I feel like I've been a bit whiny lately in this blog. Math and Art has been the first majorly challenging thing on this course, and it's really quite easy stuff. Part of it is my lit review mis-step. The essay/practical looks somewhat daunting now as I don't think it can really stand on the shoulders of the Lit review. Not too much of a problem but I have to get creative and I'm not feeling very creative at the moment. The essay is meant to articulate the maths and the creativity behind whatever it is we are exploring. And reference other artists and mathematicians. My abstract was a bit general, though this could work in my favour I suppose. A lot of people seem to be exploring music and while I find that appealing myself, if everyone else is doing it I'd rather be a bit different. Also, the current Studio project is audio-based, I think that there is more potential for confusion of the two than them building on one another.
The Essay is worth 25%.
The Practical we'll be doing in tandem and it;s worth 50%. We are to produce a work or a body of works integrating math and art, demonstrating our experimentation with what we have chosen to explore. And document it. Explaining what is asked of us has helped me understand it a bit more too... which is why I came here really.
But I have so much reading to do tonight for Studio and tomorrow I'll be editing audio for a presentation (which will be blogged about next). This weekend will be dedicated to the Essay. I just hope we don't get landed with anything else.
Thursday was the start of our new Studio project, and audio/sound-based one.
Our class was divided into 2, swapping activities on the 2 days. Our group went on a sound walk. We had a brief chat with a guest tutor and then followed him around the city completely quiet. We were to listen to the sounds around us. We were told small tricks such as counting the distinct sounds which enabled us to be more concious of what we were actually hearing. We were also to try to separate the sound from what we thought was making it. For example if we heard a bag dragged across concrete rather than associating the sound with something being dragged, just hear the sound detached from it's source. Hear it's qualities, not what is making possibly it. This is more difficult than it seems. It's something I thought I regularly do but when asked to actually do it consciously, it was automatic to associate it with the source.
I spent the first few minutes of the walk actively trying to get music out of my head (various The Doors songs lately if you must know, I've been having a renaissance).
We were told of movements of people which slight political agendas who separate "Natural" sounds from "Unnatural" sounds (city noise etc) and about how our guest tutor somewhat disagreed with this movement as all sound it natural even if it's man-made. My first argumentative thought was Synthesis or better, sound modelling where instruments that could not possibly exist in real life are modelled so we hear what they sound like.
Friday we swapped and our half met up at Auckland University Architecture department to see the Anechon Chamber (not sure why it's in that department) and it's opposite, an echo chamber. The Anechon Chamber is filled completely with sound-deadening material (some kind of foam I imagine).
The walls, the ceiling and the floor. Visitors actually stand on wire above the floor. The wire is just about the only hard reflective surface in the room. Entering makes one's ears tighten up (noticeably usually) as they attempt to hear what they are used to hearing: sound reflections. It's very quiet in the room. I've been there before as a kid on a Uni open day and I think that played a part in the feeling not being as dramatic as I remember. Possibly also that about 10 people were in the room so there were plenty of surfaces for sound to reflect off. While not as dramatic as I remember the first time, the reverb in the normal room next door was very apparent once I exited the chamber.
Another effect of the Anechon Chamber is you can hear your own internal noises more. People often discover mild tinnitus. I was mildly surprised that I didn't while younger classmates did. I've been to quite a few loud gigs and stood next to the speaker (I wouldn't normally do that).
We also had a brief hearing test, and a few other things were explained to us such as how the ear worked.
A couple of other interesting things, we were exposed to some wav files of music, speech and traffic (I think) with different amounts of reverb applied. The ones with less, meant to sound like they were in a furnished and an empty living room for example to me sounded like they had too much reverb applied. It's possible that it's because we were already listening to them in a mocked up living room. It's also possible that one does not notice the reverb because we are accustomed to it. Later in the following week (yes I'm getting ahead of myself) I was surprised at just how much reverb there is in my own recordings of various indoor situations.
The last interesting thing was that the music wav, when played with enough reverb to simulate a music chamber, that's when it sounded best to me. Is that because it suits that environment or is it just because that's what I'm used to?
