For the Max MSP assignment I’ve decided to try and make something which captures fragments of your life. I’ve been thinking about what moments of your life you would want to capture and how I can determine this. Initially, I was thinking I might make it random…. that way you might end up with some moments you’d otherwise not have stopped to appreciate. But similarly, you could also end up with a load of rubbish ones.

So I think I’m going to use emotion. Ah, that old gem. I’m going to use my favourite input ever – heartbeat – and try and detect surges in emotion, ie. raised heartrate. That way the result should be a “catalogue” of emotional highs AND lows.

Found this visualisation this afternoon on Information Is Beautiful – What Is Consciousness?

Definitely worth a read, quite a lot of it ties into some of the things we’ve covered in the Thinking lectures. Nice to read about it in a more scientific way and understand the details of it all, it’s a nice contrast to the arty, philosophical take on consciousness.

Our assignment for last Tuesday’s class was to come up with a way for Rock Art to engage with Mobile Media. As Adrian and I visited together and seemed to be thinking along the same lines, we produced our A3 sheet together.

The first thing we noticed when we arrived at the site was how vast the landscape was. There were no signs and, had we not had the map Adrian was given by Debbie, we wouldn’t even have known what direction to walk in. When we finally found the rock, we felt – as Joe put – “confused rather than satisfied”. Further up the hill, we also found some more markings but we were not sure if they were indeed rock art or merely the result of natural corrosion.

Our solution borrows from the GPS logging side of Geocaching and the social/tagging side of sites such as Gowalla or Foursquare. Our proposed solution would be a mobile app which used GPS to help lead people to the sites or rock formations. Once there – and only whilst at that location – they could log their successful finding of the site, and receive virtual awards and badges for doing so. Whilst at the rock art they would also be given further information about the site, perhaps including other visitor’s photos and experiences.

Ultimately, we wanted to make finding the rock art a little bit more fun and provide an “end result” of some feeling of success/satisfaction for the user.

Click to download our Rock Art Sheet

Excuse the horrid webcam photo, it’s 10pm on a Sunday night and I am feeling faaaar too lazy to walk all the way upstairs for my camera. I’ve spent the weekend thinking a bit more about the “relay” theme and am ashamed to say it’s got me fairly stumped. Relay ultimately means to pass something on, so I could pretty much do anything and argue that something, somewhere – even a piece of data – is being passed on. It feels like such a cop out and not even remotely creative.

So I decided just to be honest with myself and what the word means to me. My dad is quite a big The Who fan so I’ve always known the song Relay. Since I was a kid, whenever the weather forecast looks bleak, or clouds are gathering in the sky, my mum will always announce that “a storm is brewing” (which my gran also used to say and my dad always sings the line “Relayyyyyyyy, things are brewing”. So when it comes down to it, the word “relay” makes me think of bad weather!

I’m not really sure if this is a strong enough connection for the brief but I quite like it. I like that it’s different and I like that it’s personal to me. I think I’m going to make something that is controlled by the weather. I’ve been playing a little bit lately with pulling RSS feeds from Twitter (I’m eventually going to make a Twitter orb that will tell me the overall mood of my feed) so I have a pretty solid piece of code I’ve been working on. I think it might be nice to try pulling weather feeds from somewhere, maybe the BBC website, and outputting them in some way – hopefully something useful.