Marshall McLuhan

I found this one a little strange, since it wasn't so much a topic but instead related to someones work and the effect it had.

We looked at McLuhan's law of media. It states every medium Extends, Reverses, Retrieves and Obsolesces.

One I remember is a Car. Extends - Speed. Reverses - Pollution. Retrieves - Age of Knights. Obsoleces - Horse.

My example would be a console. Although I'm not sure if it will be right.

Gaming Consoles: Extends - Entertainment, Vision. Reverses - Surroundings. Retrieves - Decisions - Focus. Obsolces - Board games.

I think that is correct.

Structuralism

This time we were focusing on structuralism and the binary opposition model.

With this we looked at opposites, for example we had:

Life - Death
light - Dark
Land - Sea/Sky
male - female
white - black
human - non human/cyborg

These weren't fully opposite, since males and females share more in common than have differences.

One I thought was quite remarkable, which I surprisingly had never heard of, was GOD and Devil. They were considered opposites and they also shared a sort of word play upon their spelling. God with an extra o is Good and Devil without the D is Evil.

They also had binary opposites in Films such as Frakenstein. Light - Dark, Sane - Crazy, Danger - Safety.

Binary opposites are used mostly in films to help exaggerate and highlight how drastic something is. An example that comes to mind is the Simpsons Movie. He states that he wants 10,000 tough guys and 10,000 soft guys to make the tough guys look tougher. Soft and Tough = Binary Opposites.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDUR7YBSZ8o

Intertextuality

I've finally got an idea what I'm suppose to write now.
Ivan went through it in class and show us his example.
Since finding this out, I've got back into my previous post and highlighted some of it in blue (the parts which were most important and not just me explaining what we did).

Below is a video, I took, briefly of Ivan showing us what type of things we should write.

In the video it mentions that the rock-drill shares resemblance to the driod figure from Star-wars. Although I concur that they do look similar, I believe that this intertextuality was not done purposely.

Battle Droid (1999)


Rock-drill (1913)


If it wasn't done intentionally, as I believe (and there is no evidence) then this would be called unconscious intertextuality. This would imply that the battle droid wasn't intended to show any resemblance. However, there could be a chance that it was subconsciously made, in which the creator of the battle droid had seen the Rock-drill previously.

Concious intertextuality would be making remakes of films like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.



A quote I do like though, is "The fundamental concept of intertextuality is that no text, much as it might like to appear so, is original". Although this may have been possible very early on.

Another example of concious intertextuality would be Harry Potter the film. It started off as a successful book and others consciously used intertextuality to make film from it. Similarly to the video games they created after. This could almost be seen as an Echo of the story.

Intertextuality doesn't have to be a whole film, but instead can be just a small joke used in the film relating to anther film. It wouldn't even have to be a film, it could be anything.

Reminds me of the Kanye West incident in 2009 whereby he went up on stage whilst Taylor Swift was on there and said the following "Imma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time!! One of the best videos of all time!

Since then many people have been making memes of that incident in different scenarios.


In fact, a large amount of internet memes come from intertextuality. (I think I'm on a roll).

Sources
http://culttvman.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/crdroid01.jpg
http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/T/T00/T00340_8.jpg
http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BNjcxMjg1Njg2NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjQ4NzMzMw@@._V1._SY317_CR0,0,214,317_.jpg
http://www.popcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Kanye-West-Imma-Let-You-Finish.jpg

Semiotics

Last lesson we went through Semiotics.

Also, just before I start, I spoke to Ivan briefly about the blog and it turns out I've been doing it a little wrong. I shouldn't really explain what happened (even if it is showing my understanding of it), but instead just explain what I learnt and what it reminded me of.

Semiotics is how we interpret things. For exmaple, the first circle(1a) with two circles inside and a line is interprited as a simple face. The second image(1b) is portrayed as Hitler due to the mustache drawn on. Finally, once the hat was added to 1c, it no longer looked like Hitler, but instead Charlie Chaplin.

Distinct features were shown in each to establish what the drawing was of. 1a has a signifier of two circles and a line within a circle which signifies a face to us, due to it's format.

I liked also going into iconic and arbitary.

We'd have a scale

Iconic |----------------------------------------------------------------| Arbitary
The more iconic it is, the bettter it signifies what it is.
The the order of most Iconic to Arbitary.
Video, Photo, 3D Designed, Drawing, Word.

Ferdinand de Saussure - one of the 'founding fathers' of semiotics.
Charles Sanders Peirce - 1860's began writing about semiotics.
Roland Barthes - Use the technique of semotics in his work.

Then we did denotation and connotation, something of which I've come across many times but never really got what it meant. In a way, quite similar to signifer and signified, denotation and connotation are defined by what it is and what it suggests.

A good example of this would be with colours. The denotation is the colour and connotation is what the colour represents. Red could represent love and death and green could represent safety and health.

