Rerun

Cultagory Theory (School of Tomorrow)

:: language project video ::

Stochastic Science

Related reading:

The Science of Infinity (blog post)

Presidential Race PR 2020

XREF: 

Meme Spotting

Pirate Party

Hypertoon City

Given I'm back in the wheelhouse, steering a cohort through rites of passage in the cult of coding (Python) and stats (statistics, data science), I'm once again reintroducing the tools of the trade, such as pandas and numpy. And the datasets in seaborn. Such as tips, penguins and titanic.

Thinking about tips gave me a prompt for the above AI graphic, but in my head I was imagining a tips-based hypertoon. Imagine a black and white (meaning grayscale) film in which 1950s dressed urban characters frequent a busy restaurant. 

Consider a camera shot of one table with five people, two smoking, three dressed as males. In one scenario, a woman gets up, espying a good friend at another table. She begs pardon from her table mates, saying she'll be right back, and she takes an empty seat at a nearby table, striking up a conversation with her friend. 

The camera is following all these and sees her return. We might even see a cut, letting viewers know time has passed, but not much.

In the diagram, that would be like an arrow from a circle, looping back into itself. She gets up, the action takes us away from the table, but we come back, almost as if nothing had happened, and indeed, lets have at least a few frames that never change. 

This immutable segment, of people sitting just so, with just these expressions, is what we keep coming back to, which adds a dimension of eerie dreaminess to this film. This isn't the only keyframe we keep revisiting; it's one hub among many. We in a looping environment such that we'll eventually have seen every scenario, but there might be hundreds of them, of varying length.

The general idea is you have keyframe immutable sequences from all over the restaurant, including outside on the snowy sidewalk, in the restrooms, where women gossip and men stare stoically at urinal advertisements, in the kitchen, in the back alley with the dumpsters. 

Then you have a playhead, which travels within the spaghetti ball of scenarios that interconnect all these keyframes in a graph, a network, a topology. We might have five scenarios that take us to the dumpsters, and three that take us back inside. Each scenario has a direction, an arrow marking time's flow. In geometry hypertoons, these scenario transformations might all be reversible, but when it comes to humans in a restaurant, most action is one-way.

Here's the random element: when the movie player, the playhead, enters a keyframe sequence, it has more than one way to go next. The viewer will recognize the table, the people, but last time she got up, whereas this time she doesn't. A waitress shows up instead. 

Next time a waiter appears, whom this time we follow back into the kitchen (and there's that same chef -- we keep seeing him, and those pancakes...). We don't get back to that table for quite awhile, revisiting other tables, and those dumpsters again, before we get there. We end up following that lady back, like the first time, from the table she'd been visiting. It's exactly the same scenario. We're on rails. 

You get the idea.

Cult Talk

Media Literacy

:: breakfast viewing ::

We probably needed a term like 'media literacy' because 'literary criticism' left out movies, radio, all the new media. Literature means books, and literary meant literature. No one wanted to confine themselves in that way. Semiotics was too egghead, but was a good runner-up. One of the professional videographers I know was a Semiotics major.

Literary criticism came from such writers as Norman O. Brown and Hugh Kenner. They would know how to connect the dots and make sense of a dense piece of writing. But then Marshall McLuhan came along, pointing out the great disconnect taking place within the sensorium. 

Who would be able to preserve linear discursive thought patterns in an age of quick cuts, channel changes, kaleidoscopic nonlinear, some might say chaotic, input order? EST people? That was a book. Bucky Fuller was an EST person, wrote the author, and Fuller agreed, by writing a blurb for the book's cover.

My pitch to the American Friends Service Committee back in the day, was along the lines of the above Youtube essay: the be media literate, one needs to create, not only consume, these communications. Don't just study the propaganda others disseminate, make your own propaganda. Make ads. Just for fun. See what it takes to be persuasive.

AFSC was quite receptive and we enjoyed the challenge of making television, in Spanish, for a local cable TV youth audience. Voz Juvenile was the name of the show. At CUE, we adapted the idea for seniors. Why not let elderly folks write and record their own show, again for community television. Media literacy involves learning how to edit, run a camera.

Adding spin to facts, thereby doctoring them, does not have to mean outright falsification. Think of a pep talk. Sometimes your job is to put a bright face on things. Does that mean you're lying? What happened to conjuring? What happened to casting spells? Halloween approacheth.