Notes from class today

Here are notes from class today;

We looked at terms from the paper. We then applied the terms to a movie clip we watched.

Then we watched a youtube clip about a touch interaction, and applied the terms from the Lacey paper.

Then we had a discussion about novel interactions and symbolism, and a wee bit ‘o speculation about how to think about new systems.

P.S. If someone else has notes, please feel free to add them. You can either add them as a comment or create an entirely new post; however, it might be nice to have all of the notes in this section.

Chung-Ching and Jen ARE AWESOME! Thanks for the discussion.

A close reading of WoW tear-jerker

So I decided to look at a bit of machinima made from WoW clips set to the song “Here Without You” by 3 Doors Down. It has been an interesting journey. It is incredible to think that some clips from World of Warcraft set to a cheesy late 90’s love-rock song could make me misty-eyed. I dare you to watch this video multiple times and not be moved at least a little bit.

Cheat sheet!

If we were to create a cheat sheet for Interaction culture, what would it look like? (all the fancy terms, with a two line simple explanation and a bull’s eye example). I propose that all of us do this as a class.

Currently struggling to understand these three terms – structuralist view, hermeneutic view, phenomenological view! What’s the difference? How do they fit with each other? Please provide comments or feel free to add your own terms (with or without explanations). Let’s cheat!

Here is a video from one of my favorite movies – Ratatouille. For those of you who have not watched it yet (please do), Remy (the protoganist) makes ratatouille (a vegetable stew). Anton Ego is this big shot food critic who is a hard ass, extremely critical, hard to please and is very skeptical about the stew. The below scene is when he tastes it and is completely floored by the taste since it reminds him of his mother making him this dish during his childhood.

Now let’s try to put on different goggles and see this video again.

Structuralist goggles – The stew was good because it had tomatoes, carrots, beans, etc, cut and cooked perfectly. What is the ingredient? How do we identify it?

Non-phenomenological hermeneutic goggles – The stew is usually prepared during summer. This is because most of the standard ingredients grow during summer. No lifeworld involved.

Phenomenological hermeneutic goggles – The stew is considered as a poor man’s dish since most of the standard ingredients are not expensive.

Non-hermeneutic phenomenological goggles – Anton Ego’s experience is the perfect example for this. Tasting this stew transports him back to his memories.

Am I right? Please correct me if I am wrong.

WWE Technical Semiotics

So after reading this first introduction about semiotics, and while watching WWE’s Monday Night Raw, it got me thinking about how the theme music they use is loaded with semiotic cues for us to gain insights about the lifeworlds of the wrestler we’re about to watch. I thought it was kinda cool, so I thought I would try some explainin’. This is an older video (from 2007), but the first 2:30 is what I’ll be talking about and worth looking at from a semiotic-ian standpoint.

Mind Barf – just sharing

My selected interaction follows:

Still working on refining my argument–here’s the mind barf:

My Claims:

- This interaction is successful at being entertaining/stimulating to the intended audience
- The designers were able to understand the lifeworlds of the fans/audience and hold true to the ‘rules’ of the world of the series
- The dialogue spoken in the actor’s voices (Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi), the humorous interaction of the player abusing the sidekick, and the fact that the game holds true to the mise-en-scene of the film series all together holistically create a pre-ontological experience for the player that allows them to act and do things with the controls ready-at-hand, which therefore allows them to become fully engaged in this particular game world.

Argument?: One of the more prominent interactions designed into the video game “Evil Dead: Regeneration” where the player, who assumes the lead role of Ash (Bruce Campbell) from the Evil Dead series, is encouraged and able to “use and abuse” his companion sidekick Sam, is an interaction designed for the life-worlds of a specific audience, and through a phenomenological understanding of their audience’s life worlds, and through an understanding of the intersubjectivity for what is funny and entertaining to this specific audience, the designers were able to successfully create a fun and enjoyable experience for fans of the series and players of the game.

Ok, thanks for replies,

-Joe

When is a movie just entertainment and not social discourse?

So I’ve been struggling with this issue in my head since the Mulhall article on Aliens. And now after reading another film critique, I have to ask myself. “When is a movie just supposed to be a movie?”. I found myself several times when reading Mulhall underlining things and saying to myself, “No, that’s just how horror films work.”

Now this is not to say the same for the Double Life of Veronique and it’s review. But why do we as critics have to always find something? I guess I see it like if you’re looking for trouble you’ll find trouble. Are we really finding things the director put in to make us think about life and philosophy? Or, and this is what I think too often, are we creating that narrative for ourselves, and ignoring the true intensions of the author.

