Interactive Media Arts @ NYUSH
My experience with p5.js seldom touched upon interaction or animation, so I incorporate mouse in my code. I move a small circle across the screen repeatedly, forming a thin line with trajectory. When the mouse is pressed, the line will dance up and down. You are the one to decide whether the electrocardiogram is live or dead.
For assignment 1, I made my sketch based on the course example “bouncing ball_fixed”, and made the following changes:
This one is made with the diameter of the ellipse as (x[I]/i*5).
This one is made with the diameter as (x[I]/I/5).
Date: 02-19-2019
Response to Sarah Pink and Jennie Morgan’s “Short-Term Ethnography: Intense Routes to Knowing”
Never did I encounter the word “ethnography” until a few months ago, when a friend introduced it to me as a way of doing social research. Nevertheless, I’m not a stranger to short-term ethnography, because less than a year ago I was with some classmates in Anhui (安徽) Province doing a service program with some rural kids infected with AIDS/HIV. We spent a few days there interacting with the kids. Although a service program is undoubtedly different from a social research, there are similarities between the two that make what Pink and Jennie say related to my experiences. Now that I’ve read about Pink and Morgan’s idea on short-term ethnography, not only have I realized the things that we could have done better in the program, but I’ve also learned how short-term ethnography could be effective as well, despite more people’s belief in long-term ethnography. What inspires me the most is the “intensity of the ethnographic-theoretical dialog” as Pink and Morgan addresses. It is required of ethnographers that they are ready to raise more theory-oriented questions that cut to the chase, which makes prior study extremely significant. For the service program, we were asked to learn a lot of materials about the kids’ living conditions and the situation of AIDS/HIV in China. What kind of confuses me is that Pink and Morgan suggest that details are crucial in short-term ethnographic studies: wouldn’t focusing on details make ethnographers more easily biased because the larger picture is forgotten? Besides, I don’t quite understand what they mean by Morgan drawing from her museum curating experience, which, according to them, “enabled [Morgan] to recognize and ask participants to reflect on practices that were unspoken and would have been otherwise invisible”. Though, their paper does inspire me in a lot of ways in terms of the short-term ethnographic trip that we are about to go on.
This essay——probably by course design——could not have come at a better time. My partner and I are at a complete loss for what we’d want to do our final project on, much less what ethnographic research methods we would employ. Everything we were coming up with didn’t seem to work because we would need an extremely long time to conduct our research. Pink and Morgan really stress that ethnographic research done in a shorter timeline is not “limited” or inferior, but rather another tool to observe human behavior and draw inferences. The authors emphasize that with the higher-paced setting of short-term ethnographical research, it is in some ways a better reflection of the human experience and “being in (and with) the world.” This research method is useful because it demands the researcher understand more about the space they’re entering, without the guise of endless time to figure it out. Short-term ethnographic research in my opinion is superior to a longer timeframe because it asks more of the researcher and offers more reward for time spent. However, this depends on the researcher. If they’re simply looking for an opportunity to publish and are not invested in the social environment they’re researching, the short-term ethnographic research method will not yield good results. In fact, because of the mentioned reasearcher’s unwillingness to immerse themselves wholly in their subject, this method may actually damage and contradict anything the researcher had prepared beforehand. My partner and I feel very confident that we can comfortably and efficiently use the short-term ethnographic research method to our advantage for our final project.
In “The Medium Is the Message”, McLuhan attempts to convey his viewpoints on how mediums affect the way a message is communicated. Throughout the article, McLuhan voices his concern over how people often tend to focus on obvious effects that we miss out on the structural changes that happen slowly and gradually over time. In the case of new inventions, people have a good general idea of its intended use, how to use it and its advantages and disadvantages. However, when looking back, we realise there are a number of unintended consequences that we were entirely unaware of. Moreover, a lot of these consequences are caused by the lack of planning and consideration.
The medium, on the other hand, is something where change occurs. Hence, since some sort of change will inevitably happen from every invention and everything we create, he is able to coin the term “the medium is the message”. We are often preoccupied with the medium’s (the new invention or thing we create) content that we don’t realise the other intended consequences.
From this article, it is clear that McLuhan preaches the importance of noticing the change in our culture and society within the effects of the new medium. In doing so, we will then be able to foresee or predict the possible detrimental effects in our society before it happens. Once this is able to happen, we are also then able to influence its development of the new innovation before it becomes destructive.