The tag is the soul of the Internet

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Giulia

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

She raced up the steps to the top of the parking garage. She knew the perfect spot to catch the last gasp of the sun as it set upon Seattle from her location at the university campus.

As she climbed the stairs she pulled out her mobile phone, readying the camera. At the spot she was anticipating to take the photo a tall figure stood, elbows raised. She was not alone in her mission to catch the sunset. It was a man about her age, slightly taller. He was holding his mobile phone, steadying it as he tried to get the autofocus to shift its attention on the spectacular view.

Brushing aside her usual trepidation around new people she walked up next to him. Although he was attractive, that alone would not be good reason to trust him. She pushed out thoughts of bad horror films set in parking garages; getting the perfect shot was more important than paranoia or embarrassment and he was standing in the exact perfect spot. Besides, it was about the art. They were mobile phone photographers, hunting for beauty. Capturing. Sharing.

As she took her shot, he glanced at her.

“Are you going to tweet this?” he asked.

“ha, yeah, probably through instagram,” she replied.

“it’s breathtaking isn’t it?

She despised small talk but it was breathtaking and she had to agree. Her enthusiasm was bolstered by the beautiful view. She thought of all the sunsets she had watched in her life. Some romantic, some heart breaking; a full range of emotions and memories swept through her. This was the first sunset she could remember that was merely an introduction, a first meeting.

“I’m going to tag it #SeattleSunset” she mused aloud, not really to him but more as a note to herself.

“I have a lot of adjectives I’d like to use too. Tags are imperfect. So many ways to describe a moment. How can you tag a summer breeze?”

She glanced at him sideways, not able to tell if he was being facetious or solemnly serious, “#summerbreeze?” she quipped, “I read that The tag is the soul of the internet, you know. Clive Thompson said instagram is like that poem, Thirteen ways to look at a Blackbird. I can’t stop thinking about that”

She finished uploading her gorgeous sunset to instagram and tagged it #SeattleSunset.

“I read Collision Detection too. Heh. Well, I guess you and Clive have got a point,” he said, “Oh, dear. I’m late. Best be on my way,” and with that, he gave a huge smile, turned and walked away.

She stood there and stared at his back for a moment. Two small pieces of paper slipped out from the folder he was holding under his arm and floated silently to the concrete floor. A small breath of air came out of her mouth, but no sound. She watched him disappear.

She turned on her heel and walked in the other direction towards the other staircase, to go down to the second level to her parked car.

Later that evening when she scanned through her instagram feed, she came upon her Seattle sunset photo again. Impulsively she clicked the #SeattleSunset tag which brought her to a set of 158 pictures all tagged the same.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe
So many images of the same stunning sun, multiple perspectives, one tag. Skies of red, yellow, purple, blue and gold with intense fluttered clouds were framed by dark silhouetted trees, deciduous and conifers; buildings, from the space needle to low flat strip malls; horizons ranged from very high to very low or non-existent. They all shared that one desire to capture that Seattle sunset and now were linked through their tag.

Would her parking garage rooftop co-conspirator be among them? She couldn’t decide if she should look really intently with that purpose.

If it was meant to be, their tags would align again in the future, she figured.

The tag is the soul of the internet.

==========

Notes:

I am sad to report this is a complete work of fiction but I do need to give special thanks to @injenuity for her Flash Fiction inspiration (which I just may make a DS106 assignment because I like it so much) and her instagram photo of a Seattle sunset and her subsequent tweets.

I have tagged this as Visual Assignment 272: Picturing Prufrock, because my drawing is an illustration of a poem, just not specifically T.S. Elliot’s poem. I am taking the assignment in the broadest sense. Artistic license!

Fantasy Ted Talk: Beatrix Kiddo & Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Giulia

What can I say? Beatrix rocks.

Beatrix Kiddo & Five Pointed Palm Exploding Heart Technique

(From Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill)

Kudos to Ben for his Lebowski TED Talk, (where you can also download his awesome Photoshop template) and of course, creating this killer Fantasy Ted Talk assignment.

Also huge props to John Johnson for taking it next level combining the Animated GIF assignment.

I have been having a lot of fun asking colleagues what TED talk they would love to watch: someone alive, dead, or fictional.

