New Media Favorite

I have so say my favorite New Media Artist is Sabrina Raaf.

I love her photographs, despite the fact that she doesn't really photograph people or living things often her photographs have such life.

http://www.raaf.org/index.php

That is her website and it is really interesting to look at some of her work.

She lives in Chicago and is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is very much an electronic and installation artist. Her most recent electronic art was a robotic arm that drew perfect waves on a paper.

Mid Term Mash Up...I Dare You

My Mash Up

Some pictures to one of my favorite songs

A Prison In Hell

This reality I'm forced to live is called hell,

Where the monsters in your closet are real, but still no one believes you.

On your knees every night,

Begging for a beginning to a new light.

Clutching a silent friend as the moon

Shines through the flame.

The whip cracks on the backs of the innocent,

As I cry out to spare their souls.

The prison of fire springs to life,

The monster laughs at my plight,

And cracks the whip harder.

My prayers cannot reach God's ears

The devil turns away at the sight displayed.

My arms are open to the light or the dark,

But which embraces me I'm never sure.

Learning To Love You More

Here is Assignment #53 Give Advice to Your Past Self

Advice To Samantha Allen at 18

Dearest Past Samantha,

I am writing this to give you two pieces of very good advice that you will need this year that you become a legal adult. While what I am going to tell you may seem stupid and insignificant please believe me I tell you that both these events will have an overwhelming effect on your life when you get to where I am writing you from. First of all I know you want to go on the Retreat this June to help out Ms. Karen, but please don’t. On that retreat you will re-meet a boy named Andrew, and that will change your life forever. You will fall for him, hard, and let me tell you now, no matter how much you hope, and think, and wish, and believe, HE IS NEVER GOING TO BE WITH YOU. I’m sorry to be harsh but I am saying this over three years after the fact and I am still hung up on him. He has good aspects he really does, he is going to help you through a time in your life when a lot of your friends are physically leaving you, but for the good he has done, the bad is fifty times worse. He will have your heart on a tether and will constantly twist you around until you are so dizzy you can’t see. I wish I could tell you how many times you will cry over him, but I have lost count. I wish I remember how many times he has raised your hopes only to smash them with his next word, but I try to block them from my own memory. The only way I can think of to protect you from him is to tell you not to go on that retreat, so that you won’t meet him, and this huge part of your heart will remain yours, not floating around in limbo because he didn’t want it, and no one else has been able to rescue it. It is years after the two of you have met, and me, here in the future is still trying to fight off the love, and affection I have for him. Every time I think that I have won, he comes waltzing back into my life the way only Andrew can, so please I am begging you, stay away, and if you must go, don’t exchange phone numbers. It has been years, and you still have not seen him face to face, and that only makes the perverse relationship you will have with him worse. Please listen to me.

Now the second piece of advice, and this one is more important than simply guarding your heart, or not falling for someone you will never have. At the end of July, Thursday July 19^th 2007 to be exact, you will be in a head on collision that will land you in shock trauma for three days, and in Physical Therapy for three months. Please avoid Tolgate road, or even driving at all that day. It costs our family over 50,000 dollars in damages, hospital bills, and insurance coverage. You know that apple red used car you got as a graduation present, that despite how old it is you love? That car will be gone, scrap metal, and you will have also endangered someone else’s life because it will be your fault. If you don’t listen to me about Andrew please listen to me about the accident. You go through so much pain, such a life changing experience that I can’t even describe it and I went through it. You will have to re-learn to walk, you can’t bend your knee for months, and to this day an eight-hour shift at Red Lobster leaves you sore and limping.

Both of these events are real, they happen, and they change you. I am not the same girl you are, I have changed, and if you don’t want to change then avoid these two things. I am only telling you this because I love you and I want your suffering to be at a minimal, because it is my suffering too. So listen to me and maybe our lives will be a little better for it.

Yours,

Future Samantha

P.S. ~ Don’t get too attached to your long blonde hair your so proud of…it won’t stay that way for long!

Better YouTube Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYzv-AVi78E

Love this video!!!! Don't know why but I do.

YouTube

So my video...I couldn't pick just one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X87gwMQ0q1I&feature=channel

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTkp9UqVVHs

The Rise of One Who At a HUH????

I for one think that Jamais Cascio is nuts.

Sure in the next few decades things will get more recorded, and listened to, but I doubt that we will be doing it ourselves and putting it all over the web. So we snap photo's and send them to our Facebook's or something. That's just a way of sharing our lives with people who arn't there.

I'm talking about personal experiences and conversations that no one is ever supposed to hear. It will not be us who is recording and putting them onto the internet to become blackmail material or something like that. Eves dropping and recording private conversations is the government's job.

As for the camera on the glasses, how stupid and obvious. No one can take a picture discreetly with a contraption like that. I love that if there is an attractive guy in front of me I can fake like I'm just texting or something but can take a picture of him and send it to my friends.

Does that mean Big Brother is watching us? I don't think so. Until there is a lid-less electronic eye that watches every person on earth every second of everyday I don't think Big Brother has much in the way of information on the everyday person.

The rise of technology yes, technology taking over our lives until we can't make a move without the world knowing.... let's leave the 1984 like idea's to the world of fiction shall we?

Animations

I got a rocket in my pocket!!!!! I am proud that I did this!