The same can be said with emotions.




Finally we looked at Syntagm and Paradign.

This lead us onto Clockwork Orange how the main character would wear all these items of clothes which represent different things and almost mash it together, giving off a very strange - yet appealing look. Also he whore white in the movie, this was quite strange as most people don't wear white, since it can get dirty easily. However he decided to wear white, which could be so that all the blood stains etc act as trophies for things that he's done. This would also scare people and keep them away from him.

Rough Magic

My last blog post was on my birthday, todays my dads birthday. Haaa

Some state we were suppose to do the week before the Cybernetics post, others say we aren't. I'm not entirely sure, but I'll do one anyway. It happened two weeks ago on the 4th.

The thing which stood out to me that week was this old map that dated back to 6,200BC (not sure how I remembered that). The map stood out from everything else because of how different it looked compared to most maps we would see nowadays. They designed it in such a way in which it would only be clear to those living in the area the map was designed of, rather than those who had never been there and trying to get around (which is the reason most maps are designed now). There were no street names or keys, but that was fine because at the time, it met it's purpose.

I've got another lecture with Ivan tomorrow :)

1st Blog Post | Cybernetics

I've heard many rumours about people writing really long blogs and then their computer crashing or their iPhone freezing etc.
Not particularly something I want, so I'm going to save this every 5 minutes.

Update 14/10/11 (19:30) The blog is very big so I've highlighted the important parts in blue

On Tuesday, we had some man come in... My memory is a little foggy and I'm also exciting it's my Birthday today. Which is awesome. I think the guys name was Alan anyway.

And from what I do remember, he wanted two people to move their tables so he could set up his experiment. The tables were parallel to each other and he got two people to sit at those tables - one at each, back to back. Both tables had wooden shapes on them, exactly the same on each table.

It looked just like this.. well kind of.
So Alan would take one guys set of blocks, (lets say the red guy) and put them in a certain pattern. Then the red guy would have explain to the blue guy where to place the blocks to get them looking exactly the same as his set. The blue guy would only be allowed to say "Repeat please". I found this experiment fascinating for a number of reasons, one because it taught me how vague some people can be with instructions. Secondly because it looked at communication in a different light.

Here is a little diagram Alan showed us.


This isn't the complete one, but one of what I've explained so far.

S - Signal
I - Information
M - Movement
R - Receiver
T - Transmitter


The diagram basically states that we transmit information through movement and signal (vocal), to the receiver.

I thought it was strange that Alan said we could say the instructions to each other in a different language, as opposed to English, if we so wished. Later I began to realise he had a good reason for this. Although obvious, it was a common language we all needed in common for this diagram to actually make sense.

By the end of it, things had switched up a little. Alan got people to distract the guy giving instructions to where his blocks were. By making noise, it made the instructions harder to give.

The diagram now looked like this

This version made much more sense as it bared in mind that a common language was needed and that unwanted signal would make it harder for the reciever to hear and the transmitter to give an as clear signal.

I believe this was called the Process Model of Communication.
I also recall Shannon and Weaver being mentioned so I can only assume they made it, but after some research using Google and I safely say that assumption was correct.

I had a go at doing this block thing, where I had to give instructions to the person behind me where the cubes were. Something which made me proud was that my instructions were clear enough for the other person to easily replicate the blocks positions which I saw in front of me. Although, with that being said, one block was still out of place. Still the best in the class though ;)

Alan then went on to write on the board in the class, he began to mention other people like Norbert Weiner and what he had done. He showed us cybernetics, the communication between humans and machines.

Due to my MSPaint skills, here is a slightly complicated version of the diagram. But all information is intact and there.

It shows the process of the things which need to be done in order for a human to interact with a computer and for the computer to create a noticeable result on the render display.




He then went on to talk about how computers for children and adults are completely different.

For children, they want the game to be exactly the same each time they play it. Like Super Mario Brothers. Whilst older people like the unpredictability of games, which keeps them entertained. Like online games such as Call Of Duty and Battlefield.

I also made a note to myself that I should use Google to define Aporia and Epiphany to find out what they mean. These were words that he used which I did not understand.

Aporia:- The pause in the flow
Epiphany - Insight usually sudden.

I know these blogs are more suppose to be about what I thought of the lesson and not necessarily what we done. But I did really enjoy the first part and remembered it really well and understood everything.

I have a bunch of notes in the book regarding the lesson, including his name - Alan.

So much so, that it would be almost impossible to transcribe in this blog, particularly when as time went on, it become harder to understand what he was talking about.

Important words would be the follow: Redundant, Reptition, Action, Display, Cognition, Algorith, Aporia, Epipthony, Render, Cybernetics.

A name was also given which would do wonders for me. Espen J Aarseth.
I'll be sure to research that name when the time comes.

For now, I need to stretch from sitting down too long and enjoy the rest of my Birthday :)