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Try these tutorials and become a FLASH MASTER. July 27, 2006

Posted by dean in Flash Tutorials.
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Now this FLASH TUTORIAL for MAC absolutley ROCKS! It provides a quicktime movie to show you exactly what to do.
Click on the link below and check out a plethora of tutorials, and best of all, they’re FREE!

http://maclab.guhsd.net/flash/intro.html#

I suggest you start with a simple flash tutorial such as “motion tween” or a “shape tween”, just to get the hang of the application. After that, move on to the bouncing ball tutorial, how to make a guided path, etc. The more tutorials you master, the better you get at FLASH.

NOTE: If you are working on a mac, you can hold down the option key when you click on a highlighted tutorial link and it will download the tutorial to your desktop as a quicktime movie for you to watch at your leasuire, or you can save them for watching later. For you guys with PC’s, I think you may be able to right click to download. I will find out for you and update the blog.

Explore and Enjoy!

Ambient video/sound Podcast (iPod art project) July 27, 2006

Posted by dean in mobile media.
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shoppers
If your into ipod video, then why not check out this art project. Drag it down and soak it up!
Check out the link below for more info.
http://www.digg.com/videos_music/Ambient_video_sound_Podcast_(iPod_art_project)

Mobile Books 4 u bz ppl. July 27, 2006

Posted by dean in mobile media.
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trainguy.jpg
That’s right, you heard me! People are now reading books on their mobile devices. The following article appeared in the “TECH” section of the Sydney Morning Herald. Just when you thought the mobile was all washed up, here comes another wave of techno-madness to keep the mobile economy chugging along nicely. Micro-movies, mobi-sodes and now movellas!


Phone a book: get a load of this


July 21, 2006 – 10:23AM

For more and more readers, the printed page is losing out to a new way of reading in the dark, writes Deborah Cameron.

THE turn of the page has met the turn of the times. No, the book is not dead, but more than ever it is backlit, portable and reduced to the size of a mobile phone screen.

The thousand-year-old Japanese classic The Tale of Genji, recognised as one of the oldest novels in the world, is now available as an online download. So is The Pillow Book, the 11th-century memoir of a shogun courtier.

But don’t suppose for one nano-second that this is just a wacky only-in-Japan trend. It is the same in the United States, where a respondent in an industry survey summed up a big advantage: “Reading in the dark! Because of the backlight … I can read in any lighting conditions.”

One of Japan’s largest online retailers of e-books, 10days book.com, lists more than 13,000 e-book titles. A couple of years ago it had 4000. Another mobile phone publisher, Mobilebook.jp, lists 5000 titles and, after starting up in April, is now the highest volume deliverer specialising in comics.

Downloading a book is an instantaneous process. Log on, pick the book, pay as a part of your phone bill, and click on handly little neon post-it notes to mark the most interesting bits. The Tale of Genii as an e-book costs 473 yen ($5.50), about half the price of the paperback.

It is the leap that great literature just had to make, Japanese publishers decided. Though this is one of the world’s largest markets for books and magazines, with annual sales of $25 billion, young readers were less interested in paper copies.

Though the rest of the world lags Japan in mobile phone technology, the e-book is catching on everywhere, says the executive director of the US-based International Digital Publishing Forum, Nick Bogaty.

Personal digital devices and laptops were the main delivery mechanism for them in the US and Europe, he said, but “I assume this will change in the next couple of years to cell phones, as is the case in the Japanese market”.

The creator of the Dilbert cartoon strip told the forum, a publishing industry organisation, that his e-book sales had been substantial. “I’ve reached a lot of readers who don’t like the higher cost of hardcover books,” Scott Adams said.

E-book sales, which have been in a pattern of doubling each year in Japan, are expected to stay true to form, according to the director of the Internet Life Research Institute, Yoshihiro Nakahima.

He predicted that industry figures to be published next month will show that sales have reached 9 billion yen ($110 million) – twice what they were last year. Helping breach the gap between traditional publishing and new readers is Japan’s readiness to convert text to comic, or manga, form.

The telecom company KDDI said its e-book sales had jumped to 5.5 million downloads last September, five times the figure for the previous September.

Comics made up 40 per cent of downloads and the main users were females aged between 10 and 20, who were also big buyers of e-book romance novels and TV drama.

“We find that e-books complement the printed publications,” said a spokeswoman for the Shinchosha publishing house, Sonoko Fukaya. “As a publisher we of course would like to see our printed publications sell well, but at the same time we find that digital contents are cultivating a new generation of readers who would not have read the contents otherwise.”

http://www.smh.com.au/news/phones–pdas/phone-a-book-get-a-load-of-this/2006/07/21/1153166556183.html

The “Artstar” project: Japanese Art 4 da video ipod. July 26, 2006

Posted by dean in news + events.
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artstar.jpg

Here’s an interesting bit of art technology: Japanese Art Scene Monitor reports that one of Japan’s largest printing companies is releasing a slideshow of art by Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Homma, Kenji Yanobe, and others for viewing on iPods. The Artstar project comes on CD and includes on music track plus 175 images, from drawings to photographs. Or in some cases, meta-photographs: “[Takashi] Homma has taken photographs of his photographs, creating 167 deliberately low-fi images, perhaps in a humorous acknowledgement of the iPod’s limitations as a visual media.”
Above: works by Yoshitomo Nara. (Thanks, Lynn.)

The above article was cited on 26.7.07 at the following website.
http://blogs.walkerart.org/offcenter/?p=137

Picasso: Love & War 1935 – 1945 July 25, 2006

Posted by dean in news + events.
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25072006001.jpg
The Picasso exhibition has arrived at NGV Melbourne 30 June to 8 October 2006
and it’s a great opportunity to take a look at the art practice of both Picassso and his muse of the period, photographer Dora Maar. Mixing photography, painting and sketches, this exhibition provides an insight into the inspiration, planning and production of one of Picasso’s most famous paintings “Guernica”.

I have just seen the exhibition and I was so impressed by the high quality of the work exhibited by both artitsts. I highly recommend this exhibition for anyone with even a slightest interest in modern art. Afterall, Picasso is arguably the shining light of modernism. Check out the website below for details. It includes an  Education Resource that’s chock full of info that will provide you with a solid background on the artists and the work on show.
http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/picasso/
Enjoy!

Week One: The Introduction + Free Flash Tutorials. July 25, 2006

Posted by dean in PW Classes, week1.
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pw
Welcome to week one of Possible Worlds.

This week we are going to take a look at some interactive works.
For a list of great stuff take a look at Jenny Weight’s blog at http://mmp.adc.rmit.edu.au/?p=659

Some other links of interest include:
http://www.azapp.de/
http://www.martinrieser.com/
http://www.rhizome.org/
http://abc.net.au/bligh/
http://tantamount.com.au/showcase.html

I hope this work inspires and generates ideas for your projects.
enjoy!

Free Flash Tutrorials for You!

Now this FLASH TUTORIAL for MAC absolutley ROCKS! It provides a flash movie to show you exactly what to do.
http://maclab.guhsd.net/flash/intro.html#

I suggest you start with a simple flash tutorial such as “motion tween” or a “shape tween”, just to get the hang of the application. After that, move on to the bouncing ball tutorial, how to make a guided path, etc. The more tutorials you master, the better you get at FLASH.

NOTE: If you are working on a mac, you can hold down the option key when you click on a highlighted tutorial link and it will download the tutorial to your desktop as a quicktime movie for you to watch at your leasuire, or you can save them for watching later. For you guys with PC’s, I think you may be able to right click to download.

<b>Below are a few more Flash links. </b>

A simple tutorial on Shape Tweening in Flash.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/motion_tweens.html

Try these great Flash Tutorials that covers the basics.

http://www.echoecho.com/flash.htm
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/flash8/index.htm

Enjoy!
Dean

A Stowaway’s Guide to the Pacific. July 21, 2006

Posted by dean in research.
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Check out this online interactive adventure at the ABC website.

stowaway

http://www.abc.com.au/stowaways/

Why not make a note of what you do and don’t like, what works and doesn’t work in your opinion.
Do you like the story and what changes would you make if any? Good storytelling captures the interest and imagination of the viewer. Universal themes can connect with a wider audience and help to establish a strong connection with the content and the viewer.

In our daily lives we often hear of other peoples’ stories, but what makes a story GOOD. Why do we want to hear some stories again and again? Think about some stories that have left an impression upon you and write them down along with the reason for their significance.

Identify the essence of the story and the voice of the storyteller. Imagine what he/she looks like, hear the sound of his/her voice and feel the warmth of they’re breath. The story is alive and awaits the telling of the tale.

A lot of writers and artists keep a journal of all their ideas. If you don’t keep one now, I suggest you buy a cheap notebook and pen. Carry it with you at all times and record thoughts, drawings, ideas and conversations, etc that hold special meaning to yourself. Use the journal as a resource that you can dip into whenever you need inspiration and ideas.

Enjoy,

Dean

Welcome to “Possible Worlds” July 19, 2006

Posted by dean in readings.
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Most of the readings for the PW course are in the “Possible Worlds” reader which is available in the RMIT bookshop.

Occasionally, you will be required to check out some online resources. The internet is also an excellent source of reference material for this course, so keep checking the “favorite Websites” section of this blog for updates.

I will list a few texts that you may find interesting, but these are not compulsory readings, they are simply additional resources for PW students.

Bertschi, S; and Locke, C. (EDs) (2005)Transaction Publishers, London, U.K. Hoflich, J,R. A Certain Sense of Place: Mobile Communication and Local Orientation, viewed May 26 2006, <http://21st.century.phil-inst.hu/Passageneng14_Hoeflich.pdf>

Levinson, P. (2004) Cellphone: The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything!, Palgrave MacMillan, England.

Lunenfeld, P. (ed) (1999): The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass)

Mc Guigan J. (2005) Towards a Sociaology of the Mobile Phone, viewed August 4 2005, <http://socio.ch/mobile/index_mobile.htm>.

Myerson, G. (2001) Heideger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone, Icon Books Ltd, Cambridge, U.K. Pertierra, P. (2005) Mobile Phones, Identity and Discursive Intimacy, viewed May 29 2006, <http://www.humantechnology.jyu.fi/archives/abstracts/pertierra05.html>

Plant, S. (2002) On the mobile, the effects of mobile telephones on social and individual life, viewed July 15 2005, <http://www.motorola.com/mot/doc/0/234_MotDoc.pdf>. Richardson, I. Mobile Technosoma: some phenomenological reflections on itinerant media devices, viewed June 16 2006, http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue6/issue6_richardson.ht ml

Vincent, J. (2005) Emotional attachment and mobile phones. Thumb Culture: The Meaning of Mobile Phones in Society, Glotz, P; Bertschi, S; and Locke, C. (EDs) (2005)Transaction Publishers, London, U.K.

Wilken, R. From Stabilitas Loci to Mobilitas Loci: Networked Mobility and the Transformation of Place, viewed June 16 2006, <http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue6/issue6_wilken.html >