final
digital dialogues
___peter lunenfield
__________
Bob Stein presented on week eleven, mostly about the application he developed for Night Kitchen, TK3 Author and TK3 Reader. His presentation began with current events with him presenting an informal slide presentation of war protestors’ signage. TK3 Author is a tool that would be ideal for college preparatory high school students or remedial college students. Bob showed the class an example of a painter he knows from New York that uses TK3 Author to
create dynamic media presentations. The painter combined pieces of his paintings, videos he shot, and found video clips. I was extremely disappointed about how the program handles typography and motion associated with the typography. The typography was extremely bland and default in every nature. TK3 Reader was presented as a tool that high school teachers could keep track of students reading abilities, but I found the program to be too complex for ordinary students as well as average high school teachers to successfully utilize. His freedom of rebelling against software companies creates a secondary precedent for his tools. TK3 is like Microsoft Word combined with Adobe Acrobat and Director and…aka it will never be known as TK3 but as a close cousin to more familiar tools.
piotr wyrzykowski
__________
Piotr process was the most intriguing out of all the presenters we had this term.
He began his career as a performance artist, which I can both relate and commiserate with. His discussion was divided into three portions: human, cyborg, and post-human. His voice reinforced that he was socially and politically involved and that he has to have a message in order to create. Piotr began by talking about body and that when you loose your original borders you need to find other forms of them. He resolved this by cutting himself and by getting a tattoo in his performance pieces. His second life was centered on the idea of a cyborg and he began collaborating with other artists and designers. They over exploited the concept of bureaucracy and stressed that a cyborg does not have its own identity but relies on the characteristics of their surroundings to form its own. The “Cyborg’s Sex Manual 1.0” was a further social remark on the state of people’s personal emotions as well as their sexual acts. Piotr ended with discussing about the post-human where he showed us videos of real occurrences. An example, is when he shot footage of one of his friend’s motorcycles catching on fire. Piotr ‘s freedom of expression can appear to be cliché in some of his works, especially in his earlier performance pieces where he uses shock and awe for the impetus of his conceptualization.