Again, I don’t want to take anything away from the Kieslowski’s work or his intensions, because I believe some of the metaphors mentioned in the Kickasola article where in fact intentional. But where do we draw the line between someone just trying to make an entertaining horror flick and someone trying to make social commentary about feminism. I don’t know many feminists, but I don’t remember them lining up to go see Alien. I do remember a bunch of Sci-Fi geeks with half beards and pony tails outside the theatre though. Hmm…

Maybe if there was a film that was just an empty room with a clock ticking and the second hand was moving backwards. Now there’s a film with MEANING!

..jaMEs

It’s a Walk Off!

So here’s another video to try to bring some of the concepts we have been talking about together for the past couple of weeks into a juicy video that we can also laugh at: it’s the walk off scene from Zoolander. This is one of my favorite movies ever, and it’s for a lot of reasons that I won’t put here. Anyways, enjoy the video, and there’ll be my post after it.

Using Zoolander as a Synopsis

There are many different reasons for using Zoolander, and I’ll just start with the facts that David Bowie and Michael Jackson are represented in this video, so we’ll use that as a baseline. Also, since we just finished talking about men’s fashion, I’ll take a brief (haha – there’s a pun if you watched the video) look into this.

So Derek Zoolander challenges Hansel to a walk-off as a way to prove that he’s still got the skills to be the best male model out there. He struts his stuff in what I can only imagine to be designer red leather clothes that he can easily throw off to the crowd, as the clothes end up augmenting his skills as a model. They empower him to be better at his craft: male modeling. They are also his identity (mer-man!), as he has known nothing else in his life besides modeling. He’s got the perfect complexion, and also “his hair looks really really good with gel in it”, and the clothes become his second skin, as he becomes super comfortable in them – they are his work after all. They also show the viewer that this second skin that he wears all the time, coupled with his physical prowess, make people think that he is really, really not intelligent. Derek wants kids to be able to read good, too, and that’s a healthy aspiration for anyone to have. The film also shows Derek trying to overcome what he knows and his clothes make others think he is as well, which is what I also got out of the men’s clothing reading. There is more to people than what the clothes they wear, even though this is the only readily accessible access point to their lifeworld. I wonder how we can compare these male models to real male models – what differences would we end up finding?

So also, why do I keep end up talking about clothing and interpretation in this class? This is a central issue I believe is at play in my capstone, and the only way for me to begin to understand a theoretical viewpoint is for me to keep expressing it out loud to everyone.

And Hansel is trying to earn a living, but he’s just as scared of other male models too, which says volumes about the total package of clothing and body posture. That says a lot about phenomenology to me, how bout you?

Also, we should get a chance to bring everyone together to watch this: it’s loaded with different aspects for us to take to the critique table.

(^^)V

Hangover recreated

I am normally one of the last people to watch movies maybe because am cheap and wait for them to be five dollars also because am easily distracted and like watching DVDs where I have the authority to pause whenever I am distracted….normally I watch a movie in thirds so a movie night with me normally does not work. Below I will describe my experience with the movie Hangover which I am sure many people have watched and if you have not am sorry for spoilers. I will also use some Kenyan imagery, some language expression that I will explain down at comments also if I use a word or expression that you do not understand please ask me. Also I really doubt this is a critic Oh well.

Hangover, the movie, is like my life dressed up in a tuxedo. You would feel the same way too if you were to watch it from beneath a mushroom cloud of smoke, smelly socks and whiffs of sweat, like I did.

There is something about Junior’s Video Parlour, where I watched this movie last Friday that manages to peel the glamour off Hollywood; turn all that tinsel into post-midnight Cinderella. I used to think it was the bad quality DVDs, you know, those grainy 40-in-1s with subtitles- that you cannot disable- in a language that appears to be Chinese with an English accent. But now I think otherwise. It must be the social and economic distance. The distance between the actors and the spaces where their made up realities are played out and us and the spaces from which we observe them.

Anyway, it is not like we a reviewing a Warner Herzog film for the New Yorker or something, so let us cut the quasi-intelligent musings. Hangover is one hell of a funny movie. Even when you are watching it on a camera copy dubbed by an idiot who decided to: a) Sit too far left of the movie theatre giving you more theatre wall than screen in most frames; b) Enjoy the movie rather than film its screening and as he laughed into his mike gave the movie the feel of a broken fourth wall and with his body shaking with glee, the camera calls attention to itself like a bad version of that scene in Children of Men (2006) where blood from the shoot splashes on the camera; c) sit behind an incontinent guy who when he isn’t getting up and walking right through your screen, manages to keep his long, shabby hair in it all the time. Simply put, this movie is straight out hilarious, no technical challenges in watching it can get in the way of the laughs.

