Thesis

freeFormed After Graduation

2007-03-28T07:46:54Z

freeFormed.org is already a formal organization, LLC actually. We were fortunate enough to get free legal services from someone that one of our members knew, which definitely facilitated and expedited the process. I actually just redesigned the company website, which is located at http://www.freeformed.org/company, with a slight hack of a wordpress install. I decided to use wordpress because, during these busy times, it would allow us to update our site and information frequently with little effort. It is by no means finished, but it is definitely a start.
None of the members of freeformed have really thought extensively about what we are going to do after graduation. We are all committed to advancing the freeformed.net site and the company as a whole but, especially since two of our members are international students, it is difficult to predict whether or not we will be able to sustain ourselves with freelance and consulting jobs that we are seeking to receive through marketing the site.
In the short term, we plan to apply for various awards and grants to sustain the site’s various expenses. We have already applied for Ars Electronica, Rhizome.org Digital Communities Grant and a monetary prize from NetSquared. We will not hear whether we have won any of these competitions until late April or May. We also plan to continue working with the New York to New Orleans project and have been offered the possibility to have the New Orleans number funded through a grant secured by ITP. We also plan to begin searching for freelance jobs as soon as thesis week is over, although we all are aware that we may have to work separately to sustain ourselves. Information about grants, freelance possibilities and how web start ups sustain themselves without selling out to larger corporations would definitely be helpful.

Updates

2007-03-28T07:07:47Z

Since returning from New Orleans, programming has gone into high gear, with me staying up most nights until 6am (the programming hour really begins for me at midnight...not sure why that is). Jadie and I are slightly off our production schedule due to some problems with video uploading that we are meeting with Shawn Van Every to fix tomorrow. Thus, we have already begun implementation of Ajax all across the site and, despite a few minor problems, we have been pretty successful so far. The major hurdle involving the media navigation div has still not been touched, but we are pretty sure that we will be able to figure it out. Most of the programming I have done this week has been involving the ajax and some php behind the scenes. I have also gotten several of my friends to sign up for the site and we received some additional new users thanks to a presentation we conducted at the Electronic Social Mixer at Hunter College.

I am disappointed that we have not been able to officially release to a broader user population due to the issues we have been having with video. (shawn to the rescue hopefully). This next week I hope to get a lot of the behind the scenes php completed, start on the media navigation and of course fix the video and release the site to the ITP student list. I also plan to talk with my sister this weekend in order to implement the circle I am creating for her and her friends.

The Voices of New Orleans circle has also not really taken off. Many of us who went down there have found that communication with the people we met has been slow, probably partially due to lack of reliable internet connectivity and partially due to busy schedules on both parts. I plan to talk to Ashley this weekend and see if there is a way we can push the circle forward. I am not sure how much she has promoted it so far, I'll have to ask her this weekend.

Production Schedule for freeFormed.net

2007-03-21T05:45:47Z

Production Schedule

New Orleans

2007-03-18T17:36:09Z

Last night I returned from a one week trip to New Orleans. I traveled down there as part of a grant obtained by ITP to work with Xavier University and community groups in the area. Our goal was two-fold. First, we wanted to be able, through workshops taught at the Xavier Art Department in their new digital lab, to teach as many Xavier students as possible about video and audio capture, editing, compression and upload. Our other goal was to teach the students about blogging and set-up websites for the various community groups that were working with students from the university so that their goals, projects and information could be available in an online forum. In preparation for the trip, Shawn Van Every created a multi-user wordpress platform that would make it very easy for members of these various organizations to create their own blog, podcast their video and audio material and update information regarding their projects and progress. A good portion of time was spent teaching about the platform and blogging in general and attempting to document and organize previous documentation of the various projects the groups had already conducted or were conducting during the week we were there. This multi-user platform can be found here.

Personally, I worked closely with two of the community groups, The Porch and the Lower 9th Ward Homeowner's association. The Porch is a group working within the Seventh Ward, a neighborhood significantly destroyed by the storm. Through community projects and theater workshops they are attempting to facilitate re-development of their neighborhood and help the children within the neighborhood to deal with the effects and aftermath of the storm. Megan MacMurray and I attended one of their theater workshops where they use a particular kind of theater to encourage the children to deal with their experiences through story telling and expressive movement.