We all presented on Wednesday. I was over my application by Sunday evening so I didn't develop it further. It was in a working state and I wasn't going to mess with it.
Despite not preparing much more than a quick mental list of what to say, I found it easy to present my project and my thoughts on it. There were a range of apps, some with very good ideas, some quite impressive. Overall I was happy with how my app faired in comparison.
Presentations are funny though, I'm relaxed and not nervous about facing my class but nevertheless my body isn't fully aware of that so I'm always glad to get it over and done with. It's the anticipation - once you are up there it's fine.
Since the presentation I've been looking at a book called Objective-C for Absolute Beginners: iPhone and Mac Programming Made Easy. It looked like a really good book and has fantastic reviews on Amazon. I'm not sure it deserves quite the amount of praise that it has received but I'll work my way through it. And the K&R. But both will have be low priority as the new Studio project is starting and so will an essay and practical for Math & Art.
For the first time this course I consciously decided to not go to a lecture. Well I've missed a few classes here and there, moving house, in bed with the flu, but this time I just looked at what we were doing and decided I'd rather get a tooth pulled.
I don't think I'd have learnt anything new, but it's difficult to ascertain what was taught from other class members who's main recollection is that it was 3 hours. Converting CMYK to RGB aand back was the most sensible answer I've had. Of course however that was done (probably inverting CMY and working black calculation in there) it was done without recognition of real-world factors such as colour management and UCR which are more complicated and... we have software that does it.
I got my literature review back later in the week and it was as awful as I said it would be. Well, I passed by a margin which surprised the hell out of me, but then I saw other people's work and they passed by a higher margin so I guess being our first attempt at academic writing we got off lightly. This will be the worst mark I get in this course.
I've had the last 2 weeks "off". Every single day though was dedicated to developing this application worth 70%. I found it annoying actually. 2 weeks work on something that would pass an entire paper and 2 weeks was enough to barely prepare for it. I have some understanding of programming and yet I could not understand what we had learnt. - Objective-C's syntax is odd. C was easier to understand. If I'd been given a month to learn C and a month to learn Objective-C, I could have decided to build an application and gone and built it without much fuss.
I spent my first week reading Learn C on the Mac. I had meant to finish it by that weekend and start-and-finish the K&R within the week too and have made headway into some Objective-C material. That is a ridiculous goal really. Absorbing and understanding such dry material in a time limit and battling the inevitable attention wandering as you read all about the joys of pointers. By about Friday in the first week I decided it was time to start building the interface of my application. I used one of the tutorials from earlier in the week to build it and connect it via code, sort of making sense of things. But there were so many unanswered questions about the processes behind this very visual way of building an application and how it connects with the code.
I had settled on making an iPhone version of Simon, the game from the 80s.
I was weary about it at first as I thought it might be a bit simple or lack navigation to other views. I couldn't help myself and googled to see if any Simon iPhone apps already existed, and yes they did. I then looked through the iTunes store and yep, there were a quite few. I had been worried that looking at them might influence my design. But I wasn't that impressed with the apps that already existed and I was able to check some comments by users about what they liked and didn't like. This made me realise that while the game is basic, it's very customisable. I could have an options screen. Those options could be saved as user preferences.
I started to make decent progress over the weekend, and I started polishing up the UI with Photoshopped buttons and a textured background.
I had an idea of how one would code the basic game but googled for a JavaScript version so I could analyse that and take anything from it. I found an example and they had built it kind of the way I'd have done it. Well, the beginning part anyway I never got past reviewing the initial set up of the game before I was knee-deep in my own code that I was comfortable with continuing on.
I had a few ideas though: I wanted to give 2 options to game play. Standard is where Simon plays a sequence, progressively adding another step as the game continues. I called this "Advance". The other way was harder, called "Scramble". Each time the user won a round another step would be added, but the sequence would be entirely different.
Another option was an 8-tile game.
Other options added to the options screen was setting the tempo of the game, the timer before you lost, and how many steps in the game was to start. I also originally added volume but slowly got the idea that such a control is somewhat redundant. I think it would have been hard to implement anyway.
