Guerrilla Project Thoughts

When we started reading that Guerrilla Art Kit I thought it was going to be pretty easy to find a guerrilla art project for us to do. However, once we got into the classroom and started brainstorming it became very clear that this was going to be a bit of a challenge. As we were going through project ideas it seemed like some people wanted to take the easy way out and talk about something broad and others wanted to talk about things that have been beaten to death around campus. I wanted to do something that meant something to us and actually put out a message that we cared about and wanted known. That's when I started thinking about English majors and how much grief we have received for deciding to major in something we love. That's when I thought about putting up english related articles and pictures all over science buildings so that way we bring attention to the importance of english majors while in a science environment. I definitely think the STEM majors are important and they will help the progress of our culture, but the humanities help people keep their humanity in the midst of all this scientific progress. It's easy to think with logic, but it's a bit harder to think with your logic and feelings. Humanities gives people the ability to have a nice balance between logic and emotions. I don't want this project to be a bashing of the STEM majors because I think it's incredible the things they can do and explain with simple mathematical equations. I just want STEM majors and even the government to stop thinking that the humanities are a useless degree and that we are going to be in debt for the rest of our lives or that we can only become teachers. I'm just tired of the closed mindedness of people. I want everyone to know that humanities majors stand right up next to scientific development and honestly the two have worked side by side for a very long time. It wasn't until education became so narrow that humanities and STEMs stopped working with each other. Great artists were also great mathematicians. It's hard following your dream of majoring in something that makes you happy and having your family and friends look at you and say oh your major is easy or I bet you have so much free time or how I would love to just lay around and read literature. It's a hard major just like every major is hard. Once you get past the general education classes and into classes that make you critically think then you start to see the importance of a humanities major. I didn't mean to rant because you're an english professor so you know all of this, but this is what I want to get out of this project and start a conversation about the two colleges working together to produce some amazing things.

Paintwork

I loved this short story about the augmented street artist 3Cube. There are several things I want to touch on in this story and one of them is about accessing the augmented reality world. In the story you have to "double-blink acceptance" (7) in order to engage in the augment. I like the concept of having to accept an augment in order to see it. That is along the same lines of us having to hold our devices up to something augmented in order to see the augment. I like giving people the option to see or not see what you have augmented. For one it produces this curiosity about what the augment is, but it also gives the view choice in what they want to see, which is something we don't really have with advertisements today. We are just bombarded with whatever content advertising agencies want us to see. Also, it seems like the spex, the glasses people wear, have the ability to show the viewer their "own content." I think that is also a cool idea and I know it's something google glasses were trying to do and companies are still working on. I just don't want AR turning into the gate way for companies to bombard us with more advertisements. I want AR to be used in productive ways.

Another aspect I loved about this story stories was the whole 2D vs. 3D battle that was going on. This is a time when there is all this technology and artists are reverting back to 2D mediums. The character Art had it right that AR, in this time, has turned into digital noise. He compares it to TV and Twitter, which I found very interesting because it seems as if TV has become background noise to a lot of us. We have the TV on just so there isn't silence, but no one seems to ever be watching TV anymore. Art calls it, "disposable, infinitely fucking copyable digital noise. Mass-produced and instantly forgotten" (25). I absolutely loved that part, because 3Cube then lunges at Artefackt, who is a hologram, and knocks his spex off his face and the rave and Art vanishes, completely forgotten. I think that is so true of the digital world. It is so much easier to go in and rewrite code, if you know how, then to go erase something painted, because even if you paint over something you can always uncover the painted over thing. There's a type of permanence with 2D that is lost with 3D. As we see when 3Cube's QR codes are painted over and destroyed making his art not show and the 2D one the only thing that can be seen.

The last thing I wanted to touch on was this idea of having the technology, but not necessarily having the money and how that fits into art. Tera broke his spinal cord and there is the technology to fix it and give him his legs back, but he doesn't have the money to do this operation. Art starts out as a street artist, but gets big and then starts designing billboards for money and the whole community thinks he's a sell out. It seems as if even in the art world as in mainstream money seems to be a force that rules. Capitalism doesn't seem to fade in the future. Tera even reverts to 2D in order to get his legs back as well as get people to stop looking at their spexes and to look at the billboards. There is a reverse in technology. Once we have progressed so far we want to regress and go back to the way things use to be. I think this story is very interesting in that respect, because you can see it with our phones - they started out big and it was all about getting them smaller and slicker, but then we wanted bigger screens so they made the phones bigger, but now they are trying to come out with watches as phones so we are regressing back to small again. Humans can't make up their mind about what they want when it comes to technology. This story shows that nicely. One thing is for certain though, it's all about the money.

