Wednesday, September 28, 2011

People Watching in Photo












       I wished to capture the idea of "People Watching" with this series of photographs. People watching is what you can learn from a single glance, but what you can learn from a moment of seeing.  One can gather an understanding of mannerisms or habits from a brief moment in time. The activity of people watching shows there is a increasing presence of awareness of the whereabouts of people as well as their activities.  As Philip E Agre mentions in "Surveillance and Capture," there are many new ways of tracking people's activities (for example through UPS's package tracking systems and camera surveillance).  This increased presence of photographic technology hasn't seemed to change everyday human behaviors much, which is what I intended to capture with series of three photographs.  Cameras and technology allow people to "gaze upon the previously unknown"as Richard B Woodward puts it in "Dare to be Famous: Self-Exploitation and the Camera" and in some sense do create a hunger for it, by the ability to share the unknown or hidden (a non-photographic technology example).  The knowledge that cameras are out there and can capture your personal moments, does stop people from having them in public.  In fact, some people choose to ignore cameras, while others might be so used to their presence they are oblivious to them.  I took a portion of my pictures in a tourist area so that the presence of the camera would not be out of the ordinary and I could easily capture some personal moments.  I also chose to create sequences of three photographs because this provides a stronger sense to the viewer of the big picture of what is happening and a person's mannerisms.  A single shot may be an accurate depiction of a single moment in time, but that picture without some context of other pictures can create a misinterpretation of what actually occurred.  A series of pictures better allows the viewer to see the context of the moment and not misinterpret two people walking together for two strangers walking side by side that happen to share a glance.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Is What You Did Last Night Hurting Your Computer's Potential?

                                                                    (an xkcd comic)
         

      Computers have come far over the past few decades and allowed humans to increase efficiency. Despite how far humans have come developing computers, reading excerpts from Theodor Nelson’s “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” and working with computers this summer have both made it clear people don’t know nearly as much as they could and even should about computers.  Most people use what is available to them as illustrated by the above web comic.  This may not necessarily be what is the most convenient.  A vast amount of unrealized potential lies within computers and technology. Most people use computers to surf the web, create word documents, and share artwork, this isn’t all computers can be used for.  Douglas Engelbart touches on the productivity of computers in his article "Augmenting the Human Intellect" by discussing his referencing system using "thought kernels" and using the way people think to create a useful program. Theoretically everyone is capable of creating software to fit his or her needs. Individualized software would be the most effective way of increasing productivity because the program would be designed to promote productivity in each particular user.    Unfortunately sharing information from an individualized program would become problematic. For example if you do not own Microsoft Word, then you would be incapable of opening a .doc document in the same format the creator intended it to be seen in. Sharing individualized programs becomes problematic because a person may not understand how to use the program that you designed for you or as Tim Berners-Lee puts it, your program may contain viruses.  Sharing information is part of the reason the Web exists according to Tim Berners-Lee. If people could not share the information there would be little point to creating it.  This is why free services such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc. exist in such quantity.  As Lev Manovich discusses in his article "Art after Web 2.0," these free services provide a common platform for people to share information and ideas about art and other things. This idea of sharing information is part of what has helped us advance so far with computers but because common platforms exist, people do not need to create individualized programs to suit their own needs. It is clear some productivity and efficiency potentials of computers have been sacrificed to allow the population as a whole to use computers to share work, art, and what they did last night.