The story of Schrödinger’s cat

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Here’s the animation I did for the narrative module a few weeks ago; this is my first (and most probably last) animation. It’s about a scientist who decides to see what happens if the Schrödinger’s cat experiment is carried out for real:

He is scientist

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He’s a quantum physicist; let’s call him Dr. Ess for now. Dr. Ess is going to help me tell the story of Schrödinger’s cat; a story that — much like the cat — exists in a state of flux until observed.

Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author argues that a text, once separated from its author, has many possible layers and meanings for the reader to extract. You could say that until a text is read, its meaning exists in a state of flux; neither one thing or the other.

I’m working on telling the story of Schrödinger’s cat; trapped in a state of quantum flux inside a box. What will happen? Will the cat live or die? Will Dr. Ess be found out by animal rights activists? These things will remain in a state of flux until the reader does their part, reading the story and collapsing the waveform…

Octalpus

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The octalpus is very similar to the more common decimal octopus, the main difference being that it has 10 tentacles.

Flash game

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The point is not that it’s a good game (it’s not) or that it has amazing graphics (it doesn’t), the point is that everything you see has been drawn and animated in code. It’s object oriented and everything. I even did trigonometry on a rhombus! The flash file below is only 2.6KB, which is very nice.

To play the little game, hold down your mouse button and the triangle will follow the pointer. Eat the ‘food’ and your creature will grow a tail. (more…)

ActionScript ftw’s and ftl’s

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In the middle of making a flash game for the scripting module, and it’s been a little frustrating. At this point, things are going to descend into a fairly massive rant so unless; a) you’re nerdy enough to understand the title to this post or b) you’d like some insight into the mind of someone who’s reasonably nerdy; you might want to give it a miss. You’ve been warned. (more…)

Gondry and motorola

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Edit: I accidentally deleted the start of this blog post during a ’spring clean’. Oops. Unfortunately I have no idea what it said, so just watch the videos instead. In fact, that is probably what it said originally.

Gondry explains his reasons for doing things far better than I would in this interview, which you should watch if you have six minutes to spare:

Both of the videos above are on the mini-site for the advert but it’s a slightly flaky flash site so I’ve grabbed the videos from DailyMotion instead (which is like YouTube, except it’s French).

mscapefest 07 at HP Labs

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Just got back from mscapefest at the HP Labs in Bristol. It was a two day event about locative media and the mscape platform, which uses GPS and mobile devices to create digital ‘mediascapes’ that are layered over the real world. Also a good chance for some networking (I got three business cards, three!) and free buffet. The teriyaki beef was excellent.

It was a good couple of days, but I’m far too tired to say anything intelligent at this point. Instead, I’ve put together some Match of the Day style extended highlights, delivered via the understated elegance of the unordered list:

• Pervasive gaming; using GPS (and other technologies) to create locative games that can be played away from the screen. It set my ARG senses tingling. Included a very quick example of how to make a game in mscape, which looked far easier than it probably is.
• Audio for locative media; recording and planning methods for engaging people in locative media, without freaking them out (unless you want to freak them out). Binaural microphones sound cool — you stick them in your ears and they record stereo as you’d hear it — and Duncan Speakman, who was running the workshop, reported ‘great success’ with using sub bass audio. He made a woman cry.
• Teriyaki beef; seriously, there was a chocolate fountain and everything.
• Beyond GPS; extending the mscape platform through the use of other sensors. The focus was on proximity sensors (for location fixes when GPS is not available, i.e. indoors) but other sensors including galvanic skin response were mentioned.
• Collaborative mapping; a talk by Steve Coast about OpenStreetMap, which is to maps as Wikipedia is to enclycopedias. Very interesting talk (he’s a good presenter) with lots to think about. And they’ve found quite a lot of the copyright traps on the proprietary maps, there’s one in Bristol called ‘Lye Close’ which is great; the ‘official’ maps have fictional placed on them whilst the wiki map is apparently still lacking a ‘Mordur.’
• mediascape in the dark; we went out to the Watershed in Bristol and then wandered around in a park with some PDAs trying out a few pieces. We found bats and elephants and about twenty metres worth of GPS jitter.

Fin. I must sleep.

Liam Lynch

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Liam Lynch (Sifl and Olly, The Tenacious D movie, the Lynchland podcast and, of course, the United States of Whatever song) is one of those people who makes me want to make stuff. He just seems to be able to come with an idea, and then go ahead and make it. Plus he cloned his dead cat, which is as sweet as it is creepy.

If you’re new to Liam Lynch, I would recommend checking out Lynchland, Sifl and Olly (it’ll be on YouTube) and the songs The Fresh Electric and This Town Sucks.

Like Michel Gondry, he is one of the people who I intend to steal appropriate ideas from this year.

Web 2.0 logos

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After careful study (well, I looked at that picture of about 400 web 2.0 logos for an entire two minutes), I’ve deduced that the components of a web 2.0 logo are:

• lower-case letters
• gradients
• #F01085
• #CBE861
• #3398C3

And so, I made my own…

Michel Gondry

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New (academic) year, new blog — but I’m skipping the usual “hello world” to post a few links about Michel Gondry, a director whose ideas I intend to steal appropriate this year (in the right context, of course). Just in case; he’s the guy who did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Daft Punk video with the dancing skeletons.

• Wikipedia entry for Michel Gondry
  Well, it’s always a good place to start.
• The work of director Michel Gondry
  Double-sided DVD of music videos and other stuff. Highlights include; the Star Guitar and Around the World videos, seeing Dave Grohl with giant hands and I’ve been 12 forever — which is a sweet little film about how Gondry steals all of his ideas from his own childhood.
• La Science des Rêves (the Science of Sleep)
  A film starring Gael García Bernal (you know, that guy from Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mamá también and every foreign film ever) about a shy man who escapes into a world of dreams. It’s very Gondry, it’s got drumming and spin-art and everything!