I had some major issues that seemed insurmountable. I had a function that plays a tile according to the value of a particular variable handed to it from another part of the program. The other part of the program is a loop that iterates as many times as the game has progressed. The first time I implemented it, it did what I expected it to do, which was play everything too fast - just about instantaneous. My solution was to add a delay, so I googled how one would do that. The standard way(s) unfortunately halted UI updates so the tiles did not light up until the entire sequence had played. Other methods of implementing it confused me, it seemed that the for loop that called that function didn't wait for the function to say it had finished and it could be called multiple times at the same time. Basically a lot of stuffing around was done until I finally gave up and implemented a timer that everything in the application runs in sync to.
Every step in this was difficult because I didn't (and still don't really) understand the syntax, or how and when pointers are implemented, memory management (of which there is quite a bit on the iPhone) so my application leaks like a siv I'm pretty sure.
That said I did manage to get the game running, the tiles lighting up, sounds playing (Which I sampled from a rock organ posted online, the notes are A, D, G, A like the original), play sequences and then waiting (for a limited time) for the user to reply. It has 99 levels (the original has 68 apparently), you can pause the game at any time, mute it (someone wanted that as a feature on a different Simon iPhone game) and atm there is a quit button which is apparently against Apple interface guidelines... Though the home button doesn't quit the game properly. I could replace it with a new game button but then I wonder why anyone would want such a feature... It originally had a new game button beside the quit button but I took it out for that reason. If only I could afford a real iPhone or iPod Touch to get familiar with. Trying to design a HIG-compliment interface when I've only spend about 10 minutes using one is a bit difficult.
I couldn't get the options view to come up until last night (Saturday). This is something I've spend hours mucking around with much like the timer/sync issues. Now I have it poping up I don't really have time to get it to change settings or learn how to save settings. And passing variables between screens isn't straightforward it turns out too.
I think it will pass me through but I don't think I'll get an A. This annoys me as I don't really think it is possible to get an A, looking at the requirements verses our knowledge. I'll be interested to see what everyone else comes up with.
I have found some really good books on Objective-C and I still have to read the K&R. With this project out of the way I will dedicate some time to it with the view of understanding iPhone/iPad and to a (much) smaller degree Mac/PC application development by the end of the year. I think there is real money in this platform and this will be fulfilling the idea I had early on about this course: It has the potential to pay for itself while studying because the skills it teaches are so current. If I can use what I learn as I go, then doing postgrad is much more likely. Given that there is a certain devaluation in education because there is more of it, I think it's important to not stop at degree level. Not that I ever intend to be a worker Bee making someone else rich ever again. I quite like the idea of multiple (and hopefully passive eventually) income streams that I generate for myself.
Due to the way my weekend went (I should point out this is not a euphemism for "I partied all weekend" but usually "My time was a commodity for other people") I really only got to work on my stopwatch the morning that it was to be handed in. This didn't bother me too much, I'd been reading a book on C. Although this is Objective-C, I felt I should be able to wing it and get it out of the way so I can continue my self-learning. I actually did surprisingly well with it. I modified it's functions and buttons and UI. I'd really have liked time to dress it up a lot more but it was functional and not ugly and I made 2 versions, because I decided to put a twist on the application. We have a holiday coming up and I can use that time to get good with C, Objective-C and iPhone app development. I need to come out of that break with a completed iPhone app worth 70%.
The rest of the week was turning up to tutorials on how to do various things with iPhones like switching views and hooking up to databases. However I felt like I was sitting in a Computer Science class that's been learning C for 6 months and started on Objective-C a month ago. Without the groundwork, it was mostly lost on me.
I continued to read Learn C on the Mac and flipped though the K&R which interests me more but I think a tutorial-type walk through dummies type book would be more applicable for someone under serious time constraints.
Friday afternoon we had to hand in our abstract for the Essay that we are to write. Given that the groundwork - my Literature Review - was so appalling, I found it a bit difficult. I'd really like to re-write it. But that wont be happening, not enough time, or really enough enthusiasm either.
