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2008-5-9 19:12:52 D|MA @ UCLA - Q6W6 Final lap. Five days left after tonight. I spent most of this week working on the projection piece for the exhibition, which will be an animated loop of each revision in order for each narrative map in the database. This will be updating with each loop, allowing whatever new maps have been added during that time to show up. If a bunch of people start using the software over the next three weeks, then their work will appear in the gallery. Yesterday I had to trek to OSH to pick up nine 4-foot steel beams. Today I got a tutorial on using the drill press and drilled and countersunk holes in each of them. They will be painted white and then mounted to the gallery walls in sets of threes so that the prints being made in the gallery can easily be posted up using small rare earth magnets. Aside from the physical aspects of the installation, I'm only focusing on refining pieces of the software. There are many more features I'd like to add, but I have to polish off the ones already implemented and feature lock it for the duration of the exhibition. What I'm currently working on now is the alignment of the map properties and relationship descriptions at the bottom of the page and the map vertically centered, no matter the aspect ratio and format. The project has received quite a bit of traffic but has generated no new users or content. Since nobody has volunteered to demonstrate it during the exhibition, it appears I will be the sole user. With this in mind, I will set up one of the workstations ahead of time with the CIA/Contras/Crack narrative and 12 printed revisions of it on display. During the exhibition from 5-8pm I will be constructing two narratives live; one on Blackwater Worldwide and one, hopefully, on the ex-generals working as military analysts getting information from the pentagon. This way people will be able to see the process of information search, analysis, data entry, and narrative construction, and not just the product of it. |
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2008-5-3 14:57:38 D|MA @ UCLA - Q6W5  It's been a pretty intense week. Last sunday the motherboard on my main workstation (which I've been doing all of the flash development for my thesis project on) suffered the final stroke of capacitor plague and burnt out some component, causing it to desolder itself from the board and fuse the plastic from the power port together. With access to my files cut off, my development was halted for two days until my new mobo/cpu/heatsink/ram arrived. I have been gradually refining some of the interactive elements to the power structures project, since most of the functionality is there. I began developing a non-interactive animated version which loops through every revision for each map. This will be projected white on white (inverting the colors currently used) in the gallery about 12 feet across. Since this was an afterthought, I'm having to add a fair amount of code to the classes I've already written to accomodate for traditional and animated functionality.  Today I went to staples to buy some tan paper to use for my prints, and I ended up getting a printer and some ink cartridges as well. I put together this flyer and posted them all around campus with the hope of finding some local students interested in activist causes. I hit up the political science, public policy, information studies, statistics, and art building in addition to a few lamp posts. If this doesn't work out, I'll have to turn to recruiting random undergrads I know, which is never easy towards the end of the spring quarter. My last resort is to spend all my time and energy leading up to the exhibit in researching and adding data about various topics so as to have some content to work with during the opening. |
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2008-4-26 10:41:3 D|MA @ UCLA - Q6W4  code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code |
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2008-4-12 18:15:12 D|MA @ UCLA - Q6W2 I spent three days implementing a new dashed arc drawing algorithm into my thesis project. I came to the realization that the majority of the formal aesthetic qualities of Mark Lombardi's work comes from the use of arcs with a congruent diameter. This came about simultaneously as I discovered that Flash has no properties for defining stippled lines in Actionscript. I wrote a library to draw dashed lines along a curve given a diameter of a circle and a chord between two nodes. This allows me to draw two major arcs and minor arcs between the two nodes with the same radius. When I applied this to the main power structures code, there was an immediate improvement in the aesthetic. However, by adding the curves, a lot more can be done to the narrative capabilities beyond just adding a more natural feel to the whole. |
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2008-4-5 10:35:29 D|MA @ UCLA - Q6W1  One week down, five weeks to go until the exhibition, and nine weeks total until graduation. It's scary how little time that actually is in comparison to the amount of work I aim to accomplish in that duration. With that in mind, I'll have to summarize this blog entry briefly. Alexander Galloway came on tuesday and gave a talk, which I was hoping would be a bit more about the catalog of his work. Instead it was really about one work and an impending legal battle over it, in addition to a great deal of history on Guy Debord.  On the way to campus that day, I came across these poorly executed, yet interesting, activist stickers placed around campus on the lame Bruin Happenings advertisements. The bottom caption reads "That makes UCLA more likely to employ me at a poverty wage than to admit me as a student." Given that only 3% of matriculated students at UCLA are black, I would say this is probably true.  The first year MFA students had the opening of their exhibition on thursday night displaying work they've produced in the Interactive Environments class. The work was broad in medium, ranging from Second Life performances to mechanical video games to 3D printed scuplture. |
