Tonight in class, I saw the documentary video work of another student in my class. She is chinese and is facscinated by the methods that other chinese students use to cope with cultural adaption. This particular video touched on the tendency of many chinese american exchange stduents to become christian, possibily as an adaption method.

On to what I was thinking. I am always jealous of video artists, especially documentary artists, because I thought their medium was so much easier to handle than mine. I mean the world exists, you point your camera, and with a bit a of talent and a lot of practice you have a piece of art.

For me, I spend weeks and months, designing and tailoring, translating and manipulating data in order to create something that then seems to never be finsihed because some variable could always be altered to produce a totally different piece of artwork. Especially in terms of 3D modeling.

It is in fact, the challenge of having too many options. An infiniite amount of vaiable that are all completely controllable. She could not go back and change someones smile as they laughed because it didn't look right or change the color of their eyes because it did not contribvute to the overall eaesthetic. Its hard to find something that I cannot be resposnible for in my work. It is impossible to leave something to chance that is completely created by code either visually in terms of Alias or Maxon or textually in terms of PHP, HTML, and MYSQL.

Then I began to think about how she needed to pick subjects and ask them questions or at least direct them and I realized that all of the time I have spent building this site, I have actually began to create a tool for automating an interview, for allowing others to weave themselves into my own collaborative documentary.

When her project is finsihed she definately will have something amazing to show. She could even use the video to make another, more comprehensive video.

However, this project seems limitless. Someday when we look back on this site we will see it as a record of what life was like for people living in this place, this elmwood, this buffalo. But it may also end up being a graph or video, a database or a music track.

I think I have finally began to really use the computer to its fullest potential. Not just as susbstitute for some other artform. For example, when you do photoshop work, you are using the computer to subsitute for a camera, darkroom ,cutting table, etc. But this type of work is actually using the computer as the medium.

I guess I knew in 1986 that this would happen to me someday. Now its 2004 and I hope the next leap doesn't take almost 20 years.

Emily keating strolled into the (e:hood) tonight so we went down to the pink. We ended up seeing TK and stickboy and a girl named Rachel who knew stories about me under to alias paul-bob - weird. She was pretty excited to be able to put a face with the name in the memories. So it was Tina, Sarah, Stickboy, flacidness, and Terry at the pink. I found out that stickboy drew his name form nightmares he had.

Maybe he convinced me to get a tattoo of the dot form that I tranform into during my dreams. While everyone else seems to freak out with nightmares, I simply turn into a dot, and then every problem seems to disappear. The dot is better than any other superpower. If you would like to argue about it I will turn into a dot and ignore you, hahaha. Anyways, he told me I should get a dot for a tatto and that the rule is tatoo should be symbols but not words. This seems to be a good rule to live by as you can always reevaluate the the definition of a symbol while words are hard to redefine.

Thank you stickboy.

So amid all of this political drama I decided to check out Shawn's google poetry machine. I think it wrote a great poem about elmwood strip. My favorite part is the last line. See below. I like to think of it as a message the computer gave me to not respond to the national political debate. Why doesn't anyone talk about local politics anyways. We should sponser a live on the net local debate.

Here is the POEM:

definitely ...

in

... brisket
(UK), strip

... the
Luigi revised Carlos
Carlos
York

February 05, 2003
I definitely recommend this place!.

...
Flexible events, Electric At

Next Long it

'Elmwood') discard AMERICA,

P.S. I will not vote this year, I would rather die.

I foudn this old asian statuette in the house and ecided it was time to break out the old UZR and test it once again. It seriously took about 5 hours to make anything happen. It was alpha channel mania. Then I finally got his image and it seems worth it. You can see the model itself here Use the alt/option key with the mouse to navigate.

The iddle image is very low polygon, suitable for games and VR. The other two are high polycount but pretty.

Rachel,
This is in in response to your question that asked, "What makes us tick?"

For me it is translation, transmission and filtration of data. Data translation, transmission, and filtration consisting of anything from information on a computer transmforing a set of variables into into a visual depiction, to a text moving from one human or machine language to the next, to an idea moving from my friends brain into mine and then being passed along and filtered, to emotional cues passing from one person's body language, being filtered in my head and then processed into an English like structure for storage. Even gossip can fit into this model.

I guess it sounds as though I simply like learning, but like my disdain for one-way communicative media such as television and video, I do not like being fed information that ends without questioning and translation of the knowledge into a new structure. I liek to watch data tranform under my control or supervised manipulation. I hate being simply filled with facts. It is in the processing, translation and transformation of data that I derive most of my pleasure from.

I love mediated information exchange. Whenever I am depressed it is because I feel there is a glitch in my translation system and I cannot process or filter data either fast enough without losing significant information which could conceivably be the building block or translative tool of some more important data set I come across in the future.

I think that is why I get depressed when I am away from the internet too long. It has gotten to the point where I have mastered the data mining aspect of using the internet so I have begun to take for granted the necessity that the data exists. To me it is not so important that I learn everything on the internet but rather learn how to manipulate the data to my needs within the shortest time possible.

For that reason I am going to embrace the day when I can add memory chips and wireless communication devices right to my brain. Just thinking about it makes me tick like a geiger counter at Sheridan Park.