asli sevinc

This is our group video that we created for the 30-minute film festival. It’s about the traumatic experience we had while filming at the Tisch building.

Pirate Attack! from Asli Sevinc on Vimeo.

“Avast, be ye ready to surrender?! Cap’n Sam Bellamy is comin’ to life and he gunna scare ye all! ARRRR!!!”

I shot and edited this clip with the Xacti camera and then added the audio to it using iMovie. I thought editing on Xacti was very easy and it was lots of fun! The quality of the video is much better when I watch it on my computer, but it gets pixely when I upload it on vimeo.

So, for the Servo-motor Lab, I wanted use this pirate set that I had bought for my nephew and then send him the video in which the pirate Cap’n Sam Bellamy comes to life!

What I did is that I connected one end of a thick, sturdy wire horizontally to the hat of the pirate and the other end to the servo motor. Initially, I wanted to make it so that the motor would be under the pirate and the wire would be vertically connected, but the motor was too weak to move the hat. The analog sensor I used for this project was a potentiometer. But what I really wanted to use was a pressure sensor. They didn’t have them in the computer store when I did my project. But, they brought some more this week and I got a bunch of different sensors; and I’m very excited about using them for my midterm project!

Here are two pictures of the circuit:

Circuit with analog input and servo motor

Top view of circuit

Don’t ask me how.

I’m a real New Yorker now.

Although Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong is heavily academic, I thoroughly enjoyed the first 4 chapters. Ong was able keep my interest alive from the first sentence to the end with his rich references and meticulously laid-out arguments. I would not be exaggerating if I said that the book is -at least the first 4 chapters are- one of the most thought-provoking, as well as enlightening works I have read on the subject of orality and literacy, which made me think about and look at technology in a whole new way.

Surely, I have never regarded writing as the most quintessential form of technology that humans have created. The points that Ong highlights, such as .. makes me turn to myself along the way, at each step of his arguments and question my own perceptions. As he reaches the conclusion that “technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness”, I ask myself, what do I think of technology today?

I’m doing a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications and it is expected that technology fascinates me, but I do recall -many times- that I have had my own share of doubts and criticism towards new technological tools. Email destroyed the letter! Facebook overtook in-person conversations! Cell phone hindered isolation! Internet media is taking over the newspaper! But Ong’s arguments made me realize something else; technologies can co-exist and give way to other technologies, which are borne out of human needs, from our own consciousness! The process of becoming literate for oral peoples took thousands of years, but did literacy replace the importance of the “rhetoric”? Definitely not. The orally gifted among us still hold great power (politicians), they are still respected (professors) and they are still followed (prophets) to this day. So does this mean that the new technologies and media will not deteriorate the importance of the script, but perhaps enhance it? Doesn’t it follow that if writing reconstructed consciousness, then computers will re-reconstruct consciousness?

Ong argues that we have a tendency to reduce sensations to visuals. (”Typographic and electronic cultures has a tendency to reduce all sensation and indeed all human experience to visual analogues.”) But since writing, printing and computers are all ways of technologizing the word, according to Ong, then the challenge for us ITP Students is precisely; technologizing the word. That’s something to ponder upon.

I’m looking forward to reading the next chapters on Orality and Literacy ; I think I will have more answers and more questions in the end.

One last thing that makes sense to me more now after reading these chapters: Words have meanings; scripts and oral works tell stories. We are here to learn to technologize the word in other ways. Then, what we create should have a meaning, a story behind it, no? I will keep this in mind.

PS: To be honest, thanks to this reading I learned that Homer was “a assembly-line worker” not a “creator”! To this day, I thought he wrote Iliad and Odyssey.

Before I went to see the Waterfalls, some of my friends had said that they didn’t really like them. When I went to see the Waterfalls last weekend, I thought they were very interesting pieces that attract people from all kinds of backgrounds and places, because they have a simple message, and yet they are powerful spectacles.

I could only make time for seeing the pieces in the daylight. (But I am sure they become different pieces at night.) I thought they were original and well executed in that Eliasson was not aiming to create exact copies of natural waterfalls, but he was rather trying to embrace the industrial and urban surroundings that New York provides for them, while using something as pure as water and as industrial as steel scaffolding combined together. I find that visually intriguing.

In his artist’s statement, Eliasson says he simply wanted New Yorkers to turn to water; in a way he wants us to appreciate water in another way and even make us go out doors, go by the river or take the boat and spend some time on the water! I think it is a simple request, and he has done a powerful and moving job.

Setting up my blog was easier than I thought. I got an account with my netID and didn’t have to download the wordpress software.

The next step is to design my blog! I can’t wait to do that. The first thing I want to be able to do is to get rid of the META links, which seem very useless to me. But I couldn’t figure out how to do that, so I’m going to ask it in class.

So yes, I’m excited about my blog! Only if there was an application that could translate my posts simultaneously and create a Turkish version of the blog, so that my parents back home could also be able to read it…