Mashup Culture

I took a look at all of the sites including http://newsmap.jp/, http://www.oamos.com/ and http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i//msnbc/Components/spectra/index.html. I have to say the (oamos.com) website creeped me out a little bit. I typed my name in there and images from my Facebook came up as well as other people’s images I guess those who share the same name with me. I like having a Facebook, but it scares me how easily information can be accessed through it. The msn media website was great. I loved how I could easily access information through different channels. It was nice to be able to look up multiple forms of information in one spot, and all the top news was there. The newsman website was my least favorite. I was not impressed in the way it was set up. Personally  I would choose to use man instead. The newsman reminded me of twitter with all the top phrases listed, but I wasn’t that impressed. Overall all of these websites were helpful when it comes to accessing information efficiently and easily.

Hi, all! Welcome to the blog for the Mashup Culture class in the graduate media studies department at the New School, Spring ‘12. We will explore the remix culture as cultural exchange, our evolving interconnectedness and the distributed nature of this natural dynamic. Please introduce yourself by adding a comment below and let the networking begin…

ps: if you add a comment and don’t see it display immediately, it’s because your first comment to the blog may need to be approved so as to prevent spammers (once you’re “approved” subsequent comments will not need approval)

All,

I thought I would leave you for the semester with a super-ridiculous abuse of computer terminology and SL illiteracy by TV show writers.

CSI:NY Second Life race scene

Don’t forget to ping an IP to distract someone!

I really enjoyed working on my piece (the Phoenix & 3 rings) in Second Life.  It’s certainly one of the weirder things I’ve created in either this world or second life and so the experience was really interesting.  I think that the way I started working on it made the piece more special and interesting.  I purposely didn’t look into how to build things in Second Life until I started to build the three rings around the object that I named Phoenix.  I wanted to make sure that the shape was interesting and didn’t look too polished.  What I ended up making looks like a big shard of glass.

After reading some of the instructions and playing with shapes, I decided to put a few rings around my big shard.  Josephine later made the middle ring spin, and the object was complete.  Then, later on, I added some sound (sounds of a crowd in a market in the Dominican Republic).

I really enjoyed working on this project because it became a way to not only mash up media from several different places in one strange art project, but also create something completely abstract.  In the two years that I’ve been working professionally and on my Master’s degree, I haven’t often been awarded the opportunity to work on such a thing (particularly for credit!).

I really had a great time taking this course.  Thank you!

hi all, forgive the delay on the post (I finished my sphinx earlier this week!), hopefully you have seen it in the sculpture garden this week. I am pretty happy with it, although its simple I find Second Life really hard to use. I also have an old computer which second life keeps informing means I am not experiencing all that second life has to offer but as I am in the process of upgrading I just made it work on this old lady! I had fun adding the wind feature so for those of you who haven’t yet, try touching my object and you will see it move! I know simple but for me VERY exciting! Overall as we close out the semester I am glad that I took this course because it really challenged me and got very far from my comfort levels both in it being the first online course I have ever taken and most of the tools we used we knew to me, including using a wordpress powered blog. Second Life was the most frustrating of the tools and this final project was hard for me b/c of that. I am however, now that it is done,  glad I experimented with it. The process of building a mash up from different objects we created in different programs throughout the semester was a nice parallel to a very similar process I was going through writing my thesis. What was interesting was thinking about how the concept of mash up lives in other non creative disciplines but is referenced so differently. By that I mean, for my thesis I had to conduct a literature review and reference other studies and articles to use them to support construct an argument. For the second life mash up I had to consult previous creations, both mine and others and use them to create something new. While Second Life may not end up being a tool a use beyond this course, this project, and this course have definitely allowed me to flex my creative side and consider different ways to expressing mash ups of ideas.

I tried uploading an image but am having trouble with it. Don’t want to delay the post any longer. Will see if I can get some images up later today.  The purple, pyramid like one is mine!

N

Having so much fun building, didn’t think I would really be into this as much as I am. It is kind of empowering to be able to build an object an add attributes like sound and textures to it.  Very Cool!