Hangover doesn’t pretend to be anything but a comedic guy flick, thus to judge it outside of these parameters is not to do it a disservice as much as to hoist it on a pedestal that it neither deserves or demands. It is not the movie for you if you are looking for that new; edgy; ground breaking comedy. That is unless you have never heard the phrase, ‘what happens in Vegas stays there,’ or watched a movie premised on amnesia.

With writing credits including the John Lucas & Scott Moore duo that gave us the considerably hilarious Four Christmases, Hangover’s plot is quite simple. Doug is getting married to Tracy Garner and so his boys, Stu and Phil, decide to take him to Vegas on his last night as a bachelor. Tracy’s brother, Alan, Stu and Phil’s reservations notwithstanding, tags along. They head out in Tracy’s dad’s treasured old school Mercedes Benz convertible, which he has graciously entrusted to Doug.

Once in Vegas, after checking into the Caesers Palace, the guys go to the roof to toast to a great night out. The next we know is that they are passed out in their hotel room with a chicken clucking about, a tiger in the bathroom and a toddler in the closet. Two things are conspicuously missing from this tableau that is evidence of tremendously wild night out: Everyone’s recollection of the past night and the bridegroom. The movie then turns into this epic of hilarity as the present trio seeks to find their memories and the bridegroom with only a few hours to go before the wedding.

Even as I laughed right through this movie, I couldn’t help checking myself every time the thought of the number of times I have woken up in weird places and situations and with all the events over the past couple of hours or even days being able to fit in one blank slate.

But my life is paralleled by the movie Hangover only in the amnesia. The setting is totally withdrawn from my reality, what with the fancy car, the luxurious suite in a Las Vegas hotel and the fact that a guy can just put USD800 on his credit card on a whim. Man, if I just had the USD800, right now, I would give myself permanent head damage.

The heartbreaking part though is the realisation that for these guys, Vegas, the big night is just this one night when they get to do something silly. For me, for all of these kids down here, this is what we try to do every day. At the end of the movie, the guys return home to a wedding and their normal lives of wives, jobs, cars and dogs. For us, when we come to, there is nothing to return to. Nothing, but all that that we were trying to get high enough to forget, in the first place.

>>>>>>>

Video parlor – In the beginning when DVDs and DVD players were really expensive we would go to a parlor and pay a small fee and watch movies in a big screen TV….. Just like in the theater’s and they were individually owned with the owner taking the coins at the door of the small room.

40in 1 – Counterfeit DVDs that would hold 40 movies in one disk, the quality depended on how recent hte movie was… a new release…would be the camera copy with people walking around the screen.

A useful ability for the designer toolkit?

I’ve finally gotten to my interaction culture blog. Ok,

A very interesting class on structuralism and phenomenology today, really got me thinking not just about viewpoints of different types of analysis or criticism in general, but in particular, film studies, since we’ve read a few articles critiquing films in this course, and about the possibility that we as interaction designers might (still up in the air, no?) utilize critique theory/methods from other fields in order to critique interaction designs.

Since I think design is a discipline that is not just unique to interactions (e.g. design in music, film, art, architecture, etc.). I cannot see any reason why borrowing critique theory/techniques from other schools of design would be incomprehensible. I dunno what other people are thinkin’ since I aint no mind reader, but it seems pretty obvious to me that borrowing ways of critique or analysis from other ‘schools’ of design is not only feasible, but advantageous to a younger field like HCI, and also to interaction designers (maybe this is obvious? Dunno, but blogging it anyway. Sorry if it’s a tome.)

(Well, let’s just see then. Fail or not, something will be learned, and that’s what I’m here for. Here we go!)

Fantastical Fanservice! (Factorial) Fun

So last time we ended up watching something interesting from the land of France: Godard’s A Woman is a Woman. There was a comment I didn’t get a chance to talk about which is sort of interesting and I think will appeal to most people in our class, so here’s the best way I can try to articulate what I am thinking:

The combination of the camera angles and the audio Godard gives us gives me the impression that not only we are to become the main female character, but we are also to indulge in the fanservice the director is trying to entice us with – an interesting duality. For those who don’t know, fanservice is a term used in the anime and video game culture which focuses on the directors or designers giving the viewer/player what they really want – visceral action combined with well endowed and beautiful ladies (also reminds me of Jay from the View Askew universe, too!).