will be researching are the religions of the more scientifically advanced civilizations, such as the Aztecs, the Greeks, etc. I also want to touch on the psychological aspect of duality, and why we, as human beings, feel the need to see everything with duality. Even when we cannot witness them, we claim that there are opposites to everything, that there are forces we cannot feel, dimensions we cannot see, microscopic symmetries and particles. Is it solely due to our social construction of the world, or is it possibly the way our mind works?

Platform:
I think that project will be done through Sophie. I want to make each segment a short movie clip or animation, and place them within some small amount of text. I think that having this platform makes the project much more interesting, and I'm hoping the animations will help explain some of the more complicated physical concepts. I also will do several interviews with both scientists and religious figures, as well as professors of religion. These will be interspersed throughout the project, with "hot buttons" to click to other segments or explanations. It's still a work in progress...I'm thinking about it!

Tiffany's second attempt

2007-09-15T16:18:00.001-07:00

I am studying how everyday personal and social decisions affect happiness because I want to demonstrate how economic principles can explain differences in people’s self-reported levels of happiness. By doing so, I am trying to help the average person gain a better understanding of the discrepancies between perception and reality in the relationship between decisions and experiences and in turn, the user may learn simple concepts in economic theory in order to make more informed decisions that will have a positive effect on his happiness. Hence, my goal is to help the average layman learn about how to use economic analyses to make better decisions. I want my project to be both interactive and informative, and since I want this tool to be accessible to everyone, I may design my project as an online website.

Firstly, I am defining “happiness” as subjective well-being, quantifiable only by the user as a reflection of her personal level of satisfaction. I am going about making the argument that the average person does not correctly forecast or backcast his experienced happiness by developing a tool or simulation that mimics the process of making a decision. This may be accomplished by a four-fold method: 1. Have the user complete a questionnaire related to what is to be learned or decided upon. 2. The user will make an actual decision or complete a simple task similar to those summarized in textbooks. 3. The user will complete a post-task survey. 4. A results section will use economic analysis to explain their decision. The goal is to have the user come to the realization that their perception of a decision may be different from the actual outcome because the average person fails to take into consideration changes in aspirations and adaptation, as well as other social and economic forces that play a role in determining one’s happiness. Therefore, my contention is that the people do not accurately predict which actions will actually result in significant (lasting) improvements in their happiness.

The platform will be similar to a website with surveymonkey attached

My topic is narrow enough to cover in depth. I have not yet commenced any interviews, but believe that they may not be necessary if sufficient published material is available to reference. However, the details of my interface and planning process are rather vague and need to be carefully tailored to further the goal of this project and teach the average person how happiness relates to economics through a multimedia experience. Some other experiments I have identified that may be incorporated in the project are:
- The desire to see rewards for progress: People would rather choose to earn $30,000 one year, $40,000 the next, then $50,000 the following year, rather than earn $60,000, $50,000, and then $40,000, even though the latter is greater in absolute dollars. This experiment also introduces the ideas of aspiration and adaptation. I would probably go about doing this through a survey of 2-3 short questions relating to financial and social reward, followed by an explanation about why the user selected the answer she chose, and whether or not such choice was consistent with economic ideology.
- Remembering a general idea, but not details: Subjects reviewing a list of words will recall a general idea about the words, but do not remember them exactly and their mind will “fill in the blanks” and summarize, creating an inaccurate recollection of the event.
- Peak-end theory: What a subject remembers about an event is determined most strongly by the peak and end of the experience. For example, subjects would prefer to submerge their hands in ice water for a longer amount of time and then in warm water, than to submerge their hands in ice water for a significantly shorter amount of time, due to the peak-end theory.

Olivia's Proposal

2007-09-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

Here's a brief recap of my proposal -

Content:

The focus of my thesis argument surrounds the edification of campy B teen sci-fi/fantasy films of the 1980s as academically, scholastically, and historically valuable. Namely, I will be taking a cultural studies approach to the genre to explore how these films reflect their era, their creators, and how they reflect the dominant (or counter-culture) ideology. The fact is that "B films" are not generally seen as viable sources for mainstream film studies and are instead relegated to cult phenomena. While I understand that these films did not play a particularly obvious or intentional role in the construction/advancement of film history and language, it is also obvious that their role is severely under represented. The fact that they do have a fan following proves that they are playing a role in film. It is my objective to show how these films have affected the bigger budget Blockbusters throughout the decades and, most importantly, to show the 1980s as a decade when "B films" were not in the film world but a key element in the development of the modern day Blockbuster.

