Week Eleven

This week we had a really interesting lecture on multiplicity. The lecture was a basic introduction into this concept, that for personally was an eye opener to the things that we can be achieved with computers and the networked media. Multiplicity is the idea of “many-ness” with the collaboration of similar things that unite together. An environmental example is that of a flock of birds, where every single bird is their own individual being, but when they fly together, they unite and form intricate puzzle like shapes, allowing them to fly in harmony. A media example is of the 1K Project, where a man played a car racing game 1000 times on the same track, and collaborated all these games into the one video, with an amazing result. I don’t know whether to admire the video or the sheer fact that he had to play 1000 games.



Another amazing media example is the photo works of Peter Funch and his NYC street scenes. Peter Funch spent weeks taking photos on Manhattan street corners, to then edit similar themes together to create single photographs, with a result that is bound to amaze you.
I especially like this photo, a NYC street filled with children, something that could never possibly happen in reality. The photo really embodies innocence and youth, and makes me wish that I was still young, without a care in the world.

I also quite like this image, a close up of people with varying degrees of emotion. I think that I am drawn to this photo as it depicts raw emotion. All these people edited together in the one street scene creates an overwhelming amount of emotion.

I feel multiplicity is best understood with examples, and I think that these examples are relevant, and incredibly interesting through their explorations of unique concepts.

In the tutorial we discussed multiplicity some more, and Nathan showed us the above examples, which helped me get a better grasp on what multiplicity actually is. Nathan also went around discussing assignments with everyone, and after telling him of my desire to do assignment 2, the geo-narrative, he said that next week we would learn the technicalities of using google maps, which will help as this a component of what is required in the assignment. I finished off the lesson with reading ‘21 Steps,’ which is a story that uses google maps as a platform to narrate the story. This helped give me ideas for my own assignment, mainly not to have a shit and anticlimactic ending as ‘21 Steps’ did, so not to make the reader feel that they wasted their life away on reading a shit ending. However, the way that '21 Steps' was created was really interesting, and the story flowed well with the changing locations, but I feel that the ending was terrible, and after spending a fair amount of time reading it, it would have been at least an hour, I feel like it was a waste of time, as the ending was THAT shit.