Still Don't Think Google Is Making Us Stupid

So I posted about a year ago about how I don't think Google is making us stupid, and my opinion hasn't changed much.

But I do have to say if one day Google and all of the internet has mad us stupid and dependant then it is our own fault. Personally I will never be able to ignore the call of a good book but that is because I had plenty of opportunity to sit down and read. When I was younger I didn't have cable so I had to play or read. I didn't get cable till I was in 1st grade and then I already had a love of reading in me. Sometimes my mother would have to force me to have some sit down reading time but I have always read.

If parents don't introduce their kids to books, and don't read so they can lead by example. So if Google makes us stupid it is our own fault for blocking books out of our lives and replacing then with the internet.

Assignment #1

1.) Digital is anything that is represented by binary code ie 1 and 0. Analog is any physical representation of information. Digital readouts are generally easier and more reliable than analog. The quality of digital stays the same no matter how many times it is copied whereas analog gets worn out after so many uses. With digital as long as the numbers can be read you get the same wave. Of course you can store a greater amount of information with digital than analog.



2.) Some examples of Digital Vs. Analog are...

A digital clock Vs. An old fashioned clock with a dial.

A cordless phone vs. a phone with a cord.



3.) As for 'The Medium is the Message' I honestly had a hard time grasping it. I will be the first to admit that I am going to have a hard time with this class because computer's to me are kind of foreign. I can work them but when it comes to talking about them or fixing them I might as well be trying to speak another language. I thought with the reading it would be different, espically when I saw references to Shakespeare which is something I know and love. Then I started to read, and it seemed like I was reading something for a class I wasn't even taking.

I had no idea an article would confuse me so much. I didn't understand what they meant by the medium. It might just be the fact that I am one of those people who needs clarity and specifics but I didn't understand the broad statements they were making about 'the medium' this and 'the medium' that. Somehow it just wouldn't go through my brain.

So I will probably try and read again and try to grap something more important about this article, and if not I will have plenty of questions.

Digital Media Culture Again

So here I am, back in digital media culture a year later.

I had to drop the class last year for Charlie Brown...Big mistake, huge. So here I am again, trying my hand at this class, back to my old blog for the same class last year.

Hopefully I will make it in this class this year because if I don't I face another semester at HCC. I cannot begin to describe how much that would make me want to drive my camry off of a cliff.

So...here is hoping!

Gutenburg Rocks My Socks!

On the first day of class I made a menchion of a rant about Gutenburg, so I decided that Here it is! I cannot express my love and apprication for the man who gave us moveable type. I mean at first I really did not think about it much, how books first started, where they came from and all that jazz. I guess my love for Gutenburg and his contributions can be traced back to my five years of German.

One of my German teachers LOVED Gutenburg, he said if it had not been for the famous German the world as we know it would have been altered. And I have to say that after I thought about that comment, it is very true. The printing press came in at the perfect time, if it had not come along then our whole line of technology would be messed up and I for one cannot think of living without my cell phone haha. But also Gutenburg gave the world a chance to read, to have the written word spread. The Bible was the first book that was printed on the printing press, and it is easy to assume that if that had not happened then maybe the views people have on religion would be changed, or not as deeply rooted as they are now.

I got to see one of the few copies of the Gutenburg Bible that still exist. One is on display at the Library of Congress. While I was there I studied that Bible for at least twenty minutes maybe longer. I was of course trying to translate and read the page that the Bible was open to, but I was also looking at the complexity of the letters, how even and perfect they looked for the worlds first printing press. I marvled at the book, at how each letter was shaped, each word spaced perfectly next to the last word. It was amazing that such a primative tool in our eyes can produce such perfection.

As someone who reads all the time, and spends a lot of time reading and looking at printed words and that book at was made hundreads of years ago still looks as perfect as any type I have seen in a book today.

So thank you Gutenburg. Thank you for the gift you have given man kind. You opened up doors that needed to be opened and without those doors we might still be in the dark in more ways then one. Thank you for the gift of the printing press, and for making books easy for normal people to have access to. Don't know who I would be without you, weather I loved to read or not.

Google Making Us Stupid...Well Not Me

The Article "Is Google Making Us Stupid" raises a good point about reading, the internet, and attention spa- OH Look SHINY!!



But I digress. Honestly I think it depends on the person was well as the generation. The older generation that grew up only with books who now has this wave of online information can find it overwhelming. Where in the past they had to look for hours to find something they wanted, now its point and click. The younger generation is now being introduced to the internet more and more, and soon they are not going to know what a book is because they can get everything they want on the computer.

Me I think I am stuck somewhere in the middle. I LOVE to sit down with a book and just read for hours, I can lose myself in it. But on the other hand I also love how easy the internet makes research papers, and the like. Yes I sometimes use Google as spell check because the free word processor I have on my crappy laptop will not recognise some words that a monkey could know.

But stupid, I think that word may be a little harsh, dependent, yes, the reason for my astigmatism, sure, but making us stupid I think not.

So as I type this on my laptop with google opened in another tab to make sure 'astigmatism' was spelled right, I have a book entitled 'I Elizabeth' by Rosalind Miles, waiting for me on my bedside table.

For me internet and hardback books are friends, and will remain so...I hope.

My First Blog For Class

This is my first blog for digital media culture. I just want to get something written so it doesn't look so blank.