DDR at hand

So, as some of you may know, me and Casey go play DDR just about every Friday afternoon.  As some of you might not know, Casey is insanely good at DDR.

It was funny last Friday, though… There were a couple of new interactions that happened.  First, we gave the Pump it Up machine a try… It has 5 buttons instead of 4 like DDR.  Later on, Casey gave Doubles on DDR a try.  Doubles is where you use both pads and have to dance across the whole machine.

Now, Casey is insanely good at singles/versus DDR but I noticed that he was having trouble with the other two.  So, we got into a short discussion…

Normally, Casey doesn’t even think about the DDR pad when he’s playing, but it was obvious that on the 5 button game and on the doubles he was having to look at his feet sometimes and and think about what he was doing.

This seems like a good example of going from Ready-at-hand and Present-at-hand.  We disagreed on what it was that was becoming Present-at-hand though…

Was it his mindset/DDR knowlege?  Or was it the pad?  Or was it his feet?  I argued that it was the pad because it was the tool he was using to play the game.  Especially on the 5 button machine, he had to consciously focus on the buttons because he wasn’t used to where they were.  But in the end, we weren’t too sure.

Anyway, that is all for today.

Pre-Writing Nightmare on Elm Street

Hey Class,

Spending my lovely Sunday afternoon wrapping up the essay outline and I had question for you. Basically because my interaction is with a consumer model camera it is starting to sound like a cnet.com review or something, only with a more technical vocabulary and resources to back up what I’m saying. Is this okay? I’m actually thinking it might be an extension of my own experiences in reading reviews of such devices.

So, to get it down to a particular I am saying a particular user, a dad,  using a particular camera, my Polaroid HD DV,  for a particular event, his child’s first birthday.

I’ve been walking around my apartment imagining what that would be like. Thinking about the elements of the party. What would the dad want his audience to see. What types of extensions of his own eyes will he want with the camera. My main argument is that because the camera has such poor quality and terrible ergonomics, it interrupts the extension of his visual understanding of the event because he must take time to make the artifact known, taking away from the natural flow of him recording the experience the way he is experiencing it.

I think that’s basically where I am right now. I have some resources sprinkled in there, read-to-hand, present-to-hand, lifeworld, flow, etc.

Let me know if anyone out there has any last second feedback or if you are experiencing similar things.

Semiotics without Phenomenology?

So I asked this in class, but I wanted to open it up on the forums.

“Can we do semiotics, can we talk about it, without using phenomenology to explain our understanding of the text?”

Jeff’s comment was that’s how they thought about it in the 60’s but they realized there was a missing piece is assuming the signifier connected directly to the signified in an obvious way. But we now know that way is not so obvious. Yet, I believe there were some people who maybe disagree and that there is a bit of separation. If that’s true, please let me know because I’m having an impossible time of separating the two ideas in my head. I feel like at this point semiotics is just a way of looking at phenomenology, you know: things as symbols or representation that connect meaning and message from a supplier to a receiver. Like how UPS delivers my birthday ( november 12th ) cookies from my mom to my house.

..jaMEs

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.

Moar Brain Dumping

So I also am going to put up what I have been thinking about for the mock outline exercise. The interaction (again) I was thinking about looking at phenomenologically is the Rock Band character creator:

So I won’t be able to give the “whole” outline here, but the topic I would be talking about is that creating rockers are a painful and reflective experience. The “pain” and “reflective” aspects are the things I would like to attempt to work out phenomenologically. In terms of the actual game experience, the pain comes in through what type of controller you are using to create/edit your rocker, how much time you can dedicate to your rocker, when/where you play Rock Band, and also if you can actually find anything in the rocker’s closet that will please your tendencies.

In terms of a reflective experience, I find this interaction to allow one to reflect on what it means to be a rocker for his/herself, reflect on the achievements done in game, listen and take action on other players’ comments about your rocker, how one can continuously keep reforming their “rocker identity” to the world, and how one can keep pushing themselves to make a better rocker.

So I’ll have to go back to my notes and see if I can find anything to support this (which I believe so, as this came from a reflection on my notes), but I was wondering what the class thinks of at large about how to pull this off in a written form.

