paularstrpo

=Paula Restrepo | Biology Major | Spring 2017=

Computer experience:
I can program in python and shell (mostly self-taught). I do a lot of data visualization, mostly using [|Circos], which is useful for being able to graph large, complex data sets, like the human genome. Even though I mostly use programming for work in the genomics research lab I'm in, I do love computers and tech as a hobby.

Art experience:
I used to draw a lot. I have experience with Photoshop and a little bit with Lightroom, but I have probably since gotten very rusty and most of my doodles end up half-finished or forgotten about (or both).

Artistic Interests:
In terms of art, I am interested in being able to use tools mainly developed for data visualization for more than just plotting graphs, as a medium for creative work. I want to look at the relationship that people have with data and information flow in daily life, but from a more cynical perspective.

About me:
I enjoy going on bike rides when the weather is nicer. Tech-wise, I have a personal project where I'm going to build a PC with a friend. I also have a cat that thinks it's a dog. Recently, he acquired a habit of lying down belly up and yelling at me until I give this cat a belly rub.

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Week 1 HW | Fair Use and Appropriation - Response
Perhaps what stood out to me the most from the article were the differences and the parallels between copyright law in the arts versus its applications in science and tech. While I knew of the push towards open-source code in programming, I was not quite as aware that the technicalities of what constitutes “fair use” is still greatly debated. While it makes no sense to “reinvent the wheel” when time could be better spent on building from what was done before, legal disputes in the field of tech are demonstrating how complex the balance between creator’s rights and open source can get. With the arts, fair use depends on altering appropriated content significantly enough to give it new meaning. In other words, a work is re-dressed and a new, different life is breathed into it. With code, things are slightly different. Code is constantly building on itself, and especially in languages where the philosophy is “there should be one way, and one obvious way to do it,” needlessly re-hashing the basics ultimately hinders progress. Yet proprietary code still exists, and carries its own issues.

[|A court decision last May in Oracle v. Google] upheld that Google’s use of the Java API was fair use. With the API, there is only one way to functionally implement a method, thus everyone using that method must write the exact same line of code, therefore it cannot be copyrighted. This decision protected fair use in the interests of interoperability—in turn protecting those who use previous work to make new content since they are forced to use the appropriated content almost verbatim. One difference, however, is that creative content in the arts can seldom be built on in the same way as with tech. To alter the meaning sufficiently, the appropriated content must be altered—leaving little room for claiming fair use when something is used almost verbatim. Perhaps the meme could relate to this: the meme is not incredibly original in that the same image is appropriated en mass. The horrible appropriation of content in a meme is the point of a joke so widely re-hashed that it isn’t realistic to claim violation of fair use without ruining the fun. Yet there are places where this isn’t technically protected under the law, such as some parts of the EU. [|Mozilla had a very appropriate reaction, which was to troll the EU with memes.] If anything in popular culture is to be protected for fair use, it should be user-generated content.

Indeed, a mere idea or a fact is not in itself intellectual property.[| Prior to a Supreme Court ruling in 2013, more than 4,300 human genes were patented] (That is roughly 21% of your genes). The Court, however, maintained that DNA is a product of nature, so nothing new is created when it is discovered, meaning there is effectively no intellectual property to patent. For molecular biology, the patents that existed prior to the ruling were an example of the “over-protection” of intellectual property—they allowed Myriad Genetics to build a monopoly on the test for mutations that significantly increased a woman’s chance of getting breast cancer. These unsuccessful attempts to claim ownership of a product of nature are invariably related to how neither facts nor ideas are copyright-protected. You can't lay claim to the sky being blue, the sun, or the idea of a sleep-deprived college student. Unless something new was created within the discovery, it cannot be protected; there is nothing original that arises from a fact in itself, but the expression of that fact is where creative content originates.

If anything, I find it interesting how copyright and intellectual property laws play out regarding very different kinds of content.

