#exerpt from the play of electrons /!!?!?!?!?!??!

[youvebeenlivingfictional]

Little CYOA sneak-peeks

Lil exerpts from the opening/base posts for each storyline below :)

Javier Peña

“Can I get that for you?”

It’s jarring to hear English—it’s not what you expect. The music playing in the club is loud; the lyrics are in Spanish, sung faster than you can comprehend. You hesitantly glance over your shoulder. Your eyes catch on his smiling lips first, then sweep up over the mustache, over his nose, up to his eyes.

“...If you tell me how you could tell.”

Nathan Bateman

You were warned, of course, but it is…Absolutely insane. You’re tired, you’re sweaty, and you are so, so happy that you packed fucking light. You shift your backkpack on your shoulder, glancing around. Follow the river. Follow the fucking river? You’re not a goddamn girl scout. You pull in a  deep breath, then let out a relieved sigh as you finally spot the house…Up a rather steep incline. Son of a bitch.

Bruce Wayne

It must be a mistake. There’s Wayne Construction, Wayne Chemicals, Wayne Biotech, Wayne Automotive, Wayne Shipping, the Wayne Foundation, Wayne Medical, Wayne Electronics, but—

But this is something that seems to have been…Buried.

There must be a reason. Things like this don’t just slip through Lucius Fox’s fingers, and that man is on top of everything at Wayne Enterprises. Of course, you’d think Bruce Wayne might miss a thing or two. The man doesn’t know a damn thing going on in his own company.

[remmushound]

Donatello’s mind was blank. Unusually blank. There was a strange buzzing in his ears and in his head, any of the few thoughts he had carrying him on autopilot to continue his task. Where to screw, what wires to connect and where to connect them. Occasionally a flash of memory would shoot through the turtles mind and stop his work as his hands shook uncontrollably. Gunshots, blades whisking through the air. The sound of weapon stricking weapon.

Donatello fitted the wires perfectly around each other in a neat, ball-like brain.

Screams. Steel slicing through flesh.

He double checked, and triple checked his wiring, running a few electronic pulses to confirm what he already knew.

Shattering glass.

The robot drone blinked one eye and then the other at Donatello’s electric command.

Leonardo flying through the busted window.

He shifted each of the wings in turn, testing their flexibility and how well the new parts took to the battered body.

That monster... that Shredder...

The door slammed open and Donatello didn’t have to look up to know who entered; he recognized the heavy footsteps, the labored breath and the way growls whistled between the gaps of the snappers fangs.

“How’s Leo?”

Raphael didn’t respond, stomping over to Donatello’s table side to scrutinize the work at the softshell’s

“It’s not much, but he’s a lot better off than that Shred-Head left him.” Donatello said, “Was thinking in a week or two he can be zooming around like normal. I just hope his memories are intact— do you think—“

Raphael’s answer came in the form of a roar and a powerful arm swiping the drone from the table and sending it crashing to the floor. A few of the exposed wires caught and tore on the jagged edges of the fall, and any life that had been returned to the drone quickly flicked out of its eyes. Donatello did nothing.

“LEO’S HURT AND YOU’RE OVER HERE PLAYING DOCTOR?!”

Donatello was silent, his hands locked in place where he had been working, his eyes much the same.

“You should be in there with him— we should be coming up with a game plan— and you’re focused on a drone!”

Raphael’s fury only grew at the lack of response and he circled around to face Donatello at the opposite side of the table, slamming his hands down to splinter the wood almost in half.

“A ROBOT. Dad could be dead— Karai is!— and you can’t go two seconds without your nose stuck in wires?”

Donatello said nothing. His lip quivered and he blinked in quick succession to avoid from crying.

Raphael gave a huff. “Whatever. Enjoy your robot.”

He kicked the already-damaged droid on the way out of the room and slammed the door shut with enough force to make the room shake and make Donatello flinch. A few moments passed in silence with his numb thoughts buzzing before Donatello slowly got up from his chair, picked up his forlorn son, and started work on him once again.

An exerpt from a version of the ROTTMNT finale where Leonardo was savaged by the Shredder and tossed through the window of April’s apartment like previous incarnations.