(^^)V

Semiotic Approach to Ne Me Quitte Pas

Expressively the addresser is constructed as begging, strong yet submissive, desirous, desperate.

Conatively the addressee is constructed as stubborn, unforgiving, an object of desire.

Phatically the relationship between the addresser and addressee is constructed as dysfunctional, rocky, loving, romantic.

Referentially, the song leaves out some aspects of the relationship between the addresser and addressee to assist the receiver in an identification with the position of the addresser (phenomenological semiotics?), but also gives enough information to help us understand the phatics of the relationship between the addresser and addressee.

Metalingually this song doesn’t explicitly state any facts of the relationship or situation of the addresser and addressee to leave the song up to interpretation of the listener.

Ne Me Quitte Pas is formally a song.  It’s words vary in meaning and connotation verse to verse, but not so that the story of the addresser and addressee loses cohesion.  The chorus remains the same to emphasize the begging of the addresser for the addressee not to leave.

I have no idea if any of this is right, but I thought I would give it all a try.

phenomenological approach to design critique

I  have to some thoughts here, and please tell me if I’m right or wrong and how.

If phenomenology is concerned with the things situated in consciousness, which is situated in life-world, a phenomenological approach should be concerned with the same things.  So when you take a phenomenology approach to understand visual culture, you are concerned with the life-world of the creator.  And you might even need to reconstruct the life-world of the creator.  We cannot really become concerned about the life-worlds of the viewers because there are viewers during that time when the visual culture is produced, viewers share similar life-world with the creator, viewers 10 years later, viewers 50 years later, viewers in another culture, different age, and so on…We cannot really concern with them all…  However, if we take phenomenological approach to interaction design critique, we can not only concern with the life-world of the creator, but also the users, because the users share more intersubjectivity than the infinite broad range of visual culture viewers…but..users are still kind of a LOT.

My question is:  when we take a phenomenological approach, what are we concerned with?  Do we need to take viewers or users’ life-worlds into considerations?

I feel like it is a weird question to ask….:P

understanding things outside our lifeworlds

after class on Tuesday Ben and I were talking about an idea: what if a child was raised in a gravity-less world. they were never told about gravity. they never read about gravity. gravity does not exist in their life world. later in the boy’s life he is brought to Earth (with gravity enabled). what happens to the boy? Ben’s comment was “I think he will float away”.

i doubt he will float away, but how do we explain what will happen to him. or will he not even realize the effects. i remember reading somewhere that the native americans didn’t even see the ships coming because it was such a foreign object they weren’t able to process the ships were there until they were on the shore. could be a lie.

i guess my point is that we can all agree that the tiny specks on light in the sky are actually objects hurling through space at crazy speeds and are actually (for the most part) quite enormous in size. we’ve never seen that. and things like that do not exist in our life world.

does this phenomenon happen in design? i tried to think of an example of something like that that was created, but i feel like as designers we are restricted. can we actually design something that doesn’t exist in our life worlds? or are all designs somehow a continuation of something we already know and understand (like the radio -> cd player -> ipod)?

btw, i don’t know if you know this or not, but i love space…

..jaMEs

Quick Veronique Critique!

As I was not fully quenched by Kickasola, I read the user comments on IMDB, a few other critics and blog posts. Here are a few things that I found interesting.

Roger Ebert:
Roger Ebert is no Kickasola but I found a few things interesting in his critique of the movie. It starts with the sentence “Here is a film about a feeling.” Then he talks about Kieślowski’s style as below.

“He is drawn to coincidence and synchronicity. He is little interested in focusing on a character hurling from point A in the first act to Point C in the third. He is fascinated by Point B, and the unseen threads linking it to past and present. His films can be mystical experiences. He trusts us to follow him, to sense his purpose, to leave the theater having shared his openness to a moment. The last thing you want to do after a Kieślowski film is “unravel” the plot. It can’t be done.”

Slavoj Žižek:
For the few of us who cannot sleep unless we unravel the message, I found that this small snippet almost paraphrases it. It’s an excerpt from an essay titled “The Forced Choice of Freedom” written by Žižek.