I don't feel like I'm having much luck with classes at the moment. I sat in on the maths lecture and we got back to matrices and matrix multiplication. I now know how to multiply 2 matrices, one will be 3x2 and the other 2x3, and we'll get a result that is 2x2... I really have no idea about the logic behind such a thing and what on earth the result is good for. How can you possibly apply the calculation of two matrices that don't line up and the result being a 3rd matrix that doesn't resemble either of the 2 multiples... to anything? So this is something I need to look into at some point...
Actually I do remember this from 4th or 5th form maths, it made little sense then too. Honestly, this is the problem with maths and the way it's taught in schools. It's never applied to anything and often makes no sense. Maths could be an interesting and engaging subject and people could learn and understand it, and want to do so. They could remember it. But not with the way it's commonly taught. I just don't understand why it has to be so problematic.
Small anecdote: Straight after I finished 7th form, I borrowed a book, the 1st year text on Psychology and I read it from cover to cover. In that book was a break down of basic statistics, the bell curve, 95th percentile as it was a key to understanding certain studies. It was so easy to grasp and I vaguely remember being taught the very same thing in maths 3 years earlier and not really making much sense of it. But a book on entirely different subject made it easily accessible. For a start it was because it was for a purpose. Maths classes generally don't give you a reason why you'd want to know something. The situation could be vastly improved if students were given small projects in which they had to discover they needed a certain math to get something done. Then told how to do it then they actually got to use it. Also if it was taught from a historical perspective, how did theorems get discovered or devised and why? What practical problems did they solve? But maths will continue to be a boring irrelevant subject until the day past students find they need to know something in order to do their computer science later in life or whatever, and at that point they will learn with great stress or fail or if they are lucky, discover one of the few resources that isn't awful. At which point I may as well suggest Khan Academy for anyone struggling with math.
We then moved back on to rotation calculations that we'd dropped off from 2 weeks ago. Once again I'd like to explore that further, now I know the formula. I want to understand it. Even if I am 20 years too late from needing to know how to translate a vector by hand. Next I'll find out how 3D space is translated onto a 2D plane. It's the kid in me, it fascinated me once.
We then had an explanation of how a matrix related to a bitmap image and image capture devices. I personally found it painful to listen to, with the urge to take over and explain the bits that always get left out. Things like just why maximum luminance is such an odd number like 256 (It was mentioned that it's because it's 2^8, but if I didn't know what I know I'd still be asking "So???"). I went home later on and worked on my Stopwatch.
Anyone in my class reading this (it's alright, no one does), short version is: computers use binary number system because it translates well to on and off, (decimal would mean 10 different voltages to represent 10 digits and that would be prone to errors). So base 2 number system (binary) means that every number to the left of the first digit is twice as powerful as the bit (binary-digit) to it's left as opposed to decimal where we have Ones, Tens, One-Hundreds etc. So it's Ones, Twos, Fours... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024... numbers look familiar? Your usb stick is 8gb, 16gb or 32gb for example? Well there ya go there is the reason. So one byte is 8 bits, and converted to decimal = 256. Why is a byte 8 bits? Because years ago Intel produced it's first microprocessor and it could do calculation on 4 bits (later on with a hint of humour called a nibble) then it quickly released a machine that could do 8 bits which was a number that was starting to be usable for most common purposes: 8 bits (256) shades of grey... 256 steps of amplitude(volume) in a sampled wave form... The English alphabet, numerals, punctuation and a bunch of control codes fit into a byte (8 bits, 256 decimal) and it was called ASCII...
24-bit images are 3 bytes, and they contain one byte representing the luminance of Red, one byte of Green, one for Blue 3bytes = 16.8 million colours. 32-bit images have an extra byte representing the alpha channel which is how transparent a given pixel is.
