Response to Multimedia Projects

I noticed that there were many projects involving looking but less involving listening. I found the listening projects the most interesting since I can’t recall us ever spending any time on this topic except maybe to remark that trans individuals might try to change their voice to better “pass” or “fit in.” I like that Second Life made it into a lot of the projects. It made the project feel more like a continuum of some of what we did in class, although I did enjoy having an opportunity to branch out a little more than usual in this form of our Web Papers. I love looking through the projects and seeing all of the different technology used. I stuck with technology that I knew, photography and photoshop, but after looking at Mista Jay’s collage I wish that I had tried to incorporate that technology as well. I like that you could click on something to interact with it and have it pop up/zoom in so you can see it as a separate part as well as part of a whole. It makes me want to try to explain my project better.

My problem is that while I know what I wanted to do with my project I have a very hard describing it. I feel like there’s not much that I can do when it’s all on its lonesome on the Web Papers page without a better description of its worth and meaning, but if asked in person I would have just as much trouble trying to explain it. I guess part of the reason why it is hard for me to explain is that I don’t know any of the terms for the specific and broader concepts that I want to convey and represent. This is the same problem that I have with trying to explain to other people about what I want to do in the future, what I want to do with computers, and why it hurts me so much that computer science is close, but it’s still not quite right. My project was a slight attempt to figure out what felt more ‘right.’ I don’t have the full technology to express myself and its really frustrating. All I have are hints and suggestions. I had originally planned this form of my project before the speakers came in to talk on Wednesday, but, as you can see in my almost involuntary tangent above, it changed the way that I interacted with the pieces of my project and how I wanted to do it.

Otherwise, while making my various photo/collages I learned lots of interesting little things. Since I had a completely dead computer I wasn’t afraid of hurting it so I didn’t feel bad about taking it apart and accidentally cracking pieces of it. I feel like my computer is an extension of myself and I suppose that I look at it the way that I look at my arm. I would be interested in knowing how it works, but I definitely don’t want to take it apart or mess it up in anyway that might inhibit its use in the future. And I’m phobic of blood, but that’s not as much of an issue with computers. 🙂 I really enjoyed playing with the external keyboard and the keyboard on the dead laptop and the result is a large crop of photos of me playing with keyboard keys like legos in the various drafts that I made for my project. I didn’t know that certain keys are interchangeable and that others (f and j for example) are actually put on the keyboard in such a way that the way they clip on is upside down compared to all of the other keys. Actually, curiosity did get the better of me at one point and I pried up a key from my own, working, laptop to see if those keys were interchangeable as well, but it appears that Dell has updated its attachment technology since the original Dell Latitudes.

So this post went in a lot of different ways that I did not expect. Ah well. In that it’s a good representation of myself, so I’ll let technology represent me as I am right now, slightly disorganized.