The responses so far?

- The Architect from the Matrix
- Goethe
- Elizabeth Bennet from Pride & Prejudice
- Leonardo DaVinci
- Spock

Ultimately I chose Beatrix because I wanted to animate that 5 point palm exploding heart technique.

yam yam

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Giulia

If there was any doubt about Tom Woodward’s assertion that the Snowball effect is a key to DS106 success, I hereby present to you the tale of the Yam-snowball-visual assignment 311: Yam Yam:

Add a yam to your favorite movie and make a picture.

It started in the comments of Michael Branson Smith’s No Words Assignment with just a few clever Monty Python quips, some word play, a challenge and then a wave of new yam memes.

So, while the snowball still rolls, I present to you the theatrical release of:

the silence of the yams

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

Make The Untranslatable Understood. Again.

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Giulia

Following the lead from cogdog, Lisa M Lane, Scottlo, Stephen Downes and now Michael Branson Smith I decided to also take jump into the photo word translation Visual Assignment 307: Make The Untranslatable Understood

I used the No-English-Translation Random Word Generator Tool and got: Retrouvailles. “The happiness of meeting again after a long time”

Inspired by my brother’s apartment in Montreal, surrounded by interesting life drawing books, cool illustrations, and beautiful french speaking people on the street I decided to try and draw something up on my iPad.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

I used AutoDesk SketchBookPro and my pogo stylus. I also referenced my favourite beautiful french people with style blog, the Sartorialist.

As a small aside, I’m also playing around with Pinterest for the first time today and I thought I’d see how these assignments would look pinned on a board. Interesting. It seems the ds106 assignment site ~~isn’t pulling in~~ is pulling in my assignment but not all assignments yet for some reason so it’s nice to have a little catalogue of the assignments that I’ve come across on my assignment journey.

As for Pinterest, someone called it a visual social bookmark tool and I decided to join because I liked how Jim Groom has used it to keep track of Noise Professor’s photoshop jams sometimes just posted on yfrog and not necessarily blogged or submitted as an assignment per se.

Jury is out if Pinterest will just go into the wasteland of new tools I never use again or if a week or two I will suddenly start using it and have an overwhelming sense of Retrouvailles.

Picturing Prufrock

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Giulia

Inspired by Jim’s Etherized on a Table and Joan’s There is Time, I decided to also give Serena’s Picturing Prufrock assignment a whirl.

The symbolism in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is so rich. Every line has imagery I’d love to illustrate. I could happily spend days illustrating these stanzas. I chose one of the more boring lines because I wanted to try and draw T.S.Eliot himself thinking about getting old.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

120
I grow old … I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

How I did it!

MIXED MEDIA! I used old fashioned water color paper, water color pencils, marker to draw and color. Then I took a pic with my iPhone and uploaded to Flickr!

ReCaptcha Predictions for 2012

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Giulia

I’m not going to shake the magic 8 ball or come up with a list of really insightful surprise predictions for 2012. Instead I’m attempting @cogdog’s new #ds106 assignment to illustrate something meaningful out of random words.

ReCaptcha Predictions!

This is the equivalent of reading the random tea leaves at the bottom of your cup. What Black Swans does ReCapcha say Education has in store for the next year?

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

In 2012,

THE Shumpt is the teacher in a slump, living in his walled classroom, relying on tech support to make things happen. The Shumpt will suddenly be carried by his educational technology support team to the edge of the wall to see over the other side.

Here he will encounter Sir PartsBo and become acquainted with the deconstruction of digital fluency. Immediately The Shumpt will come out of his slump and will be reanimated as if a layer of stone has been removed and his professional life will transcend beyond purposeful but might even include- FUN.

Merely considering what exists on the other side of the wall will be known as the Wallar Proposition.

It will not always be simple, of course, because the apocalyptic veffig will try to attenuate the use of toolitas outside the wall. New legislation will be drafted and redrafted, remixed and repurposed to the point of ridiculousness. For example, the Family Educational Rights Stop Online Piracy (fersop) bill will be the source of much consternation to the liberated educator.

