Thursday, 24 March thinking this morning about doodles about getting scraps of paper envelopes in meetings Biro scribbling mindlessly letting things grow why do we do it what's the compulsion and what relation is there between doodling and the sort of little flash games that I am playing with on the Internet and where you can get little games on the Internet umm to be more compulsive but I don't think you can ever get them as compulsive as doodles because doodles is not just about the doodling well it's not about the doodling really it is more about the situation of being in a meeting or on the phone it's not something you sit down to do you don't sit down to doodle it happens because you're doing something else it is the situation and that is maybe what destroys just about anything err that you're trying to do with the phone or computer because you're not in the situation except perhaps things on the iPhone apps on the iPhone like ipint where you are sharing little bit of silliness with friends in a pub or in a class it strikes me that the iPhone in a classroom situation is very similar in some ways to the notes used to go around in classes that's similar also to the Facebook social networking and into the iPhone apps I've got dozens of them on my phone and I hardly ever look at them they just sit there I have collected them they're fun individually they are great fun possibly but I don't make time to play with them I don't have time to make time to play with them so they just sit there so how do you make a game that is compulsive but not too time consuming something that people want to do I was looking at a website err this morning and Juan Opie and he has been producing art using Flash particularly one where a camera on the Internet is taking stop frame animations and then the animations are added to the website and other digital artist Ross something or other also I think working for Fabrica err the Benetton establishment producing video cameras that point out of shop windows so all this thing isn't stuff is not very original sadly but I suppose you have to do it and then you become original but the ideas are very clever I'd love to make a camera that is showing what's happening in television downstairs in the art room and I could talk a little bit in my essay about the other networks that I have going the CCTV in the art department and something that I could do with that the flashing on the CCTV and I could possibly also talk about the network whereby I can control people's Facebook and start writing comments into their Facebook as I sit in the art department and the control that gives me a one-way sort of game but it's a similar sort of thing I guess quite harmless from me in this situation but potentially very far from being harmless quite an extraordinary level of control and then finally there's the serendipity of finding Juan firstly online when I was looking for flip-flops because of his flipbook application made for Benetton finding the Benetton site and then in the book that I had ordered from the library at Bower Ashton a book about animation there is a case study on him as well so he comes up twice in a very short amount of time and in fact I had already seen his flip book a couple of years ago when it first came out and I knew it was him but all that serendipity it seems to happen regularly you see what you are looking for our experience is far from objective we know the world as we think we know it there was a little programme on radio four last night which I must re listen to it was actually about religion but it was talking about needing to be in a group so you are needing to know what you think you know I'll have to listen to iplayer and see if I can get hold of it

Tags: drawing,web,apps,iphone,facebook,flipbook,doodles

OK Friday, March 19 and lower gate I'm going to try and talk much more clearly and more slowly one of the problems I seem to have had with the transcription is not recognising some of my faster words he doesn't like me saying err either doesn't like that at all so here is a slower dictate. Talking to my year eight yesterday about sight and perception how we see everything with the brain with our understanding and our memory not objectively with our eye so the sight is all subjective it fitted in quite neatly with the program I was watching on television about high-speed cameras and how the eye and can only process information at a certain speed so it doesn't see things the fast which is of course the basis of flipbook movement animation and move the Cinema the persistence of sight that the image on the retina and all the visual tricks behind the zoetrope and the praxinascope etc and I was also thinking about how the flipbook in your hand is still so magic the kinaesthetic actually holding it and I found some flip books online yesterday that are designed for the iPhone that work with the inclinometer so that as you tip the iPhone runs through the flipbook backwards and forwards so I'm very keen to build that into my iPhone application. I also had a brilliant meeting on Wednesday with the centre for fine print research they are very keen to get these training sessions going so to an extent that does hone what I am doing for my masters degree to look very closely at the flip books to collaboration bit with photoshoppingpong is going while I think that will just tick over I've got my year nine started now on the Photoshop ping-pong site and I can speak quite a lot about the game that Peter and I played and how much fun that was how we got into the flow what else might I talk about this morning and I think leaving the education bit behind and being much more to towards on the idea of games of playing games of collaborative games of games where you raise the energy and maybe this has something to do with expectation and with boundaries when you go and play rugby you expect to get muddy you expect to get involved in the rough-and-tumble which wouldn't be appropriate in other settings so partly the game is about appropriate in this in different settings and I was also talking about this to my year eight yesterday in relation to Facebook and blogging that you have too be even more careful about the appropriateness of the comments you're making because of the contexts in which they are made particularly if anyone can be reading them your mother perhaps or a stranger whoo second gate

Tags: flipbook,pingpong,blogging,brain,iphone,pingpong,facebook

OK Wednesday, 17 March walking up the hill again found the disadvantage today with my plan of doing this every day over Easter it's not much good in the rain thinking about games playing today I've spent the morning trying to key out the background err of the girls cheerleading err sequence and regretting that we didn't do it on a green screen because I'm losing part of the face our which would mean doing it all in photo shop frame by frame massive be time-consuming Iv'e done about a 3rd which took me the best part of a day question is how much time I waste on this if waste it is and so what background I put in that fits or adds meaning and I'm not sure I'm still totally taken unhooked by the process of moving the mouse and moving a figure that direct manipulation and it excites me in a visual way the fact that it's the person that I manipulating there must be an element to that in the same way that there is an element in life drawing I'm not saying that it's sexual because it's not except that it must have a similar sort of energy base in that it is a communication with another being and its manipulation of another being very similar to life drawing err but time is the big issue err trying to automate the process when it hasn't been done a green screen so maybe with my current yr eight after Easter I do one more set of sequences with a green screen based on what we've been doing by getting plywood and painting it green and then laying that down on the floor and still doing the death-defying acrobatic sort of stuff but the more exciting one this time was the one that came from the boys where he went bit wild to begin with again it's the wild creative wild thing like in the bottle top sequence where creativity came out of the accidental in that from their first bit of wild film it looked to me a little bit like a pinball machine so they then set up the next sequence as a pinball machine putting tape down on the floor with the idea that I would put a pinball machine background in behind the images are which I shall do again it's hugely time-consuming without a green screen but the idea is brilliant and possibly the Idea moves on one more step if you created a few sequences of pinball umm and built them into a Flash game with a lever so that you actually create a pinball machine that has an interactive element are different interactive element for the player and rather than just moving the figures with a slider they press the button to flip the flippers and you actually turn turn it into a game not that I would have time to do that although I am sure it would be perfectly possible but it would certainly be an idea to plan and to write up umm and I think probably to put a few of the Flash game examples in that I found over the years as examples like the feather one err and the singing one err so we shall put those into the website but also talking to Michaela about oakdragon and thinking back to my original game of only human and 10 pin bowling umm human skittles where the children were the skittles or the adults whoever was playing and we rolled a great big soft ball down the field at and whoever the ball hit had to gently fall over and if they touched someone else as they fell then those people had to fall over as well and it was just hilarious very very simple concept but absolutely hilarious and it doesn't the same sort of stuff that doesn't have a point to it human skittles it is just a game and the joy is in the playing and the joy is being playing as a group and is again it just is totally zany like the surrealist stuff like exquisite corpse err we have another fantastic session on Monday with exquisite corpse with consequences with my year sevens so that's definitely got to be corrected and go in as a part of this and is the surrealism thing about talking about surrealism I probably need to do a bit of work more work over this Easter umm on a Roland Penrose and talking umm doing my interview if I can set it up so that will be something to set up for this week and the digital flip books which are being will which show that the talk is today right I've reached the second gate so I'm going to stop more tomorrow turn the machine off and hope this works

Tags: Flash,flipbook,exquisite corpse,surrealism,play

A word that I have just coined, to denote a presentation that is neither still image nor moving image, but somewhere between the two. The philm is a sequence of still images, but not an animation. An animation is a sequence of still images that recreate the actuality of a live movie, by re-creating the movement in a real movie. Still images are a movie that re-create the still image perhaps. At any point one can move through the sequence, or stop and look at an individual image. The experience of a philm is tactile - it is the scrubbing through with the finger or mouse. The philm might be the child of the zoetrope or flip book, phlipbook... a pook, as in photobook.

Tags: kinesthetic,touch,animation,zoetrope,flipbook