Format:

My media presentation of this thesis will be displayed as an interactive website. The user will be able to choose from a selection of categories that will each display different information on the genre (a time line of the progression of the genre, a flash video with hyperlinked pop up windows that display further information on the content, and a game/quiz page where the user can test their knowledge of the era and/or films). Aesthetically, I am really aiming to have the feel of a fan-based website. I will definitely be drawing from other websites based on B-films for inspiration. I want the users to not feel bombarded with information but instead be interested in the theories and facts they might not have thought about. To encourage the users to express their own analysis and share information, I want each page to have an interactive commentary. Here the users can annotate the given information, find links to other relevant sites, and identify further references or examples. Also, ideally there would be a link on each page to a forum where the users can discuss/contest the site content and hold open discussions about the genre.

So, that's all for now!

Beth's Proposal

2007-09-13T19:21:00.000-07:00

Toxin-Antitoxin Pairs in Escherichia coli

BACKGROUND
Toxin-antitoxin (TA) pairs are gene pairs that encode a stable toxin protein and a labile antitoxin protein. In a healthy cell, the toxin protein and the antitoxin protein bind together to form a complex that is harmless to the cell. If, however, the cell loses the gene pair, production of the two proteins ceases, the unstable antitoxin is rapidly degraded, and the toxin accumulates, eventually poisoning and killing the cell. There are at least ten of these TA pairs on the E. coli genome, and we want to figure out why they're there. We believe that these TA pairs exist as part of a quality control mechanism that protects the larger, healthy population by causing a damaged cell to enter a programmed cell death pathway. We know that in competition, a population of E. coli cells lacking just one TA pair is less fit than a wild type population containing all ten of the TA pairs. Thus the focus of my research is to determine a hierarchy of fitness for seven of these TA pairs, that is, the order of importance of seven of these TA pairs. I will be utilizing basic microgiological and newer molecular biological technqiues to accomplish this.

IML THESIS PROJECT
My IML thesis will be a Flash-based, interactive multimedia version of a written scientific paper. This project is intended for a scientific community, but should be relatively accessible to a larger audience. The final project will consist of the basic components of a scientific paper - Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion and Conclusion, References (though perhaps not presented as such) - as well as several multimedia components (illustrations, animations, videos, etc.) that will explicate difficult subject matter and illustrate important aspects of the research endeavor.

Rachel Kerry's proposal

2007-09-07T17:20:00.000-07:00

My IML Project is going to focus on developing multimedia performance art.

While multimedia is very chic for the theatre world right now, very few artists are successful in their attempts to fully integrate it onto the stage. The novelty of these new forms rarely supports creative content. In response, many theatre companies are chucking new media and embracing the manifestos of physical artists (such as Grotowsky)

Using an original script, I intend to produce a full length play that integrates multimedia into the artistic language of the stage. In addition to that, I mean to create a smaller scale (yet more multimedia reliant) performance that focuses primarily on one character's 15 minute monologue.

At this point, the piece is conceptually simple. Three hanging scrims with multimedia tableaus as a means to articulate the emotional landscapes of the piece. The key will be to find a way in which the actor can interact with the media instead of relying on it (or worse, ignoring it).

By December I hope to have the smaller-scale piece prepared as well as the pre-rehearsal arrangements for full-scale production.

Elissa Stooker's proposal

2007-09-07T14:55:00.001-07:00

The Third Wheel: The Relationship between Radio, the Record Companies, and the Government
Working in radio this summer, I came to realize that no one in the general public knows what REALLY goes on behind the scenes in radio. I would like to create either a fun DVD or website that will explain how radio works, how the record companies work with radio, and the kinks that new payola regulations have thrown in this relationship.

I'd like to set it up as following:
- a diagnostic quiz to figure out what, if anything the user knows.
- an explanation of what payola is. a definition, history, and the current regulations
- a choice of whether to act as a record company or a radio station manager. the record company view will allow the user to act as a record company in dealing with radio, and learning about that relationship. the radio will act as the radio and view the relationship from the opposite perspective. throughout this exploration examples of radio/record company interaction will pop up, allowing the user to learn what to do. for instance, a box of CDs will appear in the radio office, and you will have to log them in the system in order to continue.
- finally, a quiz with consequences. if you pass, you'll get a raise, and if you fail, you'll get fined!