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[[image:paularstrpo_dirty_dishes.jpg width="709" height="405"]]
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//Source Images...//


Note that the water scene was composed of these images, the starry sky picture was incorporated into both the sky and inside the crystal ball. The ocean surface was blended by removing part of the source image's bottom using a mask and a soft black brush, while following the direction of the waves. The boat was added in using a mask to show part of the waves, but leave the part underwater visible. Different masks were used to differentiate the underwater versus above water portions. The sea floor was composed using the perspective and distort transform tools. The kelp bushes were composed of multiple copies of the pink kelp branch. The pages and the book were taken apart and re-composed using the image with the pages flying out to create a floating book, and the books on the book case were taken from parts of the image with a wall full of books.



The final image...

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Cinemagraph


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Augmented Reality Article Response
//Responding to the question: Do you think all forms of augmentation bring along an augmentation of space or influence our experience of immediate surrounding space?//

I disagree that all forms of augmentation are capable of augmenting space or influencing our experience of the immediate surrounding space because of the tendency for cultural institutions to follow technology. Due to the massive and rapid expansion of technological progress, there is a constantly evolving “new normal” for experiencing our surroundings. For example, at the time when Manovich wrote //The Poetics of Augmented Space// in 2006, smart devices had yet to take off (the first iPhone was released in 2007), flip-phones were still popular, and the BlackBerry was still considered (in some way) “cutting edge.” Today in 2017, not only are smartphones overwhelmingly common-place, but so is wearable technology and the host of other devices once thought of as super-futuristic such as the Internet of Things, personal assistants that have been baked in //everywhere// such as Siri and Amazon Alexa, and devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. Perhaps when those technologies were not so common-place, they could elicit a real augmentation of space or influence on our experiences. However, the being constantly bombarded with them effectively desensitizes us to feeling any noticeable change in experience. In order to truly augment space, experience should also be augmented to the point where it is, in some way, different or altered from our idea of normal. This presents a challenge to augmented reality, because it must provide experience that is above and beyond the user’s experience either in terms of sheer difference in the technology used, or in the way it manipulates the user’s relationship with the existing space.

The layers of data overlaid onto space gain a much more meaningful substance when they create the structure, politics, and poetics that Manovich argues for. Filling a void in the human experience as it directly relates to a particular user’s experience of the world leaves more of an impact than a generalized tool that can only augment space enough to feel like the technology is new but not necessarily different. For example, while devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home are still relatively new, they build upon existing personal assistants such as Alexa and Google Now that, at best, they provide a more accessible interface for those assistants and expand their capability. They are simply that—assistants. They do not provide a concrete message with which to alter the user’s experience of space on a fundamentally human level. While technology that augments space is constantly collecting information about the user, and using it to relay messages, many of these messages amount to nothing more than noise. Targeted advertisements are a good example of this, and I for one do not ever recall an advertisement of any kind that spoke to me on a human level. Therefore, augmented reality that influences experience must break a barrier of sorts between simply being part of our modern day-to-day lives (which already have an additional layer from the new-normal digital experience) and creating an additional layer that forces the user into a space that feels altered on the human level.

NGA Painting Project
My trigger image below: // George Inness 1825 - 1894 // // The Lackawanna Valley, c. 1856 // // oil on canvas //

I started by creating some overlays from images of buildings, factories, city skylines, etc. in photoshop. By isolating the building, and increasing threshold/contrast to create a very inky outline, I could then fill in the white areas with color by setting the layer blending mode to multiply. For the city skyline, parts of it were cropped and duplicated onto each end, with some transform done to extend the length while trying to avoid redundancy as much as possible.





Using a Wacom tablet, I drew some smoke clouds (on the right, below), to animate along with the buildings. The buildings were animated to sway back and forth, while the smoke follows and flows out from the pipes. The smoggy-sky image (below, left) was placed as background, behind the buildings, and animated to make the sun rise up at the start of the animation.

In addition to the above, the large tree and small person sitting were animated from the painting to sway back and forth.The smoke from the train was also animated to show it puffing, but the train stays in place.

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Site-Specific Self Portrait (using Aurasma)
using aurasma, create a template where the person (with guidance) will draw the final trigger image. Initial template (below, left), final overlay (below right).

in between overlays, where the person must shade in the triangles... creation process for final overlay: testing and implementing: