The Posthuman Condition is a way of describing human nature at this time in our history. It refers to a period after Humanism in which humans can no longer be regarded as unique, distinct or superior to the world around them. Consequently we must adapt our understanding of the nature of mind, reality, and what it is to be human. There seems to be an inherent compulsion in the human condition to try and understand our own existence. From diverse epochs of human history comes evidence of attempts to make sense of what we are, and how we relate to the world. We understand how earlier humans saw forces of nature, controlled by Gods, as determining human existence and subjecting us to their whim. By enhancing our technical capabilities, the story goes, we gained increasing confidence in our ability to exert control over those forces and impose our own will on nature. In the humanist period of western development, where science advanced and deities held less sway, it even became possible to think of our selves, with our intelligence and skills, as coming to dominate a fickle and violent nature. Indeed, some thinkers came to believe the universe is precisely tuned to the production of human existence — a theory latterly known as the ‘Strong Anthropic Principle’ . Today the possibilities suggested by synthetic intelligence, organic computers and genetic modification are deeply challenging to that sense of human predominance. These developments awaken deep-rooted anxieties about the threat to human existence from technology we cannot control or understand. We know we are capable of creating entities that may equal and even surpass us, and we must seriously face up to the possibility that attributes like human thought may be created in non-human forms. While this is one of our deepest fears it is also the holy grail of the computer sciences. Despite the enormous problems involved, the development of an artificially conscious entity may happen within our lifetimes. Would such an entity have human-like emotions; would it have a sense of its own being?
Planning which device to choose from using gloves to no-idea. An idea finally came to me at church on Sunday. I was watching a person playing drums and I thought about the interactions between the musical instrument and the media in Max, and how they could be created. - Deciding which video to import to Jitter. I decided to bring a clip called 'One Man Band'. One Man Band is a Pixar short film. Not only I had this film personally for a long time, it is one of my favourite animated films. I will explain about the clip to help you understand. In this film, we see Bass, a street performer playing a routine tune on a deserted square, waiting for a pedestrian to tip him. Soon, he spots Tippy, a humble peasant girl clutching a big gold coin, with the intention of dropping it in the piazza fountain to make a wish. Bass, seizing the opportunity, immediately plays an impromptu track, capturing the young girl's attention. Just when Tippy is about to drip the coin into Bass's cup, a newcomer steps onto the scene. Treble plays a more attractive sound, effectively stealing Tippy's attention, much to the anger of Bass. Not to be outdone, Bass ups his ante, with Treble daring to take it even further. As the two rivals their musical weapons. Tippy cowers in their wild musical cacophony, and in the process, drops her gold coin, which fall down a drain and gets lost in the sewers of the village. Tippy got angry and demands from Treble and Bass a replacement coin for the one they made her lose. When the two musicians come up empty-handed, Tippy insists she take one of Treble's violins to get her money back by playing solo. She begins to play and a passing pedestrian drop a large bag of coins. Tippy takes out two coins our and tempts Treble and Bass. But as they eagerly reach out to grab them, she tosses the coins into the top of the fountain, out of reach. The film ends. Ok, the clip is sorted, the difficult part is, I have 4 inputs, accordingly i've got to use 4 effects as the video goes. What trouble me is I don't know which effects to use so that it make sense with my prosthesis. - Today I decided to make a slight change. Instead of attaching foil evenly on the drum box, I chose to put switches, and bang against with sticks. This way I can reduce the inconvenience of coping the wires around the sticks. - Today I went to 3d lab with all my equipments to have my prosthesis done. A number of times I tried to make my soldering done but failed at the same time. When the time hit 12 I had to leave for lunch for 3d lab staff. After lunch, I went up to 3d to finish soldering however all my wires were came off if someone had touched it. I was stunned there for awhile and lot of things happened in my head. Anyway I came to myself and finished soldering finally. At tower I plugged my hacked-keyboard and tested if they were working. Absurdly one of the four values didn't react. It was nearly 4 so I gave up going 3d lab.
Rest of that afternoon I spent my time developing my Jitter patch as I was looking for some effects. I have already set fast forward, slow-motion, I needed to more effects. I liked to change colours to my video. Effect called 'Col_Hue', you can adjust brightness, saturation and so-on. I personally liked this effect as in the video, there is a scene that gets intense. I can express the extreme scene by adjusting the colour and make whole picture red-ish.
The last effect I used for ending of the movie is called 'Matrices recv.jit'. This effect sends matrices to a jit.recv object via TCP/IP yet I don't know the meaning of the purpose. I don't know in New Zealand but in Korea this picture used to come up when I watch tv till late in the night and there are no programmes to broadcast. The picture of strips of different colours. When this picture appears on the screen I knew every programmes are finished.
I only heard there is a programme called Max. For the first time I came across with this programme my first impression was like, 'Uh..what on earth is this?'. Now I get the intention and hang of this but only a very little bit. The world of Max is so broad.
- Today, I went up to 3d lab again to finish soldering for good. About 2 o'clock soldering was completed. Still, I felt uncertain about the wires falling off so I borrowed soldering machine and rest of the stuff. Later on I knew I made my self a right choice of taking the equipment since 3 of the 4 values didn't work so I had to start all over it again. This is such a nightmare!! Probably I repeated this crazy performance about 3 times. I call this vicious circle of soldering. Soldering is so difficult.
After this operation was done I began to decorate my prosthesis. To hide messy wires inside the drum I painted on the drum and the drumsticks. Also I fixed the end of the stick rounder and heavier so it's easier when I hit the switches.