Ashley Hsieh's proposal

2007-09-05T15:58:00.001-07:00

My thesis project is about Wong Kar-wai's film Chungking Express and what it reveals about the relationship between the transnational and the local. The film is heavily influenced by foreign and transnational elements. For example, the characters speak different languages other than Cantonese, the characters eat Western food and listen to America, raggae and Punjabi music. The space in which the characters occupy is heavily transnational, a merger of different and unexpected cultures. I want to ask the audience whether Chungking Express reflects a Hong Kong devoid of local "Hong Kong" culture or whether the Hong Kong portrayed is a reflection of how modern and global the city actually is. If I don't have enough time to do this, I think I'll just narrow it down to how Chungking Express reveals the transnational nature of Hong Kong although I consider that to be sort of boring and probably not as "multimedia" friendly.

My project will be an interactive DVD. It will basically open with a video of the history of Hong Kong: how it used to be a territory of China and part of its tianxia, or cultural kingdom, how it was colonized by Britain for 99 years and became a territory of free trade, thereby attracting a number of foreign investors and its eventual return to China in 1997 (although it will not be under Chinese governmental control until 2047). Because the film takes place in 1994, I will not go in depth about 1997 but rather use it as a date of apprehension.

There will then be three platforms: the first explores a bar and the transnational elements present in Chungking Express; the second explores an apartment or hotel and explores the identity crises present in the film; and the last is where you decide whether the film is a criticism of Hong Kong's lack of local culture or is merely a reflection of Hong Kong as a global city.

Tiffany Ikeda's proposal

2007-09-05T15:57:00.001-07:00

Xing Chen's proposal

2007-09-05T15:55:00.000-07:00

I am going to conduct lab research in an aspect of Neuroscience and then use my procedures and my findings to create a multimedia presentation. The project will be strengthened by similar research and findings which I will also present in multimedia. Since my lab situation is not yet solidified, I am laying out the project as a frame into which the work will ultimately be placed. I'm focused on quality of content above anything else, but work involving imaging, network pathways, communication between brain regions, should lend itself decently to a media presentation. Right now, I am planning the possible ways of laying out the background research, goals, methods, and so on and the modes of presenting the info with visuals, and links to pertinent sources such as websites and journals. Using multimedia, I will be able to show more complexity than using words alone.

Updated proposals for those who got short-shifted

2007-09-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

Again, I apologize to those of you who did not get a chance to speak in class. Go ahead and register in order to comment, all of you, and, meanwhile I will add a post for each person who will then be able to add their information (if you've trouble, just email it to me for posting) and each of us will then comment by Friday. My records show that the following people didn't get a chance today: Xing, Ash, Tiffany, Rachel & Elissa. Eventually we will all have work up here.....

Today's class

2007-09-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

We have a lot of work today so I thought I'd post an agenda to keep us on task:

- portal login
- look for common times (again) Mon, Thu, Fri
- class on 9.18
- quick & dirty feedback on proposals (everyone jots notes on pages provided)
- identify your 3 action steps and email them to me (vkuhn@usc.edu w/"440 steps as subject line) by Friday 9.7 at 5:00 pm. action steps can include: annotation of main sources, storyboarding, script, platform tutorial/workshop, survey creation/feedback, draft in selected platform...

I am afraid for youth...

2007-08-28T11:09:00.000-07:00

Welcome!

2007-08-27T16:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Gang,

We have an exciting year ahead of us and this term will set the pace. The good news is we are devoting all of our time to the planning and construction of your thesis projects. As such, this is a lab-based class and we will do extensive workshopping of your projects. There are several dates on our schedule, many of which are imposed upon us by the university (grrr) but your IML management team is on the job and has planned accordingly! (That is the less-good news).

This blog is for both sections of 440, Tuesday 4-6 pm (Kuhn) and Wednesday 6-8 pm (Bray). Check here often and we encourage you to contribute.

More about our first few weeks together to come. Stay tuned.

Your fearless leaders,
Virginia Kuhn & Anne Bray