reading playgiarism and detournement

After reading these two readings, I’m still unclear about the line to define playgiarism and plagiarism. It is really blurry if the “size and weight” of copied work cannot be taken into account to define the plagiarism. The tone of the language became the point to tell. I wonder if there is a work copied everything from your existing work except the language tone, is it a plagiarism or a playgiarism? I will be very depressed if someone manipulated my work without announced my name.

This image is well-known one. But the original photo does not belong to the artist. It’s a photographer’s work. The artist steals the photographer’s image and manipulated and published it without notifying the original author. Artist did do a lot of changes from the original image but it’s still a controversial work. I think, at least, the “playgiarism” one should change the subject/ ideals for the work. I understand the Detournement because the cut-ups are used for supporting author’s own point, it can be seen as a kind of reference.

final project proposal

In this final project, I intend to create a mixed animation video that combines the video, audio, and moving text. I will choose my video sources from the animations that I’m currently watching. I have no idea of what kind of audio I will use right now, but I would like to choose a kind of strongly stylized music like opera, rock and roll, folk, those styles that totally non-relevant to the animation. Moving texts might be added to specify and visualize the plot of the animation or the tempo of the audio.
I want my video is narrative but I will see if I can do that because I don't have much confidence that I can narrate something well through cutting and pasting, and three minutes it’s a little bit too long for me, maybe I can do two short ones so each of them I only need 90 seconds.
I have an idea for the first 90 seconds now. I want cut a character dancing/fighting scene of the Anime Fate/Zero and add the Peking Opera as the background music. I think it will be very interesting and funny video.

response to The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin

To me, technique of “cut and paste” editing feel like making a new orientation for an old puzzle. Sometimes it will work but sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense. I think it largely depends on experience, so for the fresh hand, you have to screw up many times to test the line whether this will work or not. Burroughs thought that “all writing is in fact cut ups”. I feel that I cannot agree with him. Writing is a composition, and all the compositions have their own rules. It should be logic and descriptive so that people can understand what you are trying to say. Even though images and music both can be as informative as text, text requires more literal disciplines. It is far more than cut ups. People only will use quotes to support their ideas. Thus rearrange the composition is difficult. It’s hard to put pieces together but do not follow the hint and still let the new text make sense.
I haven’t thought about any cut ups of text but I have experience of video meshes.(all for interest purpose) And I think this kind of “rearrange” techniques also have been used in image manipulations. Photoshop does have many tools for users to copy and paste the partial of the image to make a new image. I’d like to try text cut ups, but I’m afraid it just doesn’t make any sense.

radio response__talking to machines

The first love story make me feel it’s a fake story and if it’s true, it would really scare me. I have played with Siri, a vocal APP which Apple claims that it can assist the user to do everything. But I feel this program is really limited if you try to make a conversation with it like a real human would do. The command from the user should be as simple as possible so that the response could be more accuate. But when the question refers to the emotional issues which are not logical, you will strongly feel that the machine is just programmed to respond you.
Computer, I think, no matter from the earliest DOS system or to the newest smartphone, it is positioned as a receiver. It receives the command from the sender(user), then collects data and do the calculation, then send the result back to the sender again. It is a passive system that always wait for the command from the user. Even if it can mimic a human’s behavior like the Ferebee doll does, it is programmed to react so under the certain signal that sensor received from the outside.
Computer cannot learn something, I think, that’s the biggest difference from a real human. Even include emotions, I think, all the human behaviors are learned from the outside(except some natural reactions like sucking). Because the computer do not know how to learn, it will not have emotions, therefore it will not have mind. The radio discussed “ is the simulated love a real love?” I think it is and it isn’t. because the love is only coming from one side—the human. The machine might know how to collect data when a human is having a emotional express, but it will never know what does those data mean.
There are many science fiction films that depict roberts rebel againse humans or discuss about if a robert has a mind, does it have a life. I do not deny that there is someday that the machine become able to learn. But I think our brain is far more complicated than their chips and smarter.

reading post #7 As we may think

This article is also the reading requirement in New Media History class. Bush’s prophecy about Memex and many technologies is very impressive. He predicted the invention of hypertext, the internet, computers, the WWW, and even the online search engine/Wikipedia: “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.” He also envisioned website functions such as website navigation/index, page comment section, and info search function.

Memex is a device where individuals can compress and store all the info, data, records and communications “mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” It has infinite storage and hyperlinks integrated within the text. And there is “a special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index.”

Text video critique

After Effects is a powerful digital motion graphics and video compositing software. It took me a while to adapt myself to the new operating interface because it’s slightly different from Adobe Flash. AE does not have any keyframe or tween, and user doesn’t need to calculate the frames to count the timeline. The control of motion is very straight forward and easy understood.
I did not realize my text size problem until I final rendered two files and put them together via iMovie. My view setting is 100%, so everything became very small when zoom out to fit the window. On the other hand, I think my topic is interesting. I want to discuss the relationship and impact between text and image. Does text can be seen as an image if in a certain situation? We know that image is very informative. One image could say hundreds of things, but how text could easily affects the meaning of an image? The video is experimental and I think I failed to convey my points due to my font size problem and the time that text stays on the screen is too short to read. I put music at the last second, because I just figure out how to do it.
This is not a satisfied work, but it will be a good start of my video software studies.