TRON

Today we watched the 1982 film TRON.

The film is about a meta-computer program, the Master Control Program (or MCP, voiced by David Warner), a chess program that is reincarnated into one that controls all other programs, and has ambitions to take over the world. When Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a hacker, gets too close to thwarting its plans, he is "beamed" in the computer as Clu and risks facing destruction by the MCP, along with the security program designed by his friend Alan (Bruce Boxleitner), called Tron. Together Tron and Clu must prevail against the MCP to save the future of humanity.

The story was about a videogame developer (Jeff Bridges) who was sucked into the virtual reality world of computers, where he discovered that the programs there were actually sentient and living under the dictatorship of the Master Control Program. At the time the effects and concept were both cutting edge. Keep in mind that at the time the movie was released, the big games in arcades were Pac-Man and the first version of Donkey Kong!

KOYAANISQATSI

Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance is a 1982 film directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by minimalist composer Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke.

The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means 'crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living', and the film implies that modern humanity is living in such a way.

KOYAANISQATSI attempts to reveal the beauty of the beast! We usually perceive our world, our way of living, as beautiful because there is nothing else to perceive. If one lives in this world, the globalized world of high technology, all one can see is one layer of commodity piled upon another. In our world the "original" is the proliferation of the standardized. Copies are copies of copies. There seems to be no ability to see beyond, to see that we have encased ourselves in an artificial environment that has remarkably replaced the original, nature itself. We do not live with nature any longer; we live above it, off of it as it were. Nature has become the resource to keep this artificial or new nature alive.
That being said, my intention in-other-words, let me describe the bigger picture. KOYAANISQATSI is not so much about something, nor does it have a specific meaning or value. KOYAANISQATSI is, after all, an animated object, an object in moving time, the meaning of which is up to the viewer. Arthas no intrinsic meaning. This is its power, its mystery, and hence, its attraction. Art is free. It stimulates the viewer to insert their own meaning, their own value. So while I might have this or that intention in creating this film, I realize fully that any meaning or value KOYAANISQATSI might have comes exclusively from the beholder. The film's role is to provoke, to raise questions that only the audience can answer. This is the highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from theexperience of the encounter. The encounter is my interest, not the meaning. If meaning is the point, then propaganda and advertising is the form. So in the sense of art, the meaning of KOYAANISQATSI is whatever you wish to make of it.
This is its power.

Pi........The Film...30-04-08

This afternoon we watched the film 'PI', directed Darren Aronofsky. also called PI-Faith in Chaos

plot summary:

The mathematician Maximillian Cohen (Sean Gullette) is tormented by a severe migraine since he was a kid, and he uses many pills to reduce his painful headaches. He is a lonely man, and his only friend is his former professor Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis). Max has the following assumptions, which rules his life: (1) Mathematics is the language of nature; (2) Everything around us can be represented and understood from numbers; (3) If you graph the numbers in any systems, patterns emerge. Therefore there are patterns everywhere in nature. Based on these principles, Max is trying to figure out a system to predict the behavior of the stock market. Due to his researach, Max is chased by a Wall Street company with obvious interest in the results of his studies, and by an orthodox Jew follower of the Torah, who believes that this long string of numbers is a code sent from God.


94143243431512659321054872390486828512913474876027
67195923460238582958304725016523252592969257276553
64363462727184012012643147546329450127847264841075
62234789626728592858295347502772262646456217613984
829519475412398501


A Fibonacci spiral approximates the golden spiral; unlike the "whirling rectangle diagram" based on the golden ratio, above, this one uses squares of integer Fibonacci-number sizes, shown for square sizes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34



After watching the film 'PI' i found some background infomation about the film and the mathematical principles used.


Now i am going to work on further research and development for new media.

Captains Blog: Day1 23-04-08

This morning we continued with work on semiotics.

I arrived to the afternoon lecture late, but with help from joe and his extremely detailed and comprehensive notes i understood the lecture. Nigel then showed a presentation with prepared notes on Digerati. This was an introduction to our work on multimedia design.

*there are people on the roof*

I am now going to work on reasearch on Digital Media, by looking at YouTube. I will also look at New and Interactive Media websites.

The aim of the module its to learn the skills to develop a multimedia prototype in the form of a presentation, using an experimental and developmental approach.