I am now 21. Is that a good thing? It feels very odd to say.
Does that mean my work should be a whole year better than when I turned 20? No wait that doesn't make any sense..
Oh well. I'm currently backlogged with work so my next blog entry is a week little late but in the meantime perhaps you could enjoy some fish?
This would be an excellent example of interactive media/animation - something so simple and colourful like this is entertaining and nice to look at. Plus you can interact with the media. Is it perhaps a little worrying that these fish, despite their obvious media, can be thought of in a way as real fish? The world of the virtual, when controlled well, can slide into the world of the real? How far will media evolve and will it ever engulf reality entirely - will we become so fixated with our creation that we will forget to live?
...
Those are enough dark thoughts for today, now to construct a building from nothing - does that make me an architect and a builder?
The first thing we learnt from our lecture on Semiotics was that Ivan cannot lactate. .. Which is an interesting way to start a lecture to say the least.
Aww lookit the kitty! 8D ..but wait- how do you know that's a cat? It doesn't look anything like a cat if you think about it - for a start it's made of ink and paper - cats certainly aren't made of that!
Humans have the ability to very quickly read shapes, smells, sounds etc - to our knowledge this ability is unique to mankind. If you held up a piece of paper to a dog it wouldn't matter what was on that paper, the dog would only see the paper. To a human that same piece of paper could have any number of meaning depending on what was on it.
For example; this is a human face isn't it? Actually it's just two dots and two lines inside a circle. We can identify these shapes in this particular layout as human immediately and it is this that allows us appreciate art and drawings. It is also the reason we can pick out shapes in clouds and ceiling artex (you know you've done it).
It also works with words. We can see lines on a page that curve in different ways to form words like 'cat'. When we see those shapes to make up that word, we all think of a fluffy quadruped (some people may think of the construction company but we don't talk about those people).
Iconic - Closer to the actual thing (for example video footage of a cat).
Arbitrary - Least close to the thing. For example the word 'cat'.
Most art falls somewhere in the middle of these. For example the drawings of cats at the top of this post would be quite iconic and a little arbitrary, a photo of a cat would be very iconic and only slightly arbitrary and the word cat would be very arbitrary.
Entropic - unpredictable information.
Redundant - predictable information
As a rule, for something to hold the interest of the audience it must have a fairly equal amount of both entropic and redundant information. The audience needs to be able to relate to atleast some of what they are seeing or they will become detached from it and lose interest. On the other hand they must see something that they did not expect to see for the piece to be interesting.
I'm using this clip from the American comedy-drama series, Glee, as an example.
The audience first sees an American football game being set up, the redundant information here includes an anxious audience, masculine players and opposing teams. The setting is also pretty redundant, there is nothing particularly out of the ordinary about it. This settles the audience into the story as they can relate to it on some level. The entropic information is what holds their interest, here the masculine-looking players assume a typically feminine dance routine. This is completely different from the usual events of a football game (obviously) so it amuses the audience. Meanwhile we can see that the audience within the scene are also reacting as though they were not expecting this; we would expect this of an audience in reality and so we feel assured that we are seeing the scene for what it is (weird), so this is redundant information.
Another thing we learned is that funny lectures + energy drinks = gigglefits.
