David Phillips

Narrative Lab Final – Agitprop Software Theatre

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 05:04:57 +0000

I enjoy using contemporary issues and spinning them on their head. Last semester, I created a mobile app to get kids to find out where their clothes were being made, which happens to be Cevate and globally based sweatshops. This time around, I wanted to explore the issue of privacy in America; to be precise, the dwindling state of privacy. My inspiration derives from:

The rise of mobile apps with geo-location and high levels of surveillance
the incredible amount of information that Google has regarding personal habits
the increasing amount of phone data offered by telecoms to the US Homeland Security is cause for great concern for any privacy advocate
Facebook’s crumbling privacy policies
In England, they are planning to allow internet users to view CCTV cameras. If they see anything suspicious, they can report it for a cash reward.(1) This is a natural progression. Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8393602.stm

This is all incredibly frightening. Thusly, it’s time for me to exploit it’s inevitability for comedic gain.

I decided to take one of my more favored books, 1984, and see how realistic I could make it. My project stars a character named Georgie O’Well(in reference to Eric Arthur Blair’s pen name) as the mascot for SnapScouts (please note the use of case), an Android project to help children take photos of suspicious activity. Once they take the photo, Georgie says “++Good! Tell us more!” and you are able to add the individual’s name and choose from a collection of activites ranging from ‘illegal immigrant’, ‘hates freedom’, and simply ‘looks suspicious’. Once the user finishes placing their information, it is then sent to a private security firm for further investigation and future crime screening.

There are other hints laced within the site. The corporation that created the application is Mintru LLC. The founders are George Parsons and Winston O’Brien, both are characters from the book.

This is where most people get the joke. But not everyone.

“How far do you go?” was the main issue during its genesis. Some people thought it should be more obvious. Some people thought there should be no allusions to 1984 whatsoever. I was initially uncomfortable without all of the references: I was in on the joke, so are you, this is why we are all laughing and we all get how absurd this is, yes? But in order for the application to have impact, it needs to be discussed. So, where do you draw the line? I attempted to find a careful balance. It was awkward, but successful, I believe and it has reached from trending topics on Twitter to classrooms in Washington.

Links

Here is the app website:

snapscouts.org

Snardfarker(right wing blog)

http://snardfarker.ning.com/profiles/blogs/snapscoutscrowd-sourcing-crime

Mobile Behavior

http://www.mobilebehavior.com/2010/05/06/participatory-sensing-snapscouts-app-crowdsources-crime-prevention/

LA Times Blog(thought it was real)

http://jodspeed.latimesmagazine.com/2010/05/snapscouts.html

Wired Blog

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/05/enjoy-your-participatory-panopticon-with-snapscouts/

Download Squad

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/05/06/snapscouts-might-not-be-real-but-the-privacy-implications-are-r/

Metafilter:

http://www.metafilter.com/91744/Crowdsourcing-Crime-Prevention

and finally, Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/c2ngq/if_you_didnt_know_it_blackwater_xe_is_funding_a/

A final note to all: Read or Else.

Talk Back – SMS Television App Talk Back – Careful Jack, the Characters Talk Back! Elevator...

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ITP Spring Show 2010!

admin — Sun, 09 May 2010 05:03:51 +0000

Come on by to the ITP Spring Show 2010!

I have to projects at the show: This one (which will go unnamed for the time being) and UnItv. They are the awesome.

Unnamed – I’m a huge fan of agitprop. I’m exploring something at this point that can be called “software theatre.”

UnItv – UNITV is an interactive multiplatform television show. Broadcast live on Manhattan Neighborhood Network with a viewership access of 3,000,000 people, audience participation paired with improvisation leads to an unparalleled television experience. Garnered through submission of images, text and other media by home viewers, the actors respond to the material in real time, giving the audience a unique and innovative way to express their voice.

Sunday, May 9, 2-6pm & Monday, May 10, 5-9pm
ITP @ 721 Broadway, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10003

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Stop Motion – Steampunk Princess

admin — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 06:09:09 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM993F0zwqc

created by Sarah Braly and David Phillips

Comm Lab: Stop Motion Animation www.youtube.com/watch?v=U30WRu0G4Ow...
Counting Edward Mortimer – Comm Lab Movie www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovXaKUiTJiQ Here is the Vimeo link for you V-fans: http://vimeo.com/7784231...

