pirpirnaz loves arts and computing

super-human mermaid!

pirpirnaz — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:46:39 +0000

I love children. I worship the way they see this world and how they see what really matters. I am in love with their ways of creating and presenting their creations. As a child I was not different so when I saw the “No Robots Please!” project it was love at first sight. It’s a project by Alan Outten that was done with primary school students from UK, in which Outten first went in a class and presented himself and stuff like “science” “future technologies” and wanted the kids to “design the future” especially through animals and plants (that it the reason behind the cool name of the project “no robots please”-which secretly reminds me of my inner voice circa january 2009 when we were viewing Kraftwerk videos for our “remediation and techno-cultures” class at Bahcesehir University (my previous school) ). I personally think that everything future-related shouldn’t be about wires, microchips, mechanisms, gadgets, computers, robots etc. in our minds. Why are the first things that comes to mind are “flying cars” when one thinks about the future. That’s just plain boring and narrow. That’s why I liked the “No robots please!” project so much.

kids+animals/plants+future=Mind blowing stuff.

The one I am especially going to talk about is called “super-human mermaid” (attention, it’s super human, not robot mermaid!) and is created by G.Chawla, M. D. Swift and A. Hameed, all born in 1996. Which makes them 11 years old when the project was created during 2007.

The matter with this project (super-human mermaid) is this, from the creators’ words: “In case the world floods due to pollution humans can have the genes of fish so they can live in water and be mermaids.” The super-human mermaid has sharp eyes to spot predators, voice for distress calls, strong tail for swimming through currents, and your default mermaid features: gills and fins. and from the presentation visual I can see, it comes with a pretty necklace, a strapless top and long hair. I can not talk for males, because I can’t see a merman here but if this someday becomes real I am so going to get me some fish genes.

You can see this amazing project from :

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/261/

cinema redux

pirpirnaz — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:19:14 +0000

When I saw this one I remembered a piece Selcuk Artut showed us during our “physical computing” class two weeks while he was presenting himself and talking about his current exhibition “A/B”. The piece I am talking about it is http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/44/ and could also be seen here: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/45/ . Brendan Dawes is the creator of the pieces. Actually not the pieces but the pieces. oh.. well here’s the deal. “cinema redux” is a project done via Processing and is giving the chance to see the fingerprint (totality of frames) of a motion piece. Here he used “Serpico” by S. Lumet and “Vertigo” by A. Hitchcock. It gives us chance to observe the pattern (the fingerprint) and color palette the film uses and how they change and all those little pixelish frames create a bigger picture.

Selcuk Artut’s piece I was talking about earlier is consisted of the frames from his film “An Ordinary Life of an Extraordinary Woman” which can be viewed from http://www.selcukartut.com/portfolio/v3/?p=481http://www.selcukartut.com/portfolio/v3/?p=481 and a little bit clearer from http://www.kurumsalhaberler.com/images/ekler/504/selcuk-artut-75b-1.jpg

As someone who spends most of her day looking at photos, videos and other visual material, I find the idea quite pleasing. It gives the viewer the opportunity to see the big picture and something totally new out of the existing work.

accessories for lonely men 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8

pirpirnaz — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:52:28 +0000

When I saw this at http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/232/ first I was amused, laughed out loud for a while but then came to my senses and now I feel sad.

This project (was created by a Noam Toran) which is consisted of “sheet thief”, “cold feet”, “heavy breather”, “hair alarm clock”, “chest hair curler”, “shared cigarette”, “plate thrower” and “silhouette light”. All items on this project are basicly mockery of “married life” and are hilarious. They are, literally pieces of routine life as a couple. I can even write the storyline. It’s all those little things we hate when we are a couple. at least most of them. The gadgets look pretty usable (even though I can not understand how somebody could be that “pathetic”, but when I think about men and all of the silly stuff they use, it seems reasonable in a parallel universe). But I still can not understand why somebody would want to have their sheet stolen and left cold while asleep -”cold feet” also serves for the same purpose- and why would anybody like to listen “heavy breath” anyways. I know nobody would also enjoy waking up being hair pulled or share the last cigarette in the pack and definately not being thrown plates. I can not say anything about “chest hair curler”- which I actually think could be one of the most bizarre things I even seen or heard and for the last one “silhouette light” I think that is pretty useless. I just think that it may be used for decorative purposes and that’s all. While writing down this list I realized that 5 of the 8 items (and if I count “shared cigarette” in the purpose of “shared orgasm cigarette” that makes is 6) are bed-related items. should that mean that men only feel “lonely” at bed while being alone.. pathetic but hilarous. I am thrilled.