The Lower 9th Ward Homeowner's Association is an organization founded by local 9th Ward resident Linda Jackson, who also co-founded NENA, the Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association. Linda lost her home and dry cleaning/laundry business in the storm. Her primary goal with the Homeowner's Association is to prevent the residents of the Lower 9th Ward, the hardest hit neighborhood in New Orleans, from losing their land to investors and to facilitate the return of senior citizens and other residents to the Lower 9th Ward by constructing temporary residences and paying off the property taxes for residents who want to return home but don't have the means to prevent their land from being seized. Megan MacMurray and I are currently attempting to install a donate button within the Homeowner's Association blog so that visitors to the site can donate money to the cause through paypal. We are also researching the best ways to get the message out about the association's goals and needs through communication with several well known organizations and video blogs.

I also participated in teaching during my stay, mostly focused on the power of mobile media and technology but I also explained and taught about the blogging platform. I also worked with Xavier student Ashley Thomas on the Voices of New Orleans circle. We discussed how the circle could be of use and Ashley came up with several pertinent areas of discussion that she felt could encourage conversation. The three that are now present within the circle are the Road Home project, crime and discussion from teenagers. Ashley also re-recorded the introduction to the production and is going to pass cards around her neighborhood. Ashley also works at a local New Orleans radio station which has a relationship with the mayor. Once the circle is populated she hopes to present the project to the mayor so that he can listen to the concerns within the community.

The trip to New Orleans was an amazing and emotionally draining experience. I had not expected to be so affected by the city, both positively and negatively. The condition of the city in general and the Lower 9th Ward in particular is reprehensible. And the lack of adequate assistance, funding and nationwide attention is criminal. It is both an artifact of a corrupt and inept city government and lack of a responsible federal response. The saddest part is, and I had no expected to feel this way, New Orleans is truly and completely the epitome of a real American city. The soul that is present, even today as half the city still stands in ruins, is palpable. It is place that feels more untouched by commercialism then almost any large city I have ever been to. And yet the very undercurrent of deep rooted cultural experience which makes New Orleans an essential historical aspect of this country are in trouble. The city is barely functioning and its people, which make it the place that it is, are either dispersed with little hope of being able to return, or just barely getting by. It is unacceptable to me that in a country where we have enough money to rage meaningless wars thousands of miles away, we don not have the means or the sense of responsibility to help our own people. This is not simply concerning the response after the storm, or lack thereof, but the current level of interest in reviving the city and assisting those who do not have the means to help themselves. Words cannot even explain the sense of urgency, sadness and struggle that I saw when I was there. Yet despite this, the people I met, like Linda Jackson, most of whom are homeless, living in trailers outside their broken homes or just barely able to get by, are determined to do everything they can. They are fighting, working long hours and exhausted. In my opinion, it is the responsibility of every decent human being in this country to recognize what has happened and what continues to happen in New Orleans. And I firmly believe that it is also all of our responsibility to help if we can.

I don't know what the solution is to this complex and difficult situation. My personal goal is to get as much attention for the situation as possible; to reopen the national conversation, to get people with influence angry and to continue to maintain the relationships that I personally developed within the city. I plan to return to New Orleans after graduation to assist in whatever way possible. This is my blog within the ny2no platform that I am currently constructing to more accurately depict my experience while in New Orleans. More updates to come as they become available.

freeFormed at the Electronic Social Club Mixer at Hunter College

2007-03-18T17:34:30Z

freeFormed has been invited to present at the electronic social club mixer:

Thursday, March 22.2007
7 - 10p
Hunter College
695 Park Avenue
Black Box / Hunter North Room 543

The electronic social club mixer is formed around a common interest, activity or location. We bring together MFA students from across New York City to meet and showcase their graduate art work, and to form a common network around the theme of creating social dialogue through art and media.

Given the recent trip to New Orleans, from which we three members of freeformed just returned last night, I think we will present freeformed within its current working context, which is a social and media exchange between New York City and New Orleans, as well as presenting the various features and aspects of the project as a whole. Fellow ITP students Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv will be presenting their project Shift Space as well. More on this to come.

BioBronc Circle

2007-03-02T19:44:52Z

Recently, I visited Megan MacMurray's website for her BioBronc thesis project. In her words, ""BioBronc" (is) A personal investigation into the consumer choice of the cars we drive, the love America has with cars and the individual decisions that need to be made about the fuel that runs them."

She is currently seeking funding for the project and has created the website as a documentation of her thought process and an informational site about the project itself. When I went to the site for the first time, what interested me were the videos. They are amazing little portraits, not only of the ideas behind and the struggle to complete the project, but of Megan herself. However, and Megan noticed this independently of my input, the project as become so much about re-defining the way these kind of things are documented, that the current state of the website seems to be doing the project a disservice. I am not sure the extent of the further directions that Megan intends to take the project. But my initial thought was to create a freeformed circle that would allow her to continue her documentation in a manner that would also facilitate interaction and commentary (and hopefully projects of a similar nature that could link back to it). I plan to create the circle this weekend and hopefully announce a full release of a beta test of freeformed by Tuesday/Wednesday of next week on the ITP list.

Crossing my fingers......

New Orleans Trip

2007-02-27T09:09:09Z

On March 12th, I will be joining twelve other ITP students and Shawn Van Every, Marianne Petit and former student Jeff Gray, to travel to New Orleans as part of the Digital Storytelling grant and collaboration with Xavier University. In preparation for this trip I have been talking to Yonatan Kelib, fellow freeformed collaborator and someone who is also doing his thesis in the realm of mobile phones and blogging, about possible implementations of projects using the phone. Many of the ideas discussed in the planning meeting of all of the participants today centered around the possibility digital video and audio, doing workshops on how to execute both and upload them to an online forum. Of course this is important. But I am much more interested in teaching things that don't require large amounts of teaching. Not because I think it is more important, but just that it could be readily available to anyone. Yonatan and I have discussed, in addition to the further user testing of the actual freeformed site, creating an entirely asterisk based system that would allow people to simply call a number a tell their story, with as much contextual information as they wish to leave. We plan to incorporate these messages into an open freeformed circle, no registration, no need to actually view anything online. The media files would also be posted to a blog that Yonatan will create for his research.. We hope that other people who join the online component of the site will then visit this circle, listen to the stories and apply their own pictures or video to them via media comments. I think it will be an interesting experiment.

Both of us of course intend to document as much as we can. I will be bringing my Nikon D80 for sure, as well as two mobile phones with different service plans. More about this as it gets closer....

Mobile Phone Coverage Maps for New Orleans

2007-02-27T09:05:07Z

Cingular

Sprint

Verizon

T-Mobile

Download PDF

Documentation of Xavier User Test

2007-02-27T04:12:43Z

Click on an image to view all....

T-Mobile Issues

2007-02-23T00:45:09Z

Thanks to our user testing experience, we discovered that there are numerous problems with T-mobile these days that didn't exist last year when we released the first version. First, some T-mobile phones send a 1 in front of the number while others don't. Easy enough pattern matching problem to fix. (thanks Shawn). But now T-mobile also sends video as windows media instead of quicktime. BAD!

Some photos the Xavier Students took

2007-02-21T07:10:35Z

Documentation:

The Chaos Button

2007-02-21T06:12:36Z

i was talking to Megan MacMurray yesterday about Alice Planas's thesis. She is trying to create sort of an anti-social network where people who either actively don't like each other or who don't know each other but who live in close proximity to each other. The idea is for people to be taken out of their comfort zone and be forced to communicate with people who may have different view points. Its an interesting idea.

Megan's reaction to the project as it relates to freeformed was the concept of a chaos button. Members could push it and immediately create a circle that contains users that live in their city but that they don't know.....or something along those lines.

Xavier Students

2007-02-21T04:15:20Z

Yesterday, the students from Xavier University arrived in New York. Around 4pm, myself and the rest of the freeformed crew, met with them to discuss mobile technology, the freeformed site and take them for a tour of the immediate surroundings of NYU. Unfortunately, it was freezing outside and, despite their boots and jackets, I think we froze all of the students to death. The experience was quite interesting, however. Aside from needing moderate instruction on how to use the N80s (which I myself needed initially) they seemed to immediately be familiar with taking pictures with the phones and had no problem with the concept of using them as documentation of their trip. In fact, not once did I see any of them take out a camera of any other kind. But more interesting then that was hearing them speak. Initially, I had thought a lot of them would be from New Orleans, but most of them weren't (all of them were either from the West Coast or Texas with only two actually growing up in the city). However, they were all juniors and seniors so they had lived in the city, presumably, before the storm.

I was very hesitant to ask them any questions about what had happened and how it had effected their lives and education. But I soon found that I didn't have to. As they spoke about themselves, their interests and their school, the aftermath of the storm was evident. One girl, Ashley, who I spoke to extensively, is the producer of a morning radio show. She was telling us about how the two other local radio stations had become syndicated and many people in the community were very upset because they felt that their local voice was being taken away. She also told us about the destruction of the school's radio and tv station equipment and the loss of many computers during the storm and how most of it still had not been replaced because the school did not have enough insurance money to replace it.

I also spoke to their professors about the intentions of their art program and the ideas behind the possible collaboration between ITP and Xavier. Their program seems to be very opened ended, requiring the students to fulfill certain requirements yet allowing them to find their particular focus within their major. Xavier is apparently primarily known for very good pharmacy and biology departments and the art department in general is very small. This was even more curious as it made me wonder why these students, coming from very different cities, had chosen to be at Xavier. Not because there is something necessarily wrong with that at all. As Tom Igoe pointed out while all of us were having dinner, going to a university that is known for your intended major can be very difficult and create unnecessary pressure. But still this fact introduced an interesting dynamic. Their professors also indicated an interest in trying to expose the students to the powers of digital story telling. During their stay, they will be learning about digital audio and video recording and editing, podcasting, video blogging and various other technologies. This is all great. Yet, I couldn't help but smile when I saw how easy it was for them to communicate with their phones.

We will meeting with them again on Wednesday at 5pm. More on this to come.

Qoutes

2007-02-16T15:53:34Z

Quote:

"I argue that we should be skeptics about the potential of cyberspace. Knowledge carried through the Internet is no less shaped by social forces than it is elsewhere. Far from delivering us into a high-tech Eden, in fact, cyberspace
itself is being rapidly colonized by the familiar workings of the market system. Across their breadth and depth, computer networks link with existing capitalism to massively broaden the effective reach of the marketplace. Indeed, the Internet comprises nothing less than the central production and control apparatus of an increasingly supranational market system."

The foregoing quote is from page xiv of the Introduction to the book entitled Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. The author is named Dan Schiller. The publisher is The MIT Press located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England. 1999 is the date of publication.

A Week of Asterisk

2007-02-13T05:42:52Z

My mission over the last week has been to get the initial part of the asterisk side of freeformed up and running before the students from Xavier University get here next week. This has been quite challenging. ITP has been in the progress of migrating over to a dedicated asterisk server over the last month. This required an entirely new configuration of all aspects of the original freeformed code, including the changing and adding in new functionality. There were a few snags to do with unaccessible administrative functions, for which Shawn Van Every has been kind enough to help me with almost as soon as the problems arose. The freeformed asterisk configuration is now in a testing phase. Users next week will receive a phone call every time they upload a media file so they can leave a contextual description of their file (they can also turn this off on the fly). Users can also call in and leave comments on a particular circle.

Our initial thought was to set up a specific circle called 'Digital Storytelling; HOME' and then allow the students to create sub circles if they want to. We have also been asked to devise a walking plan, specifically illustrating where we will be taking the students. Since New Orleans has a very rich musical history our thought was to do research on musical history in New York City, specifically Greenwich Village and do a walking tour based on that information. More on this to come.