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Brecht Reading – Thoughts

admin — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:25:00 +0000

This is a quote I wish to ponder more in the coming weeks when reflecting on my Narrative Lab final.

The nature of culture has actually changed in the past century, due to perhaps a thousand things, but information technology and size of population. There is less faith in concentration or reflection and much more faith in distribution and speed. It’s not an age for producing myth. We don’t want collective symbols. we want distributed information. The idea of gathering people together to observe and contemplate shared values, that core idea, is weak now, I think. So we we need to rediscover the idea of community and it will probably be discovered outside the market, which I think is all about distribution.
-Erik Ehn, NPR, 2005

Indeed, we do “need to find our fire again. Our ability to collectively share.” I have always loved creating stories, myths and worlds that never existed. But there is much more commercial emphasis on very quick myths, something that they can throw together with narrative, meta-narrative and then slap a logo on it. This was inevitable, perhaps with corporate reappropriation of art as it has done for ages.

Brecht: A Short Organum on Theatre

11
In establishing the extent o which wean be satisfied by representations from so many different periods – something that an hardly have been possible to the children of those vigorous periods themselves – are we not at et same time creating the suspicion that we have failed todiscover the special pleasures, the proper entertainment of our own time?
…12…We grasp the old works by a comparatively new method – empathy – on which they rely little.

Theatre has changed throughout the times to reflect the needs of that particular era. Brecht mentions that the representations presented in Aristotle’s era are considerably different from Shakespeares. Not just the play itself, but the performance style, it’s representation of humanity.
My question, which may be answered any minute, is what does that say about our generation? We a generation devoid of new myths. We have rehashes, reboots, reimaginings, and retellings of the same material over and over again. Reruns and DVD sales of yesteryears. Nostalgia, dismembering our capacity to look forward, but drag on our newly conceived notion of yesteryear. Our myths are our childhood myths. Transformers, Smurfs, Clash of the Titans, Bourne Identity. These are all from our past, not from our present. One could state it is our present shrouded in the guise of our past, and to that I would say we didn’t hear the myth the first time. We did not learn from our stories the first time. We did not heed our gods the first time. So, the flood of reruns will run for 40 and 40 until they have awaited our memory newly cleansed.

20 But science and art meet on this ground, that both are there to make men’s life easier, the one setting out to maintain, the other to entertain us. In the age to come art will create entertainment from that new productivity which can so greatly improve our maintenance, and in itself, if only it is left unshackled, may prove to be the greatest pleasure of them all.

my last favorite quote:

the alienation that is necessary to all understanding. When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.- Brecht on Alienation

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Genius – Live Improv TV

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 04:52:18 +0000

Our homework was to create a 5 minute television show that allowed users to send information to the program via the web and have it affect the show. My group, which consisted of David and Bai, decided to create a show where the host had to improvise a show based on images that appeared on the right side of the screen. We modified the existing code to add img tags for the end user so they just needed to copy and paste image URL’s, which were then sent to a moderator who controlled the image flow for the final picture.

UPDATE: Our classmate Lisa Maria recorded the whole demo. It’s 11 minutes of awkwardness, but it gets the point across.

1 hour of Live Television – SNL Yesterday I watched Saturday Night Live. I had some limitations,...

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Flash-Animation(WIP)

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:59:32 +0000

Look Up – by David Phillips (click to view)
Temporary Music by Kirk Withrow

Notes: This is definitely a work in progress. I have several scenes that I had to pull in order to make the deadline. If we get a chance for a midterm to improve our animation, I certainly will. Wednesday, I should be learning how to get the legs to move.

Scenes still to be included:

Balloon scene: A balloon vendor walks by and he buys all the balloons, but only reaches the atmosphere and gets stuck. Balloons pop.
3rd Attempt: Grabbing the leg of a taller person, getting kicked off.
Realization: he looks at the string on the ground and discovers math.
Spinning the rocketship around the 2nd world.
Final Moment.