“The perception of our reality as one of the possible, often even not the most probable, outcomes of an open situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply canceled out but continue to haunt our reality as a specter of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant linear narrative forms of our literature and cinema.”

Joseph G. Kickasola
I am pretty sure this guy was stalking Kieślowski. I am absolutely stunned by both by the quantity and quality of nuanced observations and interpretations he provides us. He situates his interpretation based on the author’s previous works (references to The Decalogue), life (French and Polish politics), lifeworld (Kieślowski’s attitude towards old people) and through his own judgements as well. This, we all agree, is by no means a simple task and Kickasola has done a kick-ass job. (Sorry couldn’t resist it!)

And here is where I start whining. I have one huge issue with this article. He beautifully states of what I think is the paradigmatic glasses we need to be wearing while watching Kieślowski’s movies.

“… the essence of the film hinges on the experience of watching it, not simply on an understanding of its story, characters, and use of metaphor.”

After stating this, he does exactly the opposite – explains the story and provides rationalistic explanations to the characters’ traits by contextualizing them with respect to the metaphors and motifs of religion, spirituality, politics and philosophy. It does help us understand the movie better but aren’t Kieślowski’s movies meant to evoke? Does one need to have a rational understanding to “feel” it better? If Kickasola is trying to do that, then he is essentially at logger heads with Kieślowski.

Kickasola paraphrases Kieślowski’s attitude towards this by saying
“This type of abstract, nonverbal “rhetoric” can be very persuasive…”

In other words, to me it feels like Kickasola attempts to help us understand a movie that the director did not want us to understand in the first place.

All said and done, I do not deny the fact that knowing about the director’s life, his works, his beliefs, the metaphors and motifs used in the movie and Kickasola’s interpretation of them have definitely enriched me to understand the movie. But the answer to the question whether it has helped me to feel it better is NOT a big resounding yes!

PS: I wonder how Pauline Kael would have critiqued this movie!

The Double Life of Veronique

I immensely enjoyed and appreciated ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ on so many levels but my immediate reaction after the film finished was ‘huh?’ and that I wanted to watch it again. I understood (well thought I understood) the main story line and the nuanced dramatic devices such as the clear ball and the symbolic emphasis on sex and death used throughout the film. However, there were still so many questions I had that were unanswered, for instance, what was the deal with Veronique agreeing to lie in court for her friend and was the piece of string related to her death some how?

Reading Kickasola answered many of my queries (turns out the part about Veronique lying for her friend in court was part of a subtext that had to be cut which is why it didn’t really fit in overall). Yet at the same time Kickasola raised more questions and brought out the cynic in me as I found many of his comments suspect and unconvincing. I tend to find myself feeling slightly sceptical when academic writers start using jargon that confounds the message rather than clarifies it. Was he just reading too much into the film or were the complex layers and meanings completely intended and decided upon by the director? For instance the theme of vision and new beginning is inferred purely from Veronique removing Alexandre’s glasses from his hand in the hotel room scene at the end. Also, the comment about the anonymous phone call being interpreted by postmoderns as “a recognizance of the interstitial image and a critique of the medium” (p.252) is not discussed or elucidated at all.

Maybe I am missing the point and I should just appreciate and accept what the author interprets in the film but it keeps making me think of when I had to read ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Bronte for my English literature class at school. There are so many interpretations flying around of the book, one of which is a Freudian psychoanalytic reading which was predictably about sex and repressed desires. It just didn’t seem to make sense that people were reading Freud into Bronte’s book when he wasn’t even born when it was published so the author obviously had no intention of symbolizing the Oedipus complex in Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship.

I guess all this just comes back to the issues we have been raising in class, how much as a critic we are able to bring to the table and interpret a ‘text’ and how much we look to the author and their intention or even if that matters. Either way, I really loved the film and have been thinking about it ever since as it is a poignant and thought-provoking work of art. The director Kieslowski can include me with the fifteen-year-old girl he met in Paris (p.244) in being profoundly affected by the movie.