- As I think there isn't too much to show still I had to take a short documented video that demonstrates how does my prosthesis work. When I take a video with my camera the video come up as .avi file so there was a process I had to encode the file to .mp4 or .mov file. Lastly, my video and patch files were burnt to CD. -
We had given a new assignment, which we were to use 3 individual robots within 3groups with 4people. Our project required to make and programme robots to react and interact with environment. Out of 4 types of dances we chose 'Black Grace'.
We didn't have much knowledge of the dace, so the first day, we pretty much spent that day researching what black grace is all about and discussed how we were going to present this powerful expression to the robots.
We thought portraying the background story which this dance came from was more important rather than just copying the movements from the clip we watched.
Black Grace is a predominantly Pacific Island and Māori male dance group. Body collision in beat rhythms, and flying acrobatic were the main motive for action. 14 March
Our group charged making the vicim-bot. We named our 3 robots victim-bot, punch-bot and grapple-bot. Victim-bot's role is simply a robot suffer beating up on as a result of two other bots actions.
We spent that day pretty much fiddling and constructing the robots, while the victim-bot shorter than the other bots.
17 March
Today we managed to complete constructing the 3 bots and also about 40 or 50 seconds of choreography.
We have made a decision of our robots interact each other mostly in the capacity of straight lines.
After awhile, emily and i went to the next door, and start thinking about designing the poster and the background set. [pic] Emily came out with 3 different design of the posters, and we chose the one that suit the best. And for the background, we had a picture of a guy who seems like maori person and a picture of a typical Pacific pattern with simple black and red colour on. We decided to use whole black background in the chromakey room and put the pictures across the background.
18 March
I took the charge in musics, however finding music for the dance was quite challenging and it also required lot of effort adventuring and to download one. Anyway the music sorted luckily before the rehearsal date.
After James had suggested with different ideas of body frame of the robots, we decided remove the head from the aggressive-bot to make it look more horrible.
In development coding stage we have completed the two robots - (victimBot and punchBot). Now the Punch-bot knock over victim-bot, and the victim-bot is meant to stand up itself. Also from a point, we have made a lot of changes to make frames more powerful and steady as we much started constructing our robots from scratch.
Later on, we came out with a problem with using bluetooth, but we coped with this problem with NXT internal timer.
19 March
We are still waiting for the smoke to use in our performance as our theme is 'mist of the past'.
To create the battle scene, we fabricated the area with black sheet over it. Then we shot a edited film of dawn raid's black grace that features a story about New Zealand's morally failing history. After the video is finished, spot light beams on the robots and the light-sense will react and the dance begins.
Tomorrow is the final date and we're gonna show what we have prepared so far. I'm quite looking forward to it.
20 March
Everything worked all alright at rehearsing, but the final outcome was very disappointing. As to start, video went smoothly, when the pin of light beamed on robots, it looked as they are going to work alright but the victim-bot couldn't stand up besides our robots were hidden from the crowds so people didn't see the most time-consumed movements.
Relieving feed-back we've got is that we had given another opportunity to run the performance again and film it properly.
Yesterday, we didn't do our best with the programming and stuff, so we arrived early and while others tried-out their robot thing, we quickly advanced some moves to Mr T, but unfortunately Mr T not even stopped on the way but bumped into the wall.
So much time and effort we put in yesterday just vanished away. so sad !!
Anyhow after the display show, we have given the 2/3 of this project.
This project is called 'Character-bot', and pretty simple too.
We required to make a new robot that explores freely around its environment with no specific destination. This time we didn't need to use our protocol.
We started to rebuilt our robot, few problems occured with the back tyre, but we came up with a robot that works.
As we are getting used to this robot and the programme device, we feel like we have stepped further to think creatively.
We have introduced to our new project, lego-tribot.
The aim was to create a robot that functions in the way the chess-piece protocol from the last project. Then there is a programme called 'NXT', we make our robot move using this programme. Personally i didn't have any experience of making lego robot, so i didn't have a clue at first. However i become used to designing the robot later. Still, programming each movement is difficult.
The programming task asked us to make the robot move from the entrance door to the studio room. From this matter, we had lots of difficulties with load of test-runs.
The fact that we all never had any experience of this, i suppose more than half of the class had struggled with programming the robot. What leaves something desired was if we just had explained the basic stuff of how to use the programme, we would not have so many troubles.
Anyway we will have to wait untill tomorrow to see if Mr T can make its destination.
It demanded of us to plan protocols of a selected chess piece.
We picked our chess-model 'Pawn' and we were thinking about characteristics of our chess-piece and we came out with a protocol 'Mister Tee', the reason that we chose Mister Tee as our character is that he moves forwards, backward, right or left, go forward three squares and one more square to either the right or the left, creating the letter T shape. And it also disguises itself as the first rival pieces it takes out. Takes on the characteristics of eaten piece for right of the game.
After all the decision were made, next we told that we had to walk from Britomart to Aotea Square practically making use our protocols. Fortunately our movements was very simple, so we found our way back easily within half an hour of time.
During this project, we were required to think a lot as well as creatively. Creativity was essential part of this task and i felt my creative sense has expanded in someway.
I was the sensor of the group and during the activity, i observed how the team works and kept a record of progress by taking photos.
Some of the missions were pretty interesting like following the lady in red and finding tattooed men. One of the issues we have was that when we looked for a tattooed person, it was hard to spot one where place is too crowded or where is too empty.
Other than that i thought the project was successfully carried out.
And what i liked most about this project was the idea of creating the map through surprises. Like each cards leads to places we don't aware of or never expect. I also think this was another way of getting to know each one of us. and just little but discover the new side of us.
Overall, I think it was a valuable time for me and for all of us.
The aim was to create a robot that functions in the way the chess-piece protocol from the last project. Then there is a programme called 'NXT', we make our robot move using this programme.