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Phatekinetascope

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:13:51 +0000

I attempted to create a phate…phenakistescope(I just spent 10 minutes just trying to find the correct spelling), but not to any satisfactory level. A phenakistescope is a spinning wheels with interval slits for the user to look through and see the reflection of the wheel in the mirror. The issue that I ran into was inspiration. There were no stories I could create with only 12-16 frames in mind and could be created in a week. There are some brilliant pieces that tier the image into three different sections, thereby creating a 36-48 frames to play with. I eventually settled on a baby’s head that turned into a bowling ball. Here is the work in progress. If I have time, I will go back and redraw it, give it a proper cardboard backing and ink the image to improve the contrast.

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Antenna Workshop – January 13-15

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:16:12 +0000

Time Out – Microdestinations for your Library
Co-Created by Nien Lam and Allison Walker

Keynote Presentation

Time Out Concept Project for Antenna Workshop 2010

ITP held a workshop with Antenna Design. We were given the assignment to ‘design an intervention (= installation or an automated machine) for “interactive services” in public space which will generate a new interaction amongst people. An “interactive service” is a “mechanism” which provides some service or product for people. It is a kind of hybrid object/environment, such as an automated vending machine, information or entertainment kiosk, street furniture, etc. My team created a micro-destination station for our NYU Bobst Library for people who need to decompress and create a sense of community or communal experience. There were 5 separate floors, each with a different destination (ordered by altitude: underwater, beach, rainforest, mountainside, night sky) and each was given unique attributes. Every station had increased oxygen flow, headphone jacks, lighting control, and richer soundscapes depending on how many people were sitting with you.

It took a few days for us to come to this conclusion however…

Day 1: Our initial idea was a coin-based game that would be played in a planetarium up and down the stairs. The biggest issue was that our concept wasn’t site specific. We were told to literally go to any physical location and create a site-specific concept.

Day 2: We decided on the Bobst Library. We thought of a variety of games that could be played from floor to floor and on the ceiling, finally landing on relaxation. We kept seeing people walk away from their desk to the outside and just stare into nowhere, presumably decompressing from their homework for 5-10 minutes.

Day 3: We created a Keynote presentation and dragged an entire bench in for our presentation. We had a great time!

Photos of the final presentation were taken by the incomparable Jonathan Ystad
http://geminijono.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/antennaworkshop/

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Talk Back – SMS Television App

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:46:08 +0000

Talk Back – Careful Jack, the Characters Talk Back!

Elevator Pitch – User-generated MST3k. Users watching a show on tv/web can text in any comments/questions they have and the characters will respond back, the best of which appear on the screen for everyone to see.

Origin – Talk Back was created out of a desire to pick up the snarky commentary on screen that was used in “Blind Date,” “Next,” and other dating shows, not to mention Pop Up Video by VH1, and expand it to television and movies to a point where you are interacting with the characters. Our constraints included the use of only pre-taped material, so we decided administrators would read the comments texted in and respond as in the characters voice. There was a level of excitement that came with improvising responses immediately and then showing them on screen as they arrived. We ended up choosing a 5 minute scene from “Real Genius,” due to Robert Carlsen and I’s mutual love and the film’s insatiable quotability.

Structure – Textmarks would send the messages to a page, which was then redirected into a Google Spreadsheets, wherein, multiple admins could be logged in at the same time. We each would speak in the voice of the character. Each row has a Flag column. When the flag was marked Yes, the Question and Answer were sent into a queue to be shown above and below the screen.

Success – The textmarks did transfer into Google Documents and the information was able to show up on screen.

Failures – Google Documents would not let the sheer amount of text messages to be injected into the database, so we ended up with a bottleneck with the messages, which created a delay time for the responses to show up on screen.

The Future - In Phase 2, the messages would go directly to the individual who wrote it. Eventually, there could be the capability to respond to people in various languages.

Screen Grabs:

ITP Spring Show 2010! Come on by to the ITP Spring Show 2010! I...
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Dream SMS Applications

admin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:20:19 +0000

Describe an SMS based application that would be helpful to have at ITP:

Your computer texts you when it’s being stolen. Note: a more reasonable request. Your computer begins to scream out loud when A) your cellphone is further than 5 feet from it and B) is at anything beyond a 15 degree angle parallel to the floor.
Having SMS text interlace with e-mails when needed.
A # to text and ask if the floor is open.
A # to text to find people’s phone numbers?
a text message that could unlock something?

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