Or it's CMYK is which is another colour space called a subtractive colour space and used for printing. Then there are High Dynamic range images that are 16-bits per pixel (2 bytes) so they are 48-bit images. While they take up twice the file size, 16 bits=65535 levels of luminance so much much higher fidelity colour, - very important if you are going to muck around with images in photoshop as do so usually results in dropping data from the image. 256 is low fidelity in audio too, and CD quality is 16 bits per sample... 44200 times a second - 44.2khz16-bit, - ever seen those numbers around CD discussion?
All this stuff is good to know in many ways, not least because this is a technical degree and not knowing this stuff might otherwise be considered laughable and someone not to be taken seriously. Understanding the basics gives you a grounding in the more complex stuff and can help you in ways that you don't know yet. Like any knowledge you can draw from it in ways you cannot imagine. Plus it's a bit weird to do colour correction in After Effects but not know this. I mean, really, how does one do that?
Right that felt better I think I filled in some of the missing bits...
On Tuesday afternoon we started our 3rd paper for the semester, Design and Data Structures. In this paper we are introduced to iPhone application development using XCode, Objective-C and Cocoa Touch. These are all keywords that I jumbled up a bit when I started exploring it myself a couple of months ago, but now it's all clear what the difference is. Objective-C is the language, based on C (as one could guess). Cocoa is the framework that you can draw from when making applications for OSX. It contains libraries and UI elements that you can reference in your code. Cocoa Touch is the same thing but it's the iPhone/iPad framework and it's UI elements. XCode is simply a development environment supplied to make your applications in. It's the Complier, and a separate program called Interface Builder where you can drag & drop UI elements to build your interface. So, a couple of months ago I might have said to anyone who would listen (er, which is no one really) "I'm going to try to learn XCode" meaning I was going to learn iPhone app development, I sort of sounded like someone saying "I'm going to learn Dreamweaver" when they really meant they wanted to learn HTML and web development. *sigh* when did I become the kind of person who finds that mildly amusing...
We have a guest tutor, a man who has built an iPhone app and published to the App Store. Tuesday was theoretical, we were introduced to some concepts on the Objective-C language, but much of it would have gone over people's heads, although hopefully enough retained so that it reveals itself when it's nature is understood.
Wednesday and Thursday were much the same, the concepts were... well conceptual. We were given a handout on Wednesday, if we followed it we'd have an iPhone app that didn't really do much but had graphical elements that responded to touch. I took that home and worked on it but didn't get it finished due to some interruptions at home, and then I got to a point where the stupid thing would crash on startup with no explanation. Debugging was a bit difficult as I didn't really understand the code so I just listened to the Tutorials. We received our first assignment for this paper, worth 30% of the total, to build a stopwatch application. The basic application had been built but was missing critical parts that we had to add. I decided to duck out and find a book shop that had a book on Objective-C. Nowhere in town had anything, and if they had have I'd probably have been charged some ridiculous price, in NZ we seem to be ripped off with the price of text books. I also went to the AUT library twice, the first time I found nothing, the second time I decided to loosen my criteria as I was getting desperate and this time found 2 great books, although not on Objective-C.
The first one, Learn C on the Mac is around 300 pages and easy to read. The second one I was very happy to find, C Programming Language (2nd Edition) - written by the creators of C and regarded as the THE book on C. C is a good primer for Objective-C as Objective-C is an object-oriented superset of C and you can write C code in Xcode and it will compile and work. I have an Objective-C book lined up, Auckland Public Library has the follow-on book to Learn Objective-C on the Mac. On Friday we were to work on our Stopwatch, so I stayed home and read the first book.
There are a few bits and pieces that this project requires for it to be completed, there are 2 "experimental film" reviews, one of which had to be from the international film festival which is a bit difficult as the film festival films aren't all that experimental. Nevertheless I've watched one film festival film and one experimental film and they will be documented in this blog post.
I really wish I'd had time to alter my submission after the critique it had at the presentation (that it tried to fit too much in) but I'm happy enough with it that it was lower priority than other tasks I had to complete. Righty, first film review.
The Room
Some people get enjoyment out of awful things. I have a friend who liked to watch terrible movies for the humour. I'm not one of those people, watching terrible movies makes me think about the finite amount of time we have on earth and how it could be better spent elsewhere. The Room (2003), written, directed and featuring Tommy Wiseau is an awful film that has gained cult status because it is so terrible. I decided to watch this film because I'd read on a local forum about just how amusing it was. I' down with watching a comedy I thought. Well it turned out it was funny because it was awful. I persevered only for the sake of the film review. So what makes this film so terrible? The script, the acting, the direction the props the dialogue... And it appears that it was made is all seriousness, although Wiseau appears to market it these days as a black comedy, a genre that it doesn't really fit either.
It's about a love triangle between Johnny, Lisa and Johnny's best friend Mark. Johnny is a genuinely nice banker (I know...) who has set Lisa up with an apartment, car and lifestyle. Mark is Johnny's loyal friend who is eventually seduced by Lisa who has become very dissatisfied with her relationship. The film also features undeveloped sub plots and other characters such as the neighbour also set up and looked after by Johnny (and loved like a son) called Denny. Denny is something of a man-boy who likes to watch Lisa and Johnny kiss. Lisa's mother Claudette who visits every now and then for a chat and "went to the doctor and I definitely have breast cancer!" - This is never mentioned ever again in the film. Denny has a run-in with a drug dealer who wants his money on the roof of the building that they live in, we never hear of that again either. Michelle and Mike, a couple who like to use Lisa's couch to intimately eat chocolates off each other. It eventually ends with Mark and Lisa becoming hostile about their relationship at Johnny's birthday party and when everyone leaves Johnny trashes his place and commits suicide by shooting himself in the head. The last scene is Lisa and Denny crying and asking if he is really dead despite the large pool of fake blood behind Johnny's head.
The film is obviously meant to be a show case of Tommy's acting which is amusing because it's dreadful. The reactions to events taking place are flat, and when dialogue finally kicks in "Lisa, why are you doing this to me?" that is well... also flat.
I sat through this film and it was hard to watch, however in hindsight I can appreciate the cult following that it has, it's awful nature does make it amusing. Now Plan 9 from out of Space, that is a dreadful film!
[not finished]
This lecture wasn't too full-on as half of the class didn't attend. Our first assignment (a Literature review) was due at 4pm and also The following day our Studio hand in. We'll then be spending the next 2 weeks (I think) doing our next paper on XCode.
[I'll cover the subject in more detail later....]
Related, this weekend wound up being for most of the class the weekend they did their Literature review. Unfortunately I was just as disorganised. Well, it wasn't just plain disorganisation, it was related to not really knowing how to do the research part properly in conjunction with having a studio project that was also quite demanding yet so much easier to make tangible progress in. The result for me and many others is a Literature review hashed together the night before. I'm told that this is a fairly normal thing for students to do by a friend who has been there and done that. At least first year students. I find it pretty unacceptable to work like that but at least this time, being my first induction to the whole academic writing thing, it's probably understandable especially given that just about everybody does it.
I up skilled massively this weekend, learning how to research my subject in an academic fashion (it's not quite the same as real-world methods) and actively reading, and of course then came the lamenting "If only I'd done this last weekend". Of course last weekend I was mucking around with video footage.
The word limit was low (1500-2000) and the question was fairly simple: In what ways can the creative practice integrate both math and art? If I'd been asked this question and just expected to answer off the top of my head I'm fairly certain I could have come up with 1500 words of examples. Perhaps. Or perhaps if I'd tried, I'd discover my ideas are actually quite vague. Either way my job was to pull current writings on the subject and compare and contrast them. If I was to do this again I'd do it well, as now I suddenly have the understanding of how to do such a thing. I will use these skills in the future. But for this literature review those skills are not apparent. What I submitted was truly awful. It's embarrassing really. As time started to run out, I was increasingly aware of my lack of sleep and with 2 hours for deadline I just did not care anymore. My last 3 paragraphs are mere sentences, the conclusion is short and weak and half way through my references went out the window.
But I'll just have to deal with it and do better next time. Most of the class are also unhappy with their submissions, so I'm in good company.
