My favorite part was when Conan went around the room and mused about which clique each media outlet would represent in the high school cafeteria. He joked, “NPR is the kid with the peanut allergy.”
HA!
Hello, my name is Aaron Uhrmacher, and I’ve always been interested in how we remember people. Today, I specifically want to look at how our digital tools are changing the way that we remember and memorialize people as well as some of these tools that are helping us to do that better. Let’s start by taking a look at how we live.
If you’re in NYC tonight, come down to the 92Y in Tribeca to play Pop ‘N Scream, the game developed by Steve Aquillano and myself using MegaPhone Labs technology.
Doors open at 8.
Tickets are $10/each.
Geekdown Website
All My Life is an interactive data visualization that shares moments from the archives of my online life in the context of what else was going on in the world during the same time. First exhibited at the NYU ITP Winter Show, December 2010.
Social network updates are about sharing what’s current. What am I thinking NOW? What’s important to me NOW? But how will we feel looking back at all these brief moments we shared in a year, or five…or ten? Might it trigger the same feelings of nostalgia we used to encounter by looking through an old yearbook?
For this project, I’ve built an archival database sucking in feeds from 22 of my social destinations (Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Goodreads). In this data visualization, I re-visit shared moments from my past and attempt to contextualize them by referencing the music that was popular at the time and news headlines so as to try and trigger feelings of nostalgia by connecting real and virtual world events.
Since 1996, I have shared my thoughts, ideas, images and videos on a variety of social networks. Much of that is now lost. Some companies have gone bust and taken my activity on their site with them and there are other sites in which I’m no longer active (i.e. Jaiku). And although we are told that what we publish on the Internet lives on forever, it does not mean that we (the content creators) will always have access to it.
This project began as an effort to create an archive of my online activities and blossomed into a data visualization that tries to connect my personal musings to a larger societal context through music and news.
Each day we reveal special and ordinary moments in our lives with different groups of “friends.” Sometimes it’s a brief status update on Facebook, others it’s a link on Twitter, a picture on Flickr, or a place we’ve visited on Foursquare.
But these moments are ephemeral and – once shared – often forgotten.
And when these moments pass, they are difficult to re-visit. Some sites allow the user to view his or her history, but it is only accessible in a linear fashion or by keyword search. And for these systems, it can be hard to contextualize the memory.
My goal was to create a unique, comprehensive visualization to revisit these shared moments.
While this project is a particularly personal one, it brings up issues about privacy, data portability and online communications. My hope is that by seeing how I have chosen to archive my online life, others will follow suit.
This project was built using a MySQL database to archive all of my online activity as well as assorted PHP scripts, APIs for Billboard Magazine, Last.FM and TIME magazine. The program was written in Processing. Each time it runs, it selects a random 5% of updates stored in the database to display.
Special thanks to ITP professors Dan O’Sullivan, Dan Maynes Aminzade (aka Monzy) and resident researcher Craig Kapp for their incredible patience and support in bringing this project to fruition. Also to designer Noah Bell for guidance and inspiration in developing the visualization.
Here’s a cool Twitter data visualization of my followers using ISparade.jp
From the release notes:
The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh, and notice that it’s one continuous camera shot.
The song is called End Love and it’s off their new album:
For my Comm Lab final, I wanted to play with Final Cut Pro and at the same time experiment with different ways to mash up audio and video. Lately I’ve been most interested in the ephemeral videos that are licensed under Creative Commons on Archive.org.
Since it’s the end of the semester, I wanted to find footage that I could do something funny with but that might also be relevant to our time here. I stumbled upon a video from the 1988 series, “Computer Chronicles,” where they covered the first ever Computer Bowl. It was a gathering of geeks from the east coast and west coast, including luminaries like Bill Joy from Sun, Esther Dyson and Mitch Kapor (who, for the record, ripped it up).
Ultimately, I was blocked creatively. The raw footage (including the TV commercials at the end) were so funny by themselves, I couldn’t figure out what to do with them. I thought about finding episodes of both the Simpsons and Family Guy that I could remix for the east coast vs. west coast battle. I also thought about how to play with the audio and video to make it funnier. Here’s the result:
Given the time constraints and my lack of experience in Final Cut, I think it turned out pretty nice. However, I still think the audio needs some work.
Nobu and I worked together on this project, and it was a lot of fun. We started by watching a few popular stop motion YouTube videos for inspiration, including Tony vs. Paul and Ping Pong Ball Manipulation.
We then discussed some different types of narratives. We tossed around the idea of taking our camera out to the park to film something in “Tony vs. Paul” fashion, but we couldn’t figure out how to make ourselves fly and so decided against it. So we went to the Halloween store on West 4th and Lafayette to see if we could find something fun there to use for our film.
Jackpot! We settled on some silly string, a tube of fake blood, a package of rubber rats and a package of rubber spiders. We constructed a bunch of different storylines with these new props, but we still needed a place to set it in.
Back at ITP, we decided we liked the West Side Story angle, and we wanted our rats and spiders to fight it out cage match style. Nobu and I rummaged through some garbage cans and the junk shelf to construct our set, and then took our first stab at shooting with iStopMotion.
It didn’t take long to determine that 30 frames wasn’t very much. What you see here is our third attempt. In the first, we spent too much time on the intros of the rats and spiders and not enough on the actual action. The second take was a complete departure that began as a fight, transformed into a choreographed dance and ended up as a fight again.
But in this version, you can see we had a better understanding of how to tell a stop motion story. In the end, there were only a few frames that needed editing:
and one more:
So without further ado, here is “Rat vs. Spider”: