Super Mario Clouds is an old Mario Brothers cartridge which the artist modified to erase everything but the clouds. The video quotes words from Michel Foucault: “A day will come when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity.” This challenges the definition of authenticity in terms of art. The artist of Super Mario Clouds mentions that he did not touch the graphics from the original cartridge. So there is no generation loss and no “copying”, because he “did not even have to make a copy”. The color and shape of clouds are not exactly the same. This is interesting because it reminds people of Mario Brothers and yet is claimed to preserve its own originality.

This video documents the history of Super Mario Clouds and demonstrates the results of the video creator’s own attempt to “erase everything but the clouds,” a ROM hacking exercise that produces a different game altogether. 

The video reminds me to be always aware of my final project’s originality, while learning from similar projects as well. And I should always document my work truthfully so that people can gain an accurate understanding of my work.

Fin De Siecle II is a huge wall with a lot of screens on it. On the screens, there are broadcast TV programs, computational art and conceptual art playing concurrently. It attracted my attention because of its monumental size. I found it interesting because there are a lot of things going on at the same time on this screen. And although content varies from screen to screen, it looks harmonious as a whole. And it makes me curious about information and emotions conveyed on each screen. After visiting the museum, I researched on the artwork and found out that: the creator Nam June Paik liberates the moving images, which include close-up footage of David Bowie’s face and choreography performed by both a human dancer and the schematic outline of one, from their original contexts. The work reflects how programming saturates and shapes our world. In this case, programming is applied to media content. It helps to structure and transmit such content.

This artwork called Dance is created in 1979. When I saw it, I was attracted by its music and the movement of the dancers. Drawings on the floor are projected. And they reflect the movement of the dancers on the screen. They are colored based on design of each part. After visiting the exhibition, I did research on these works. They are choreographed by a five-part dance to a score written by Glass. The art piece is to show that there is something similar in terms of approaches by artists when they create art. This is insightful because usually creativity is considered as something subjective and unique. But in fact, there is something common among the creative art pieces.

https://github.com/bmoren/p5.geolocation

This library provides techniques for acquiring, watching, calculating, and geofencing user locations. Some of the functions are geoCheck(), getCurrentPosition(), watchPosition() and clearWatch().

An example of code making use of geo location:

var distance;

function setup(){

distance = calcGeoDistance(46.785844, -92.015965, 44.940834, -93.311287, ‘mi’)

print(distance);

}

This function calcGeoDistance calculates the distance between two coordinates. The last part ‘mi’ indicates units.

I became interested in a project called Random Shopper made by Darius Kazemi. It demonstrates random consumerism. It is basically an automated browser that helps users to purchase random things with a total of under $50. Users will not know what the purchased items are until they are shipped.

This project makes me think of some current clothing rental platforms e.g. Le Tote that make use of people’s obsession towards such randomness to rent random items out to users each month. A mail box containing random items will be shipped to users’ house based on their dressing preference. And users pay monthly rental fees for the service.

Similar projects like this make me think of more possibilities we may create in the future to make use of such randomness and people’s preference towards surprises than things that are fixed. This sense of out of control yet in control gets me interested.