Rainbows End and the Discomfort

Rainbows End was a bit uncomfortable for me. I would have felt exactly like Gu with all of the new technologies. In the Minority Report Tom Cruise walked through a bunch of advertisements and they were all shouting his name trying to sell him things. This scene in the movie made me really uncomfortable because we are already heading towards this already. Google will give you advertisements based on what you search on the Internet. I don’t need anymore help trying to stop myself from buying things. I also hate that advertisements think they know me. Also, I’d definitely need glasses, like the Google glasses, because I hate touching my eye and won’t be able to wear the contacts. I’d be the worst AR person because I wont be able to use the technology. Also, I think it would be interesting to see the studies done on headaches and eye problems caused from using the contact lens. I don’t think our eyes are meant to have information that close. People get headaches from looking at computer screens for too long and now we are trying to have computers on our eyes instead. That just seems a little counterproductive to me. I was a little confused about how the email would work. Like I know it’s supposed to be person to person communication, but I guess I don’t really understand how that works really. And also sounds a little weird. I like the pop culture that is thrown into the book as well such as mentioning Rowling. I also disagree that the geeks would be the ones to give up real books for digitization. I like people who like comic books, reading, and fantasy would be the ones to keep real books around. It makes me worried that ebooks are becoming so popular in the schools and that real books are becoming obsolete. I don’t want to lose all the antiquated technologies. I think letter writing is a lost art form. I think typewriters are cool. I love real books and this immanent technology freaks me out because I can only be old fashion for so long before I have to start using the new technology. Although with that said I do own all the apple products so how much do I really dislike technology. I just don’t want everything to become digital. I have a fear of technology crashing and then what will we do. If records are all electronic now and then a crash happens then we have lost everything and have to start over again. It will be like building society from scratch. Plus precious things could be lost forever. I mean how cool is it to have copies of original Shakespeare plays, or first editions of books. If everything becomes digital then how cool does it really become to say hey look at my first edition of this digital copy. It sounds a little silly. Although if it’s knowledge we seek then it won’t be so silly. Who cares how we got the information about Shakespeare as long as we know it. It’s a slippery slop this new technological age we are entering. We must trend lightly.

Harry Potter Paper Augments

While working on this augmented paper I have found some really cool uses for AR. This could be really beneficial for English majors and especially in high school. As I was augmenting the paper I was trying to figure out what to have as my overlays and it became a way to try and make the overlays important and not just another image. I am wanting to use the scholarly sources in my paper as the overlays, because it leads to more support for my papers as well as giving the reader more information if they so desire to learn more about that specific topic. I also think it could help teachers to make sure their students are using credible sources and it might stop students from plagiarizing and it would be a way to check that information out. It could be the new one to cite sources so that students don't have to do a works cited anymore! I also talk about specific scenes in my paper and as I was writing the paper the first time I thought how much easier it would be for my teacher to just be able to see the scene I was talking about and not have to write down all this information trying to explain my point of view and what I was trying to prove. Well now with AR I can put a still image of the scene in that part of the paper and then have it augmented so that it goes exactly to that clip of the movie and it becomes easier for my teacher to know exactly what I'm talking about. It doesn't erase all of the explaining in the paper, but it makes it less confusing and easier to understand what someone is referring to if they have the clip right there in front of them. I just think the possibilities for AR in the form of education is endless. Students can probably augment things with math and it could make learning math a little more fun by showing how math can be used and what it's good for. You could augment things in science classes to see different formulas working out or videos of experiments. You could even augment art and music classes. I'm going to be an English teacher in high school and already I'm trying to see if I can work this stuff into my lesson plans, because it is a great way to engage students that have grown up with this advancing technology. Writing papers no longer seems antiquated anymore and actually has become technologically advanced through the use of AR. Students would no longer hate having to write these papers, I hope, because they would get to spend time augmenting and turning them into something fun and would want to share with other people. It would also encourage students to read each other's works and see different writing styles and have a conversation about why they chose certain things to augment. There would need to be a whole semester on AR alone and it could inspire kids to love writing. It's very exciting to think about.

