I finally got around to uploading the Processing project I completed a while ago in my Workshop class. My project goal was to create a navigable landscape, randomizing as many parameters as possible. You can play with the interactive version here.

[another cross-post from the NML blog]

At Project New Media Literacies, we’re collaborating with Harvard’s GoodPlay Project on an ethics casebook to address the special ethical issues that arise in the online world. GoodPlay has identified five different ethical areas, but at the moment, we are working on activities that explore credibility and how it is assessed and developed online.

Drawing by Marc Ngui

I’ve been listening to a bunch of Philip Glass while working on papers and revisited his opera about the life of Gandhi, Satyagraha.

Glass has a reputation for sort-of cheesy, new-agey stuff, so focusing on Gandhi as a topic doesn’t do much to reduce the overall corniness of his oeuvre. My cynicism requires me to ignore the silliness of the “message” and the overarching themes Glass tries so earnestly to get to by focusing each act on Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King, major literary figures with ties to Gandhi’s life. Luckily, the best part of the opera is not the story. (If you could even say it has a “story.”)

While I’ve been neglecting this blog, I’ve been working on school projects, including a post for the blog of my research group, Project New Media Literacies. This is cross-posted from there!

Here at Project NML, we are very interested in how new creative works often spread across a variety of media types. The new media landscape is full of stories that exist in books, TV, and social networking sites. We call the ability to deal with these changing modes of communication “Transmedia Navigation.” But even before widespread digital communication made the nearly effortless flow of information across media possible, artists were experimenting with ways to break out of the limits of traditional media.