356 | Week 8 | Google changes 'to fight piracy' by highlighting legal sites

Google announces that illegal sites will be demoted on their results page, offering top spots to paying companies.

Pros: Legitimate successful companies are encouraged to keep doing well. Google needs to make money somehow, this placates that.

Cons: Non paying sites are demoted. Makes some research harder for researchers. Kind of pointless, insignificant, maybe just a front to say "hey look we're doing the moral thing", but really it's a ploy to make more money.

By taking down illegal downloading sites to the pages a few back, it only makes them harder to find, IF we were looking for them. Frequent illegal downloaders know exactly where to look, bumping it a few pages down wont do anything if they don't use google to find their torrent pages.

I heard an argument made that artists need to make money, so it was nice of Google to bump down torrent sites so that they'd keep their money. My argument against this is that artists usually make bank on just their shows alone -- album sales go to their representatives and a percentage to the artist.

I also think that part of the music experience is being able to share it. I think I heard an article from Childish Gambino (Donald Glover, Community) saying exactly this. He would rather his music be a shared valuable between fans than selling out to a record company. I think he also said he put them out himself? But most of what I have from him I found from Soundcloud.

356 | Week 8 | The Global Flow of Visual Culture

Cultural Imperialism and Beyond

On page 398, the book talks about other countries breaking the laws of radio and television broadcasting into another countries airwaves. This was one example provided about cultural imperialism invading through the airwaves of another country, like when the U.S. broadcasted "The Voice of America" globally during the Cold War.

I jumped to the second about CNN having become a battleground for control over shaping world opinion. Someone asked me what I thought about the ebola breakout recently, and my brother next to me sighed heavily and told us that the "ebola breakout" was a distraction to cover up violent acts and deaths in the Ferguson 'riots' (rhetoric breakdown?: riots here shouldn't be the right word...I think the whole point of the protest was non-violence, so I also think that "riot" was a word given to us by media to scare us...or something...just some quick thoughts, but it sounds legitimate to me).

356 | Week 5 | Piracy

What I understand from Lessig's chapter on Piracy is that the "theft" half of it is simply out of date.... we're at a point that so many pieces of our lives are available as media on the web, usually well represented or to some extent relative. Whatever drives us to do it, be it hair-raising anger or passionate agreement, we adopt these images to change and borrow from, then feed it back into the stream of internet media for all to see.

So I think when he mentions "piracy" piracy, I always related this to theft of music and movies online for redistribution profits, but after about a years experience discovering the mass of artists on SoundCloud, people also download this same media for the same above purposes. I found this presentation on TeddTalks of Lawrence Lessig discussing how this outdated law of "piracy" puts a standstill on how broadly new art and media art may be able to borrow from.

356 | Week 4 | Storyboard :]

My intention here was to give it a bit of a western drama feel. I don't know how successful that was, but here it is! I'm very happy with it over all but there are things I would change after I' presented it.

356 || WEEK 4 || STORYBOARD????

Thinking about the storyboard as a form of illustrating my routine jolted me a little bit. I didn't think I'd ever been so good with routine until I tried to consider smaller routines within the day, not 1 solid routine throughout the day. Micro vs. macro.

My second problem was being able to construct some kind of story out of this. Superheroes? No, no superheroes in this one.

Rio might be a superhero, only in a surprising longevity...he'll be 15 soon. He's concerned with lack of adequate attention, but aren't all dogs a little worried about that? He's got the big eyes and old-man beard as evidence that he's a puppy forever, no matter how old he gets.

The story would have only been screen shots of me driving closer to my house, with speech/thought bubbles from Rio way off in the distance. Could do two perspectives, me coming from the street and him getting too excited about the wrong cars. (Could he look like a little yoda, sprawled in the sun, snoring away?) His little dog-spidey senses go off and he senses me coming. (Honestly it could be anyone, not just me. It's any car!)

He'll keep talking about something happening, something beginning, and by the time I pull into my driveway, he has an (exaggerated) pile of tennis balls ready to go.

My other idea was just cooking a pot of beans. I made them today and I kept thinking about how strong our senses can be for taking us way way back, and in specific, I'm talking about scents. So I took several little snapshots of a few things that went into the beans, and I was hoping the story might be about how cooking something I've been eating my whole life and getting it right for the first time can be really exciting, and for the thousandth time, I wish I'd known my Abuela in my twenties.

I knew it was right by the smell.