Pros and Cons of AR

In Geroimenko there are many instances of augmented reality. It would seem like it is a good thing and can benefit a lot of different causes. However, something that has been on my mind has been making me doubt augmented reality and wonder if it is truly something good. In this day in age it has become so easy to hide behind technology and allow it to do the work for you. Does this new form of technology allow for people to attack others. It can be beneficial, as the book talks about, it allows for boarders to be eradicated and protests to be heard. Although, does this become a device that could be used against people. Could it become a tool for teenagers to use for bullying or for protesters to use to attack other people. I guess everything can be turned into a negative and having apprehensions about things might be my way of trying to improve the technology. I think this can be a great benefit, especially as I augment this paper. I just don't want the entire world to become something that we augment. Where the world has to be looked at through a phone or an app. The pictures showing the wall street protests look so cluttered and I don't like it. I think taking away the people from the protests makes it less impactful. Having 100s of people standing in a street versus having a 100 augments in phones; the people are more impactful in my opinion. The book also talks about the activist getting caught in real life and how AR helps with that problem, but what about what the activists are advocating. Sometimes it can be for good, but it could also be misleading and could cause problems. The only concern shouldn't be for the activists because they have a personal mission and might not care about repercussions of their augmenting. There is just so much unknown about this new technology, but trying to prevent it isn't going to stop it. Having these discussions and bringing up all these points can maybe help with improving ways to protect people. I do think there are probably more benefits than disadvantages, however not looking at the disadvantages would be silly. I think AR could impact many different areas and not only in activism, but with education as well. It's an exciting technology.

Guerrilla Art - Smith

The Guerrilla Art book that we read was actually very helpful. As I was going through it I was thinking about how I could use some of the techniques and make it augmented. There was one idea about leaving little inspirational cut outs for people in random places, which got me thinking about augmented things to have little messages. This lead me to thinking about how I've seen messages written on bathroom mirror saying, "You're beautiful" which got me thinking about maybe augmenting things for adolescent girls. Or even boys. To try and help with self-esteem issues. Or maybe augmenting things for High School students.
I'm going to be a teacher and so I'm taking an EDF class about adolescent growth and development and self-esteem is a big thing for adolescence and if we can encourage girls to stop being so cruel to each other and to look out for one another that might change how girls grow up. We could also try to augment things boys see too so that they stop using the term "you blank like a girl" or using "girl" as a punch line.

Reading the guerrilla art book and Smith’s comments about legality made me wonder about the legal issues we might run into. I know we talked a little bit about companies putting their work out there and we aren’t changing anything, but are new laws and copyrights going to be written to try and stop people from augmenting things? Smith also talked about guerrilla art not being permanent, but does our ability to augment things change that and make it so that it will be permanent in a way? It seems that some of the fun of guerrilla art is the fact that it disappears or is taken by someone, but with augmented reality there’s not the same uniqueness or impermanence.

Also, these ideas were really cool and I think it’s awesome that people leave books in public places and grow plants in random places. I just hope that our society doesn’t become so technology based that we lose the interaction with people these types of arts describe. You might not get the same out of watching people look at your art, because you might not know if people can see your art or not. I also feel like the secrecy behind the whole adventure is kind of taken out because you have to tell people about it so they have the right app in order to see your augmented reality. I don’t want to slap augmented reality because I think it has been really fun, but I also think that for this guerrilla art it might be better to leave it to the other mediums and to not get augmented reality mixed up in it.  

AR Game Play

I started out playing the AR basketball game that was on the Facebook page, but you had to have the sheet of paper for it so everyone in the class couldn't play. It would also be hard to play anywhere because you would need the paper with you. However, I found a basketball game that you didn't need the paper for and it would just be a floating basketball hoop. I liked that one a lot better because you can just do it anywhere and you also have the ability to move the hoop around and make it a little harder for yourself.

The make it rain app is basic, but it's actually really interesting because the money looks realistic and it shows the potential that AR has and how realistic it can look. It's also fun to pretend to have money. I showed this to my step mom and dad, because they have a lot of money and it was fun interacting with them with this AR game and I actually got to talk to them about what we are doing in class and the things that AR has the possibility of doing in the future.

I tried playing an Astroid AR game, but the overlay was in space and not in the physical world so it was kind of a let down. It would've been fun to shot things with the classroom as the backdrop. It just goes to show that a clear definition of AR is still not understood by some people designing games.

The Ghostbusters AR game was really interesting, especially since you have to actually get up and walk around to find ghosts. It definitely makes the game much more interactive than just sitting on the couch and shooting basketballs in the hovering hoop. It's definitely away to get active with the game.