Threshold Circuit- by Joe Reinsel

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By using examples of collaborative methods and tools Clay Shirky, in his book ” Here comes Everybody, The Power of Organizing without Organizations” discusses multiple ways social media has been used to develop approaches to business, issues of faith, political protests,entertainment and many other areas of culture and society.

He makes a case that considers methods used before the Internet and then with the use of collaborative social media tools on the Internet, people could more easily create emergent and useful relationships for change.
I consider myself a regular participant in many types of sharing online using twitter, facebook and other products. One notion keeps coming to my mind again and again is why do we really care?  This is a very complex sociological question  that Shirky talks about in chapter 5, “Personal Motivation meets Collaborative Production”. It discusses the creative development process used in Wikipedia and talks about the “desire to do a good thing”. Because the idea of Wikipedia is to create a public resource for everyone to use and gain knowledge he says that users want to make something that they are proud of and and benefits others at a later point.

This is one of the many benefits of creative collaboration in the digital age. As more”apps” are made and people share information with them using iPhones, iPads, Android mobile products, I believe we will gradually move towards a more “social” model for content creation.  Software needs to take back seat in the creative process and finally settle into being only a tool to create the content.

Radio:

In the early days of radio it was used as a communication medium across long distances to relay information between two or more places(HAM radio). Then RCA took from agriculture the word, “broadcasting” and used it to change our relationship with this device. Instead of interacting with the medium similarly to the way we do with a telephone it changed it very quickly into a transmitter of content like comedy hours, advertisements, and music.

Television

Television applied this “broadcasting” technique further with visual imagery along with sound and eventually connected and learned from the film industry to create better content.

Internet

At the point we are right now, the Internet is a converged multi-level platform of entertainment and information that has all of the ability to communicate between people easily while still allowing for content to be pushed through broadcasting.

So looking at these three developments of technology, each developed important components to media production, journalism, and communication. Because the Internet can be thought of as a open playing field, this has allowed for many new ways to express, exchange, develop and think.

Each is important in its own regard but in terms of media, the Internet is a culmination of the earlier two and we have yet to see its potential.

In future posts, I plan on dissecting these areas further and discuss each individually.

Balancing visual and sound elements between distortion and clarity, I created Threshold Circuit. Viruses (biological and electrically) manipulate information and our bodies everyday and I want to visually describe that “teetering” moment between clarity and confusion

Balancing visual and sound elements between distortion and clarity, I created Threshold Circuit. Viruses (biological and electrically) manipulate information and our bodies everyday and I want to visually describe that “teetering” moment between clarity and confusion

Now is the time of year when we begin to think about food and also the massive quantities that we will probably be consuming until the new year. When I am working on a project using digital media I frequently connect cooking to my compositional process. I make comparisons to cooking and video editing because it is a similar procedural method; Ingredients, blending of these ingredients, rendering, display, and consumption. Many times that I have sat to wait for video to render or have edited a series of audio files in and combine them into a sequence. Also, I wait for the soup to finish or the beer to cool before fermentation. I always seem to be waiting for something be it either food or digital media to be finished.

(image is from video rendering farm – http://greenm3.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54f92c99e88340120a51014ce970b-pi)

This is the flyer for the show at Gormley Gallery at College of Notre Dame of Maryland
http://www.fly-post.com/view-flyers/details/709/

This was a talk I did at Ignite Baltimore in June 2009. Here is a brief description of the 5 minute presentation.

“Art and Technology have always been allies or enemies in the creative process. But we all want to be friends, don’t we? Dorkbot Baltimore is a place to share and learn about what people are doing with technology in weird and new ways. Toasters and HTML? Coffee cups and Proximity sensors? HD video cameras and Stilton Cheese? Who we are: We’re a bunch are tech nerds, artists, computer programmers, biologists, and whatever you are. Meetings: Once a month We meet to talk about our projects, or show new bits of technology we are working on, or a new idea that we have yet to design. It’s an incubator, a show and tell, a performance, or a workshop. Join us.”

I was recently interviewed on the WYPR Baltimore public radio show “The Signal”. Here is a link to an excerpt of the show.

Joe Reinsel on “The Signal”

Link for complete episode “The Signal” 9/4/09
Complete Episode

“Deck” was created to explore a “non-electronic” experiment of creating an animation using thin simple lines.  In “Deck” I used a portable video camera and “danced” across a backyard deck keeping the camera lense focused on the deck’s floor.

The music for this piece has similar purpose to “Lim.1″, to immerse the audience into the fast movements by using the constrasting, slow moving sounds.