Aesthetics: July 2006 Archive Page

--Wintergreen ''When I Wake Up'' (KeithSchofield.com)

Is this for real?

I'm not so sure the song goes with the images, but it's still awesome.

Qui ne se souvient pas du SPACE INVADERS, lun des premiers jeux vidéo -- Aux commandes d'un vaisseau, il s'agissait de défendre la Terre contre des escadrilles d'envahisseurs venus de l'espace... Et bien, la plus grande partie de SPACE INVADERS de la planète a eu lieu le 24 juin 2006 au festival Belluard.

--Space Invaders (notsonoisy.com)

A beautiful film project, that challenges our notions of spectatorship by reversing the gaze of the video screen, turning each pixel into a human being who gazes back at us, all of them powerless in their participation in the enactment of a space battle simulation that always ends in destruction.

Or I don't know... maybe it's just cool.

And yes, Liz's face registers the shift between thinking Jon is sweet and deeply weird, but the sudden retraction of her hand from Garfield's back seals the deal: she wants so little to do with Jon that even touching his cat feels wrong. --''Uh...'' (Garfield: Permanent Monday)

The world needs more daily critical analyses of Garfield cartoons. No, really.

--Muppet Wiki  (Muppet.Wikia.com)

Too much information on the muppets. Way, way too much.

The best students will learn, retain and understand the material they are taught in class no matter how it is presented. However, there are many students in the class who do not have the attention span to concentrate for the whole lesson, who get distracted or do not do the required reading because they are simply not interested. It is these students who benefit from the circus approach to teaching. --Marc Zimmer --Life in the Circus (Inside Higher Ed)

This observation of Zimmer's isn't presented as a complaint; instead, he sees the situation as an audience awareness issue, and analyzes the various ways that professors can meet the students' desire for inspiration and spectacle.

--Troy Sterling and the Active and Passive Verbs (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I created this with Impress, the Open Office slideshow presenter, and exported it as a Shockwave file. I'm amazed at how tiny the resulting file is. It looks like a few effects didn't make the transition, but they were just eye candy.

I designed this as a simple linear slide show, for me to present in the front of the room. In this online version, all you can do is click to advance to the next page. It should at least have multiple-choice questions, in order to ensure that a bored reader isn't just clicking through on autopilot. (At any rate, it's more entertaining than my more traditional online guide to Active and Passive Verbs.)

This is just a bit of practice, as I continue to experiment with various media production tools.

I've also downloaded Jahshaka, an open-source video editing tool, but it crashed on my little wimpy laptop. I'll try it again when I get some time at the office.

--The Information Machine (YouTube)

A fascinating vintage piece of rhetoric. It skips a bit in the opening, but settles down quickly.

The images of room-sized computers and stacks of punch cards made me swoon. The narrator's patient voice and the final image -- of a rose fading into a heart -- show an concerted effort to make computer technology into a continuation of the human effort to make functional and beautiful order out of the world, rather than something to fear.

Note the gender-specific roles assigned to the cartoon characters -- a room full of white-coated female operators of some sort is followed by a very white, very male boardroom. We can't fault the film too much for being a product of its time, of course.

The content is visionary for 1957, the year of Sputnik, when science fiction heroes were battling giant mosters and robots that looked like walking water coolers. It's also interesting to see how computer scientists introduced the idea of mathematical simulation to the general public.