LEDs...

Thinking of new ways to map out movement. Considering building an LED system - practising programming/arduino/electronics and possibly making something really interesting as I think I could program the lights to show a path flow through a space - perhaps multiple paths at the same time.

Some research images/projects....

http://graffitiresearchlab.com/projects/led-throwies/
http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Throwies/

http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Light-Drawing-Pens-Tools-for-drawing-light-do/

http://www.devicedaily.com/misc/amazing-japan-winter-light-show-features-45-million-leds.html

http://www.scienceprog.com/wp-content/uploads/2006i/Dot_LED_Matrix/LED_Matrix_To_LPT_screen.gif

I also produced some photography in Year One using glow sticks which created some really interesting effect.

2 day film project

So, for a two day film brief i made this short 2 minute film around my project subject. It is a collection of moments where individuals are avoiding each others eyes while being in close proximity. It almost serves as an observation of my fascination of behaviour in a public space.

http://vimeo.com/18056983

Tutors commented how the film changes the reality of the subject that is filmed, and makes people appear like actors.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvp5Nk0kYa7Xdk6NDMuHkwPxgdIfTX3EfPxNty2qZLqPWHO40TPu4GzpvmJZpa4-TUSrFywTtY7pHGR-f8h29xhpdrDNePukbpPlhxuh_TJiCCRRX6u5FLhyphenhyphen_v3-rzhDdrGa9FJWFKEYEp/s1600/card1172.JPG

Idea makers

Well....during my lost afternoon I spoke to my friend who is a software developer about RSS feeds and he pointed me in the right direction. Tweeting has become a huge revolution in communication and giving the world your thoughts openly. I want to try and make one. See how hard it is. So.... I did some digging and found a way to extract twitter data into a spreadsheet - which could further be used for programming - if I find a way to translate the data. I also looked into extracting it onto webpages....Twitter has its own 'widgets' allowing you to extract particular tweets, which I have done as you can see on the right I made one to see what people are saying about the London snow. >>>>

This will be kept in mind. As my friend said: there are idea makers and the people who do it.
I want to be BOTH.


http://www.brelson.com/2009/11/using-google-spreadsheets-to-extract-twitter-data/

http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets/widget_search

LOST (the awkward english silence)

Ok so...this week i am very lost. Last week during the FREEZING period prior to the snow I went and observed for three hours in London Bridge station doing sketches and taking ten pictures every ten minutes or so. I got around 200 photos, along with a number of videos showing the movement of people through the main part of the station. I did gain a much greater understanding to the way people move through this space compared to my rough guesses for my model:

I discovered there is a fast lane and a slow lane, and the waiting area in the middle. Some people stop on the edge of the waiting area for only a few seconds before continuing while others take a little longer.

Also the trans-fiction on the board, even though when they are waiting for ten minutes. I guess its a bit like the eye contact thing on the tube. Avoid small talk at all costs. Look at the board, look at the board, look around, look at the floor, look around - oo that's a nice coat - - oops caught someones eye, LOOK AWAY! (pretend to be generally looking around.....) and such like. Fair enough people may not feel like talking to complete strangers, but since when did people become SO uncomfortable. Its quite absurd. I have observed on several occasions complete strangers starting up a conversation about their lives on a train. I guy sat opposite me on a
train back from college and asked to play hangman. That felt very random. I also met an interesting guy who did market research in my local town and told me all about the jobs he did - such as getting people to taste test haagen daaz ice cream.

After consideration I would suggest the expectations and perceived intentions of a stranger scare people from ever talking to strangers. People expect a reason for the interaction, and it is very difficult for any interaction whatsoever when everyone tries their hardest to prevent it occurring. I think its fascinating how people in such close proximity try so hard to ignore each other. Perhaps there could be a way to give people a reason to interact....a game, comment about an event etc etc. I am quite a shy person in new sitatuions with new people, however I learned since coming to London that talking to people, even randomly to show an interest in them is much more interesting even if you are only with them for a short time. You never know what you might learn or hear about. Even if its boring as hell you can make an effort to leave. The awkward English silence.

David Cameron measuring nations happiness

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11833241


I think this is quite interesting given the state of things. However, as I have discovered there are actually many ways to measure the mood of the nation through pulling data from various social networking sites. I think Jonathan Harris's (Legend) project We Feel Fine illustrates this concept completely.

http://www.number27.org/wefeelfine.html

Data visualisation is a bit interest of mine and I think there is a lot of potential in this sort of data.

(http://simplecomplexity.net/visualizing-human-emotions-we-feel-fine/)

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved. Their database has several million records, and they collect about 20,000 per day."

Chromoroma

So I found this project last night which is supposed to be launched late 2010 - so any time now. Its looking quite nice. It constitutes an online game which records your oyster card data - which stations you've been through and the journeys you have made, and awards you points for certain stations and more for finding other routes/quicker routes and trying other methods of transport. I really like the visual mapping - see image below. I have registered to play, so I await its release!

http://blog.chromaroma.com/

http://www.chromaroma.com/blog/2010/11/the-view-from-the-visualisation-team/