Of course, it is difficult to know how this will turn out. The only thing to do would be to analyze more ReCapchas. I recommend submitting assignment ideas to DS106, as there will be a ReCaptcha at the end of each form submission.

This will serve the dual purpose of working on Assignment 305 and contributing to the reanimation of your creative self.

My Dog, My Muse

Posted on December 11, 2011 by Giulia

Must. Make. DOG. GIF. ASAP!

Ear flapping Flying Dog

Why must I make a dog gif? Well, let me take you on a journey through my thought process.

As you may know, I have already written how much I love photograph nostalgia like Dear Photograph.

Yesterday my friend emailed me a link to Back to the Future. Be still my heart! What is going on there?!

The artist, Irena Wirning writes:

“I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them…”

I can really relate. I love other people’s photographs, old and new, in their homes, in their albums, in their ancient projectors, in their Flickr streams. You know that Flickr picture with 1 view? That’s me clicking through creating little narratives about the context for each photo.

The way she sets up each shot is so meticulous. I found myself revisiting the site and on the fourth visit, I started clicking around looking at other pages and then- I came across Irini’s Muse: Chini the Chinese Crested dog!.

Now, I have also been reacquainting myself with the joys of dogness in my life.

Most of all I enjoy the walking again. In past winters, I have been prone to semi-hibernate into a mild turpor when cold weather comes. Stella’s necessary walks have been great motivator to get us out of the house.

This weekend on our evening walk, we noticed Stella’s ears looked like she was flying and my dog became my own muse; I thought how cute it would be to make an animated gif of her funny little ears flopping. I filmed a short 10 second video last night on my iPhone.

Then I notice in the twitter stream these hilarious definitive collection of cat gifs. Martha and Alan shared an exchange about the lack of dog gifs, so without a minute to lose, I transfered the video from my phone to my computer, imported into MPEG StreamClip. Set in and out at the appropriate 2 seconds.

MPEG StreamClip screenshot, Select OUT

Exported to QuickTime.

Imported Video to Photoshop as Layers.

On the Mac: in order to import video to layers in Photoshop you need to ensure that you are running 32bit mode. This can be changed from Finder-Applications-Photoshop- Info (cmd+i)- select “open in 32bit mode”

Screen shot Photoshop 32bit mode

Played with delay per keyframe (default is 0.04). Cropped image. Played with dithering. Exported as animated GIF.

TOO FAST (0.04s)

Messing with keyframe delay

TOO SLOW keyframe delay (0.5s)

Still not right- 0.2s, 0.2s, 0.4s, 0.2s, 0.2s

Nope, not yet. 0.3s, 0.4s, 0.5s, 0.4s, 0.3s delay

Aaaah. GIF sweet spot: 0.1s delay. Ear flapping 5 frame goodness

Step Right Up!

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Giulia

In honour of Mikhail Gershovich‘s turn to collect teaching carnival links, I did a little drawing for him.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

And now, I cannot get Tom Waits out of my head…

Step right up, step right up, step right up,
Everyone’s a winner, blog links galore
That’s right, you too can be the proud owner
Of the quality goes in before the name goes on
One-tenth of a dollar, one-tenth of a dollar, we got service after enrolment
You need pedagogy? we got pedagogy, how ’bout engagement?
Something for the prof, something for the T.A.,
Something for the researcher, hmm
Three for a dollar

-modified from Tom Waits. (1976) Step Right Up, Small Change.

How DS106 Changed My Life

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Giulia

Having exhausted everyone in my physical proximity, I was sitting around this weekend just hoping someone would ask me about DS106.

#ds106 folk help me out. @jimgroom & I need short video clips telling me what made #ds106 special, powerful, fun, different etc. Anyone?

November 19, 2011 9:20 pm via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@twoodwar

Tom Woodward

Oh, Tom, I’m so glad you asked:

This is the second animation that I’ve tried using this method. The first one was last week for Dave Cormier’s #change11 session on Rhizomatic Learning.

I find it interesting that Rhizomatic Learning has 300 views and two “likes” whereas this DS106 video has only had 30 views and already has 5 “likes” and 3 comments. I realize we shouldn’t conflate mouse clicks with engagement but this is a good example of how I feel the DS106 community is so encouraging and enthusiastic.

What I meant to mention in the video was the essential role of commenting. My first post was just two drawings, no text. The comments caused me to revisit the post and write out context and process. Luckily, Tim and Alan have already touched upon this in their videos.

And maybe you will too? There’s always time to tell the world about how much you love DS106!

Technical notes:

[Yes, I used an iPad but please be aware: I partially despise the things.]

I used the Taptrix Brushes app to do the drawing, which records your brush strokes as you draw. I have been mostly using AutoDesk SketchBook Pro for most of the work in my Visual Practice. I use a pogo stylus. The hardest part is erasing and redrawing because it does not do frame-by-frame animation, just records everything you do.

I do NOT enjoy the process of drawing, exporting “Actions” via email. [EMAIL?It's 2011, why am I EMAILING!?]
Then I have to extract the .zip file into a .brushes file, open the file on the desktop Brushes App (free download). Then export to MOV. Then Import into iMovie. Alas, this is Life With an iPad, where moving content is notoriously painful.

I feel like I help sell these infernal devices every time I do a drawing on one, so I must tell you: it is not all rosy. It takes patience and tenacity.

I used PhotoBooth to record the video and just watched the animation as I read. (This is why I missed the key important bit about comments) Finally I brought the whole thing into iMovie. I confess I also despise iMovie 8 and up so I’m still using iMovie HD (v. 6?). I had to export the thing about 4 times before I got the settings correct. YouTube wants wide screen but Brushes exports 800×600.

Overall I’m pleased. I wouldn’t mind (hint, hint) if someone took the drawing part and did their own audio since I find my volume is low. [REMIX!]
I tried to get the smooth voice of @scottlo to do it, but alas he’s too busy dissecting his teaching.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

Rhizome Remix

Posted on November 6, 2011 by Giulia

This week’s #change11 facilitator is Dave Cormier, talking about Rhizomatic Learning – Why We Learn. I saw him present at the University of Guelph #eportfolio week earlier this year.

I know that as the Manager, Web Communications and Innovations at Prince Edward Island University he is well versed in the pragmatist view of a bureaucratic policy maker. Ah, but you don’t have dig too deep below that job title to see that Dave is also a husband, father, French philosopher-citer, teacher, @gsiemens-contrarian, coffee-science hobbyest and nomadic, rhizomatic learner. Perhaps even a #socialartist?

Leslie Lindballe went on ds106radio a couple weeks ago, did some rhizome reading and reflecting live on the air. The following week Dave presented in Alec Couros‘ ECI831 class and I downloaded the video, listened to it on my mobile and did a little bit of drawing.

My Animated Doodle about Rhizomatic Learning

I like it for my first real try. But. Do you know what it really needs?

Someone to say something.
Narrate this thing!
Sing to it!
Play the guitar, ukelele! Or didgeridoo! Or piano!
Just make some sense of it. (if any is to be found!?)

So, I’m issuing a remix challenge. Record some audio for my doodle: using your PC, Mac, mobile, soundcloud, YouTube, etc. (your tool of choice, etc.), while watching the video and post it here for me. Or download the video using MPEG StreamClip and do whatever you like to it! (Update: I’ve made a version without audio for easier remixing)

Of course, feel free to take your own nomadic rhizomatic learning path. Cuz that’s cool too.

Some of my fave nomads: Leslie and Alan Levine (hopefully GNA Garcia) are joining me in a G+ hangout Wednesday November 9, 2pm EST to talk to Dave about Deleuzian, Rhizomatic Nomadic Learning. I think Tim Owens will be there (yaay!) and we *might* also be on DTLT Today. (Please join us if you can!)

Technical Sidenotes

I’ve been wanting to try animation for a while now but have gotten in the comfortable groove of using AutoDeskSketchBookPro and not Brushes, which will record your brush strokes on the iPad to make a movie. However, in light of Tim Owen‘s recent question: where is the change? and Nancy White‘s highly interactive and thought-engaging week about #socialartists, I decided to move out of my comfort zone, try Brushes again and do a little animation. Resolution could be better. Anyone know what export settings I should use from iMovie!? It goes in sharp and comes out fuzzy Audio: mixed in some CC music by Serge Seletskyy.