Cool, so we built our first “pre-viz” versions of the wiki, but it didn’t look like anything we wanted it to look like because the default wiki sandbox doesn’t have a css editing plugin. I tried other sandboxes, ways of editing a page, and even just straightforward code, but nothing really worked. I did find this app for Google Chrome called Stylish: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe?hl=en. Pretty cool. It enables you to add your own css stuff right into the app so any page you look at is customized to your liking. I used that and our css profile to make wikipedia look different and show our design. Anyways, we decided to open a wikispace so that we could put in some content. We are not going to fiddle with it now, but we are creating separate blogs to try and create another brainstorm type thing. Once we figure out the how the info fits in to different slots, it’ll work out fine. ————————————————————————————- Three.js page for the SIF Sharepoint website is up which is AW3SOM3. Now, people will be able to look at different,cool things that can be used for other purpose other than different, cool things that just look different or cool. :/ Anyways, it’s a big step in things for that little side project/fun time thing. I’m trying to be straight up on my goals and perspectives for that…”thing” because I don’t want it to be a project or something, but more as a thing where SIFs can just drop … Continue reading

When we think about communities and ethnicities, most of us would agree that we’re striving for diverse communities which value community. But new studies on communities and diversity are showing something different; that people tend to clump together based on race. According to recent study featured on the on The Atlantic’s City Lab, people tend to value diversity less when their neighborhood is actually diverse. Interestingly enough, people will value diversity more when their own neighborhood is less diverse, according to this study as well. It’s not to say that these are iron clad laws of diversity. It’s no secret that this evidence was collected via a computer model, and we don’t actually live in computer models. But the outlook of these findings isn’t meant to be bleak. It could just be that when we look really close up at the make up of our communities, we find that people tend to stick to what they know, gravitating towards neighbors that look like them. Zooming out a bit we may see our cities as more diverse city, despite having less diverse neighborhoods. So let’s put this to the test. How diverse are our cities really? To find out I pulled up this map at CURVE. The map shows a total of 308,745,538 color coded dots. Each dot represents one person in living in the U.S. according to 2010 census data. The results aren’t surprising if you know an area well. Atlanta, for example, has far more blue dots (white people) on the north … Continue reading

Hello All! As you can probably tell–I’ve spent a great deal of time this week hacking my Edublogs WordPress CSS. It involved opening up the source code in Firefox’s debugger and figuring out all the various tags, <DIV>’s I could change around–it was surprisingly difficult and time-consuming. Often, simply targeting id’s or classes wouldn’t work on overriding the built in CSS and required strange workarounds. I still couldn’t find a way to change the background color that actually worked; I had to change it in the actual WordPress dashboard–which let’s me change the background color of 3 things–the background one of them. There are still a few issues I’m working through today–some unexpected side effects. The z-indices are breaking some of the <a> links(they’re hiding behind a layer that I’m still attempting to figure out). Hopefully it won’t take me too long today–but I want to get this finished today. Why? Because I need to work on other things that are more long-term important–like the 3D environment, which has seen some pretty good progress as well. Brennan, Alexandra, Thomas and I had a pretty great meeting earlier with Michael Page from Emory who is already working on a reconstruction of Atlanta in the 1930s on a much larger scale. It will be great to share resources with them, and our project will dovetail nicely, because as it turns out–we’re using the same engine, Unity, to build and environment. We figured out some obstacles and challenges in our discussion that I … Continue reading

That the debate over the art/kitsch divide has been theorized since at leat the 1930s shows that the supposed divide is arbitrary and the argument then breaks down into relativism. Like industrial culture production, the argument itself is of itself. To exist, it must already belong to the existing argument, otherwise it has no historical reference and the argument collapses. Unlike craft, kitsch cannot be defined by the intent of its creator. It is an outward-inward categorization that ignores embedded meaning planted by the creator. It is instead demarcated by an outside observer, who judges it to have no “pure” cultural value. Whether this is due to funcionality, quantity, or aesthetics, the judge claims it lacking in qualities needed to elevate it into true art. In modern times, the art/not art battle rages on through technology-based art. The industrialization of culture, specifically post-war culture, wherein normative benchmarks measure the acceptable deviation range allow for new correlaries through technology. What once was mass-produced physically on assembly lines is now (theoretically) endlessly able to reproduce itself through digital copies. This includes pixel-based images as well as digital-physical production methods, such as 3D printing. In the mid-20th century, artists avoided the production of kitsch, but since artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst began to break the normative benchmark by intentionally producing “non art,” the range of acceptable mutation has grown almost to the point of meaninglessness. 3D-printed art relies almost entirely on the intent of the creator to define it as pure art … Continue reading