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Blog - February, 2010

Life is a battlefield (day 180)

Maria Lantin

I saw the movie The Hurt Locker last night.; I'm not sure what I think about it. I experienced a kind of boredom and confusion throughout, like it wasn't fitting into any trope I was expecting except maybe a video game. No soundtrack makes it deadpan. Camera manipulation is slightly reminiscent of a home movie. No story arc aside from the guy who's afraid to die and indirectly involves an unprepared officer in a dangerous situation. The thread is a macho bomb diffuser who can't get enough.

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Desire for innovation (day 179)

Maria Lantin

I was on a panel about innovation today. Alex asked me to be on the panel yesterday after someone else cancelled. I was a bit panicky at the idea of speaking about innovation because the word has been so overused that I can barely get a grasp on it. It seems to be a word we use when we mean "something new that will make me lots of money" when really it should be more like "something new that makes life better for a lot of people". Either way, it's simplistic and trite to add it onto practically every company and product and high-up person out there.

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The beauty of baffling

Alexandra Samuel

It’s the nature of Twitter that you baffle half the people who follow you & are baffled by half the folks you follow.

I wrote this tonight in response to an old friend who was teasing me about finding half my tweets baffling. It’s a comment I get a lot, often from Facebook friends who are subjected to all the tweets that I cross-post to Facebook. And in most cases, it’s because I’m often tweeting about relatively technical things that don’t make sense to folks who aren’t web developers, or at least, very heavy social media users.

I know how they feel. About half the stuff I read in my Twitter feed baffles me just as much as I (apparently) baffle others. And that’s a good thing.

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Wanting more (day 167)

Maria Lantin

I attended a talk by Bruce Alexander today. He's a professor of psychology at SFU, and recently wrote a book called The Globalisation of Addiction. He's been studying addiction for over 30 years and brought up some interesting points about the mechanisms of addiction, or insatiability as he prefers to call it. First he makes a distinction between insatiability and exuberance. Both have excess as a characteristic but differ in the feeling experienced by the person exhibiting the behaviour and the person witnessing the behaviour. As he puts it "Exuberance gives you a contact high. Insatiability gives you a contact low". I suppose the line is fine and that one can certainly morph into the other. I remember a line in the animation Ryan where one of the characters talks about the first flush of addiction being highly creative, productive, and attractive. Often the language around the behaviour can identify the deeper motivation of the action.

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Engaging in dialogue (day 163)

Maria Lantin

CODE Dialogues happened yesterday. I didn't blog about it because I needed a break to get clear on what stood out for me about the event.

Bruce Ferguson started the day with a pretty heavy talk on the responsibilities of being an artist working with technology in the context of a world where many things are not working optimally. There is still a tech divide. The disparity of, say, access to the web, is pretty glaring when you see it on a map. He was basically pointing out that artists have a role in working with technology in a way that highlights the inflection points of tech as creative and destructive. He was pointing out that culturally we are still pretty clumsy at discerning what we should do with tech, and how we should do it.

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Shadowing Rafael (day 161)

Maria Lantin

I spent many hours familiarizing myself with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's thought patterns today. I didn't have the luxury of speaking to him so I googled him and read books about him and watched videos and read interviews. Mercifully, there was lots of repetition. I need to know a bit about Rafael because I'll be responding to his talk tomorrow at CODE Dialogues. It occurred to me that I could go in cold, or warm I guess...because I already knew some things about him but I think the preparation will be worth it.

Some of the things I take away from my research:

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Opening gifts (day 159)

Maria Lantin

It feels like Christmas eve pretty much every night now. Every day there is something to look forward to. Last night was the game, tonight was preview night at CODE Live 1. Tomorrow is Opening Night for CODE Live. And it goes on. I picked up more tickets today: for a choral evening at St-Andrews, and for the Cirque Eloize.

I wholeheartedly recommend going to see the CODE Live exhibitions. There are three sites, CODE Live 1, 2 and 3. CODE Live 1 is at the Great Northern Way Campus (GNWC). CODE Live 2 is at Emily Carr. CODE Live 3 is at the Public Library. Some highlights from CODE Live 1:

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So who won? (day 158)

Maria Lantin

If you had lots of money and you were suddenly faced with a vote for or against the redistribution of wealth, which way would you go? What if the majority of your neighbours were quite poor? I faced that decision today, with my avatar. I was a wealthy flagger (had invested some money) and healthy enough though I had been injured in a random shooting by some of my fellow avatars. I had made good choices along the way and though I had tried all the drugs presented to me, I stayed away from teen pregnancy and marriage with kids, and didn't sink my money into a house. I considered myself a compassionate avatar for equal opportunity and justice for all. But when the vote was called, I was surprised to feel a quite palpable twinge of entitlement. I deserved that money. The fact that chance had favoured me had been forgotten in a frenzy of selective memory. Exposed, I sheepishly voted for equalization of wealth. I consoled myself with the cheers of the many who got richer. I then secretly hoped that winning was not tied to wealth.

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Welcome to the SIM Centre

The Social + Interactive Media Centre is a new research centre that supports a wide range of applied social, interactive and design projects. Funded by a 5-year grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the centre offers BC companies a way to tap the design, creative and technical expertise of Emily Carr faculty and students.