Research

So I looked up the term 'Digital Media' at UF libraries and there were only about 20 books or so that contained that phrase. It was kind of surprising. There are so many different things poeple are doing with the field in film, programming, photography. Not many poeple have choosen to get all of this work in one place though.

Well while reading Digital Art by Christiane Paul, I came across a piece by Nam June Paik called Random Access. I had one of those moments where I had been wanting to do a project for a long time and then have realized that it has been done before (and in 1963 for that matter). Anyway the piece involves a collection of cassete tape tacked to the wall, and a reading head that a viewer could run across the magnetized surface, to hear a bunch of different audio collections. My idea for a piece like this though is being able to encode data visually where it could be read back and played to the system. I kind of have an idea in my head that if you can somehow program texture and color into sound, you could hear any surface. I ask myself what would a Pollock sound like compared to the wall it was hung on.

Other books I looked at were two by John Maeda. I found them really interesting to read because the creators of Processing, have their student work in the book. I believe processing was their thesis project or something similar. Anyway the books have a lot of great insight into the field and into being a creative professional in general. Especially exciting is to see how someone can jump from being a porgrammer most of his life, to a well known artist and professor. He gives much of his insight on life, learning, design, art, programming, and history of the field. Its a good read.