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2008-3-17 16:47:18 D|MA @ UCLA - Q5W10  Well, aside from the server crash two days before my review which wiped out all my data and my backend engine, I think the review went rather well. We seemed to focus the critique on the installation rather than the software itself, which was ok with me at the time considering it was broken and I had to create some dummy data in an xml file to make it seem like it was working. In reality, I should be looking for deeper critique on the software itself, and not so much how it's presented in the gallery space, or even the products that it creates (although the latter is indicative of the softwares qualities). This morning I received an e-mail from the RE/ACT festival committee in Germany, and my IPicons project was accepted to participate. Unfortunately, the database and backend code used in the project was lost in the server crash (it was reviewed in february, so it was working fine then). Luckily the icons generated by the project were stored on a different drive which still works, so I can use them to gather (1) IP address, (2) date they were created, (3) hue, (4) brightness, (5) pattern, and then run the (6) geocoding afterwards. This would essentially recover all of the meta-data required to display the original content. Re-scripting the engine shouldn't be too difficult, I just have to set a weekend aside to do so. Two months remain until the final exhibition on May 15th. I have that much time to get my software to such an extent that I feel it's finalized, or atleast available to the public as a beta version. I'll be attending the senior studio with one of my committee members, Willem Henri Lucas, and I think I can get valuable feedback on the branding, iconography, and visual language from the undergraduate design students. |
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2008-3-12 23:4:13 R.I.P. un1vac  At 9:37pm the slave hard drive on my project server "un1vac" was found dead. Resuscitation was attempted but unsuccessful. Along with it died the following projects: - R.I.P. IPicons - R.I.P. Wikipedia by the Minute - R.I.P. Distributed Scraping Amongst the chaos my thesis project was severely injured, and will require several days under intensive care to return to healthy functionality. It's my own fault. The hard drive was the oldest I own (nine years, it's a veteran), and I neglected to upgrade it because I'm so fucking poor. I just spent $50 on a HDD twice the size of the one that failed, and now I feel imense regret that I didn't buy a new drive for it last summer when I setup the system. The hard drive is the most valuable and the most vulnerable component of the system. It's preventative care that could save me a lot in the long run... On the brighter side, the IPicons project can be recreated, and the icons generated are stored on the functional hard drive, however all of the meta-data related to them is lost (possibly able to regenerate, we'll see). This can't really happen until I have graduated. |
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2008-3-10 12:56:17 D|MA @ UCLA - Q5W9 Progress continues. Last week I doubled my written thesis and greatly expanded the example narrative, shown above, illustrating allegations of CIA complicity in the international drug trade in order to finance clandestine operations against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. I've got 4 days left to refine my narrative, print the revisions I'm interested in displaying, finish the artifact board, and install it all in the installation room. |
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2008-3-1 13:4:19 D|MA @ UCLA - Q5W8  Subtle changes to the artifact board. I have added some name tags and some short descriptive text to some of the photos. Soon I'll be adding a lot of printed data such as excerpts of court testimony and findings from the office of the inspector general. The collection of all of this data is used to form the citations and relationships between characters in the narrative. I have begun developing the CIA, Cocaine, Contras '79-'97 narrative within Power Structures, and it has helped me find some basic revisions in the software to help aid the users. Things like the ability to refresh lists, or the ability to add more data after submitting some. I realize there is a great amount of feedback that still needs to be implemented to let the user know the system is working or not (like whether they are logged in, or if their data is saved properly). I have two weeks until the private review. It's going to be a little looser this year, since the reviews will occur in parallel in order to give each person a greater amount of time for critique. It's less emphasis on it as an exhibit and more about process and goal for the final MFA exhibition on May 15th. I am planning on setting up a workstation in the installation room, and accompanying it with a variety of small prints and at least one poster sized print of the latest revision of the narrative structure, as well as the artifact board which will hopefully be full by then. I'm afraid all of this focus on the review is causing me to push back my online promotion of the project as well as the written component of my thesis. |