Windows 7 mobile VS. Iphone: from a designer’s p.o.v

pirpirnaz — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:15:25 +0000

I’ve been using Iphone for a while now but haven’t got a chance to meet Windows 7 mobile in real life yet, but from what I could see from presentation videos of Windows 7 mobile I can point out some design differences. First of all, the overall layout of icons on the screen. While Iphone is using still square icons for all the applications, with an approach that is a democratic use of space for all of it’s components, Windows 7 mobile OS seems to use (I say seems because that is what I get from the youtube videos etc.) more widgetish, more dynamic icons and animated components for the overall layout on the screen. The other major difference I found while looking at the differences between both is probably Iphone’s ability of adaptation of screens while being rotated (in most of the applications) I am not sure if it does or does not exist in Windows 7 mobile OS because I couldn’t find any relevant documentation of that feature. Another thing I can say about different design approaches is that Iphone is more of a button based (both while using the square button on the hardware and pushing on screen buttons in applications- even if the button contains text etc. -such as in all sorts of applications) product than Windows 7 mobile. Windows 7 mobile seem to contain more typographic elements than Iphone does and text is bigger. I’m pretty sure there are many other differences between two but my ability of actually inspecting Windows 7 mobile is limited with youtube videos and that’s all I can point out for now.

from cm 64 to today

pirpirnaz — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:52:47 +0000

This is going to be the one and only personal entry for this blog, which would be dedicated to this amazing class I am taking this semester as an MA student in Sabanci University, called “cs 450″, which is a class where artists/designers and computer scientists learn to work in a collaborative manner and create together. I am very excited. I’ve always wanted to create something that really has a digital function in life and also visually satisfying and meaningful but since I am an artist/designer/visual storyteller I lacked the skills to make that come true but today I feel lucky and have hopes (not expectations) for the coming weeks.

My very first computer was a commodore 64 which my parents told me that my sister brought it from heaven when she was born (practically the first “bribe” I got from my parents avoiding my excessive jealousy) and since I was 5 years old I believed it and for a very brief time I believed that computers were heavenly and of angelistic material. It took me till I was 10 years old to own my second one which was an assembly of my dad’s old computer parts just for gaming purposes and some ms-dos tricks I learnt from the computer class I was taking after school hours. My first decent computer was around I was 12, around the time my sister crashed down my previous one while “physically” playing with it. That was a Compaq desktop I believe, before it merged with HP. I used it for a long time. I met dial-up internet with that, all that was “interesting” for me, my very first geocities web page, extensive hours on mIRC, chatting my way through extensive and painful phone bills, icq, napster etc. Then came my first notebook, when I graduated from high school which was an IBM thinkpad, a twin computer with my sister (we were jealous of eachother so much that my dad got us exactly the same model) then my beautiful Macbook Pro 17″ which is my current temple, and the school assigned Lenovo which I really don’t like, and is like a bad duplicate of my old IBM Thinkpad.

I was around computers through out my own personal history while having 2 Computer engineer uncles, a father who is extremely curious and is a techno-geek on his own, a constant gamer aunt, of whom I remember as a gaming geek (and still is) through out my childhood memories and a long list of computer engineer friends & lovers.

Other than using digital media for my own professional and artistic purposes I believe and see digital media, devices and computers as a very handy tool that one can adapt like adapting to nature and I believe “computers” as a wide field, are in a very close relationship with human nature. One can learn and progress around them so easy and so fast that it almost become a survivalist instinct (my best example is my one-year-ago-big-time-computer-hater-and-digitally-illiterate mom who is now addicted to her notebook.)

So I want to join the game.