Look for new “fearless lieder” object near the wind floater.

(touch for sound ).

Thanks for a great class.

-DS

It’s pretty cool how a lot of the previous projects cumulatively come together in the sculpture garden in Second Life. I don’t mean to imply by the title of this post that building my sculpture was an easy feat, but I really enjoyed getting into a process and learning how to navigate the building tools.

With “Tree House”, I was initially trying to give the roof over the golfer image a frizzy purple hair texture. Instead I ended up with something that looks like psychedelic solar paneling, but I am happy with it. The photo is from a previous Mashup Culture class, I believe, on Aviary. I also took one of the more recent skyline drawing images and added that to the hemisphere shape that floats above the trunk of the tree (even though it really looks nothing like a tree).

Adding sound was a bit tricky. I was not able to attend the SL sessions in person, but reviewed some of Josephine’s instructions on the video. In the end, I borrowed script code for the Serdar sculpture to activate my own sound file upon touch. I used the end of a clip from FreeSound that was originally posted as sounding similar to my neighborhood. At the end of the ambulance sirens and street noise, you hear to guys saying “almost there…”.

In retrospect, I would like to have adopted more features from the other sculptures within our class display.

Serdar was one of my favorites in the garden. The floating heart shape accompanied by what sounds like a snippet from a soap opera just before commercial break is pretty cool.

I also really loved the subway ride on TV floating over the ocean. That reminded me of an audio book where you would find relevant audio clips associated with a place and time. Similarly, I liked the sculpture that included what appeared to be a school band.

Incidentally, I also seem to be having trouble uploading screenshots as I keep receiving the following message with different file formats:

“Unable to create directory /home/.gaelin/collab_admin/http/networkedcollab.org/mashup/wp-content/uploads/2011/05. Is its parent directory writable by the server?”

Happy to share the shots within anyone who is interested. This has been a fantastic experience, especially with Second Life. As some of the other students mentioned, I am not sure how often I would use SL in my spare time, but as a tool for bringing people together from remote areas, I think it adds a much more engaging layer than some other media.

Like John, I had never used Second Life prior to this class. I have designed and mashed up images using other, more traditional programs like Illustrator and Photoshop, but I found the Second Life sculpture assignment to be pretty fun. After a few frustrations in terms of uploading images and sounds, I began to enjoy the creative process. Similar to Grey, I went in with no preconceived notions, and I played around with several different shapes/textures before settling on my sculpture of stacked spheres with alternating imported images.

I was amazed at all the sculptures from our class. I loved seeing how everyone incorporated their images into their sculptures, and how some images were extremely recognizable while others became distorted and abstract. In addition, I must admit, I’m a little jealous of those who figured out how to get their objects to float and rotate as this was something I could not achieve. So, since I wasn’t able to have my sculpture float, I decided to build onto someone else’s floating sculpture. I added a tall cylinder with zebra stripes ( mostly just because I really liked the zebra stripe texture).

I thought this exercise was a great example of different ways we can interact online and participate in a virtual world. We are no longer just conversing in a chat room, but building something entirely our own. In addition, this project seemed to be the ultimate mashup that played on other past projects.

I’d upload the screenshots I took, but this wordpress site won’t allow it. So you’ll just have to head to SL to check it out!

In all my time as a web surfing, pop culture spouting, digital geeking, video and film making guy, I have never once touched Second Life.  I use programs to edit film and motion graphics that are very complex – yet SL angered me like no other.  However, credit goes to Josephine and this class for making me a better person when it comes to using SL.  Like some others in this class, I may not log back in frequently, but to know that I created something unique in a unique world is satisfying.  My sculpture – that tall, rotating obelisk hovering above a glowing circle where, at the intersect, snow is produced – is one of the weirdest things I have ever created for a class.  It was a fun experience, especially since I had to create the object along side chirping and glowing fragments of my classmates imaginations.  It truly was the essence of a “mashup culture,” where the collective community left remnants of color and shape with other pieces – all in order to be manipulated, translated and transported.