[aryapathak-ls25-blog]

Week 6:Analog/ Digital Transitions

Week 6- Analog/ Digital Transitions

 Jacob Gaboury Professor at U.C. Berkeley Film & Media- Historian of Digital Media- Studied at University of Utah and NYU

·             Experimental Computer Science (ex. AT&T Bell Labs and the University of Utah)

·             Distinctions between public/private institutions and their funding of experimental art

·             Bay Area Experiments

o   Stanford

o   Palo Alto

o   Berkeley

 Engineering Experimentation 1960-1980 -. Innovations in computer science and engineering and their relation with the arts

 Computer Science didn’t exist until the 60’s- digital & electronic computers weren’t even developed until 50’s

             All CS was experimental

 ENIAC Computer – One of the first computers in the united states, big, not portable. Shows how far

How did the portable laptop we have today come around? It was not a necessary invention but instead the product of artists, engineers, etc imagining the future of the technology

 1957-

US and USSR are in the cold war

After USSR launched sputnik, Americans got worries, ARPA (Advanced Research Projects) was

  Licklider- “man machine symbiosis”- he wanted to change the way we think about was a computer is from a passive calculator to but rather as helpful tools

·             First Director of the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) in 1962

·             Moved ARPA contracts from private sector to universities

o   ended up founding 7 of the most influential CS departments

·             Laid foundations for ARPANET which was the predecessor the the modern internet

 AT&T Bell Labs (now called Nokia Bell Labs) – founded in 1925 by the inventor of the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell, originally in NY, now in NJ

·             Responsible for numerous inventions in signal processing, electronics, computation

·             In 1960’s artists and researchers collaborative to make

 Lillian Schwartz (1927)

·             Early Computer Art Pioneer

·             Worked at AT&T Bell Labs throughout the 1960s and 70s

·             Deployed mixed-media techniques, blending film, painting, and digital methods

 University of Utah  

·             Funded by defense department (ARPA IPTO)

·             Organized around “problem solving” for key technical challenges in this experimental research artea

o   Texture shading, shadowing

 ·             John Warnock (PhD 1974) – founded Adobe

·             Nolan bushnell- Founded of the video game Artrori- later

·             Ed Catmull - founded Pixar, phD thesis involves one of the visit computer animated/ digital 3d simulation . we watched a couple in class

Public/Private

Experimental research works on key problems, broad principles, and abstract concepts

 Experimentation is not generally commercial or market driven

 Industry wide-shit in the 1970’s

·             Mansfield Amendments severely limits military funding of research

·             Researchers flee universities and capitalize on experimental systems/ move to the private sector

 Bay Area research

 1962-Augmentation Research Center (ARC) earliest systems to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing

             Sponsored the same way by nsa> by arp> by ipto

NLS0 ARC developed on-Line System – one of the earliest system to employ many contemporary technologies- hyperlinks, computer mouses, raster-scan video monitors, screen windoq

 Debuted in December of 1968- in what was later known as the “Mother of all Demos”

             Combined the use of video conferencing and network collaboration

             Prompted the “demo culture” in Silicon Valley

 Palo Alto:  

Xerox PARC –

·             Tasked with designing the “office of the future”

·             In 1970 after ARP/ IPTO were defunded, top CS students from schools like Stanford and Utah and went

·             Hotbed of Innovation- Laser Printers, Graphical User Interphases, Ethernet

·             Super Paint (1973, Richard Shout)-.essentially the first photo shop-like software

 Berkeley:

Computer Memory- Installation

·             1972-1974- The World’s first computerized bulletin board system

·             Effectively the first social network

·             Users could ADD a message, ATTACH keywords to it, and FIND messages

·             Project 1- (1971-1980) international community of place aka a technological commune in SF. began as collaboration

 Experimentation is central to technological growth and innovation

Computer science was an experimental practice for most of its history

Experimentation and innovation benefit from and rely on public funding

BLOG POST: 

Jacob Gaboury’s presentation on the history of experimental computer science and the transitions of analog and digital media was extremely enlightening.  He started by discussing the history of the digital computers, which was already new information to me because I didn’t know that digital & electronic computers weren’t developed in the 50’s for military purposes. Gaboury seemed admirable of Licklider, the first director of the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) and a proponent of “man machine symbiosis.” Licklider wanted to change the way that we think about computers from passive calculators to helpful tools. Throughout the lecture, it seemed like Gaboury was a supporter of this idea was well and the reading from this week confirmed this. The exerpt below provides evidence:

From this quote its clear that Gaboury similarly believed that by simply focusing on computers as passive calculators and focusing solely on the visual output of a machine, we are limiting ourselves to the “black boxed object,” which is the restricted image produced at the end of a process. The quote continues on to argue that we must understand the history of computers and acknowledge that the development of computing was not simply due to simple inheritance of one technology to the next more advanced one, but rather that various public and private institutions have played a critical role in the evolution of computing. Most of Gaboury’s presentation drove this point home. It’s clear that a lot of the experimentation and development with the actual digital media techniques, rather than the end results, done by Lillian Shwartz and later expanded on by Computer Science PhD candidates at the University of Utah was the result of increased public funding of the arts. When the Mansfield Act reduced public funding and these artists moves back to the private sector, Computer science became market driven and focused on the end product rather than the process of getting there.

Here is the link to see more of Lillian Schwartz’s artwork: 

http://lillian.com/digital-animations/

This website is REALLY cool to me, especially because it goes in depth into her work, her contributions, and her life biography