356 || Week 3 || Free Culture Concept

So I suppose what I wasn't understanding was where the "Free" was in Free Culture, but I think I have a grasp on it when I imagine that a free culture is not that it's a culture that is free (like free food), but a freed culture. A culture that is free. In this instance, one of the key phrases was "A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid" (page xvi) and I realize here that he isn't talking about the subject of unpaid artists, I think maybe he's talking about the priviledge of being an unpaid artist, like this is a contribution to the greater society and your pay is really only what you get out of that. I think it's listening to critiques and and understanding that what you've given has made an addition to the world, like the stories that we developed around pieces in the art gallery in Week 2.

**The property part of this is probably what has me stuck. What does he mean by a culture with property?

Edit: He means that (page xiv) a free culture supports creators and innovators and lends intellectual property rights (similar to artistic licenses?), to a certain degree, to a point that the next creators and innovators following these creations and innovations don't get caught up in outright permissions from concentrations of power (page xv) - "political, corporate, media, cultural" concentrations of power" (William Safire, 1999).

**What people that aren't online is he worried about?  How do I begin to think about this?

356 || Week 3 || Some Heavy dataBases

Although the storyboard at least made it somewhat amusing, the reading on data was a little confusing. I wasn't sure how this would relate to what we're going over in class yet, but I suppose it's just a preemptive lesson that is merging with this weeks' on Storyboards.

I tried to take Statistics at CBC one year, but my math skills are sub-par at best, and when I look at this, all I see is numbers, but I think I should try to see it as a form of organization instead. Once we get into the project with this lesson, I'm sure the project instructions will give us some context, but I'm actually a little worried about this one. I hope we get some clarification because this is turning into something of a blur!

I found a couple of videos to supplement what I didn't get out of the storyboard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvrpuBAMddw < -relational database

356 || Week 2 || Gallery Visit

During todays visit in the gallery, we had discussions over a few specific pieces that really sparked my interest. I should have paid more note to the titles, but there was quite a handful I found myself drawn to. The first was on the right when you walked in the door, hung on the wall and with a ceramic mask mounted in the center. Joe read the words around it for us, and I remember when I'd read it, I had a chill. I get a certain satisfaction out of things that rhyme, and this one had an eerie vibe to it.

Next was the most striking piece in the room, dominate in terms of size and in statement. I recognized the caricature of Obama by his hairline, the prominence of his ears and the toss of his tie over the right shoulder, a trait in his style I've seen a few times in the media.

I titled this piece "Truth Spread Thin". Summer's story was not only amusing but did seem to lend this piece some context. She told the story of Pinocchio. When Pinocchio lied, his nose grew in length. Obama has been caught in lies himself, not always directly, but by not making promises he said he'd keep. I hadn't noticed myself, but he's holding a bowling ball. At first glance, I'd thought it was a basketball. Quinn had said that he "looks black", and upon further examination we discovered that the face was an exaggerated representation of Obama, so that we recognized him as Obama. Someone else mentioned that these caricatures are often featured in political comic strips, and even white presidents can be recognized as a caricature. I agreed with this, I didn't recognize him as a black man, but as Obama.


"THE POLITICIAN WITH WARTS AND ALL"
The artists statement was a piece of its' own. "I AM STRUCK..." (there's the reason for the bowling ball) "BY THE MEDIA AND IT'S CONVOLUTED PORTRAYAL OF REALITY" (stretched legs - convoluted reality?) "THE POLARIZATION ON THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE, THE CONTINUED WAR ON TERRORISM< THE BLAME GAME OF THE AFTERMATH OF MANMADE AND NATURAL DISASTERS, TO THE ARTIFICE OF POLITICIANS."

 It being in uppercase made it quite the shout as I read it to myself, probably intended by the artist.

356 || Week 2 || Myth of Photographic Truth

In the reading, I struggled with the concept of the myth of photographic truth. It shouldn't be so difficult to understand, but in my sleepy state, I must've twisted the meaning a little bit. When I got to class, that was clarified for me, but it seemed I'd missed a crucial step in the first go around.

When I'd defined it, I said it was because a photograph can't be taken as truth or a representation of reality, at least not anymore. At one point, it could have been, but now we have the technology to manipulate a photograph. Lisa reminded me that there is still the camera and the person behind the camera to account for, who can control the photograph and to some extent, what meaning we pull from it. He has a hand in the position of his target, the setting (in some circumstances), framing and focus. In that instance, we cannot always take a photograph as truth because the person shooting has full control of the shot to show things the way they want to, suggesting context in some cases. They even the ability to put in mind false facts, a trend not uncommon in todays fashion ads.