Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing covers a lot more than just individuals providing art for different frames of a short film. It also includes crowdfunding, microtasks, and open innovation. Crowdfunding is when many individuals provide financial help for whatever the project may be, and mircotasks are when many tasks are completed by many different individuals for the same project. Open innovation is like asking many people to work together to bring ideas to life.

I think it is interesting to note that Wikipedia can almost be seen a microtask platform. Many people are adding and changing all the time. The Ted Talk by Jimmy Wales said Wikipedia sees an average of 1.4 billion page views monthly. That's a lot of traffic on one website, but also increases chances for addition when there needs to be.

Aaron Koblin made an interesting point in his Ted Talk as well. He claimed that with the interfaces we have now, we have an obligation to maintain humanity and tell some amazing stories. I think it was the most poignant part of his Ted Talk and I enjoyed it immensely. One of my favorite things to watch are projects about humanity, glimpses into it. Facebook has this wonderful page called Humans of New York where photographs and snippets from conversations with the people in the photographs are posted. I think it's a wonderful way to document humanity. It can be found here: Humans of New York. 

Synesthesia, Cymatics, and Different Ways of Knowing

Synesthesia is fascinating. According to the Wikipedia article it creates a crossing between senses, such as seeing numbers and letters as colors. This is known as grapheme-color synesthesia. Synesthesia can deal with any kind of combination of senses, though.

In Even Grant’s Ted Talk, he talked a bit about making sound visible through cymatics. This in itself was intriguing to me because I’ve always loved audio visualizers. Seeing sound interests me. I related the work of cymatics to be almost like creating a physical representation of what synesthesia might be like. It creates a way for people who don’t have synesthesia to maybe get a vague sense of what it might be like for someone who does have it. Another thing to be explored is the relation of sound to matter.One of my favorite stories that Great Big Story did was on the cloud piano. It’s a device that takes pictures of clouds as they pass overhead and a program interprets the sounds to play the piano. This creates a soundtrack of the sky, as one might say. You can view the video here: Cloud Piano | That's Amazing

Grant even implores the audience to think about how sound might have related to the formation of the universe and its shapes. That’s an interesting point to me because when listening to recordings from space, there strange underlying noises. Saturn recordings are especially haunting. Here is an example of recordings from Saturn: Sounds of Saturn Rings - NASA Voyager Recording (HQ/HD)

Daniel Tammet brought it all together in his Ted Talk. He spoke of how he experiences synesthesia and tried to bring that to the viewers. I quite enjoyed the section where he talked about how he saw numbers. Beyond that, however, his analysis of language was interesting. I liked how he explained why statistically most people thought that the Icelandic word was sad. It’s something I do believe should be explored a little more - how words can evoke certain feelings just from their sound.

Swinging the Lambeth Walk

     In class we watched a film called Swinging the Lamebeth Walk that reminded me of an audio visualizer. The way the art moved made it seem like it was responding or dancing with the music. As shorts, I find films that are similar to be fairly enjoyable to watch. However, when they get long I find it hard to keep myself engaged and focused as I have no plot or character to latch on and follow.
     As a sidenote, I found the thumbs up both funny and a little endearing - especially before the end screen.
    I feel like films like these tend to carry more meaning than I glean from a first viewing and I usually read up on them after to get the backstory.