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- |Changes [Feb 26, 2009]
The camera
THE CLASS:
I'm so happy that I stumbled my way into this class. I remember back at the beginning of the quarter I was trying to nail down a schedule; I was going to take IHUM, PWR, and Math 51, but wanted to add another class that would be a little more fun than those three. I looked at a couple of STS classes in the bulletin, thought they sounded interesting, and figured that I'd shop a couple to see what looked good. I went to this class on the first day, got lost, and came in a couple of minutes late. The little room we were in was packed. People were standing in the hallway for nearly the whole period. About ten minutes in I thought to myself: I'm going to take this class, irregardless of how much work it is, etc...it just sounded so interesting. I practically ran back to my dorm to sign up in Axess. At lunch that day I was so excited about the class that I told nearly everyone I knew about it...which led to about four more of my friends signing up to take the class.
I've found each object we looked at very interesting, but I must say the most fascinating thing is simply the big picture that emerges from all this. It's an entirely different way of looking at the world, a combination of seeing everything in crystal clear 4D (both looking at the object's spatial self as well as the temporal history that leads up to the object) as well as drawing connections in between things. Every item available for analysis appears as a little node on this huge, interconnected network that comprises our world. It's a way of looking at reality as more than a series of objects, but rather a series of connections between objects. The interconnectedness of it all is staggering to me. It's sort of like playing that game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," except with things instead of actors and movies. At some point, everything owes some element of its design to something else.
THE PROJECT:
My starting point for this project was my mom's Tupperware collection. For a long time now I've kind of ragged my mom about her "container fetish" as I sometimes call it: this seeming obsession with boxes, bins, Tupperware...basically any type of container. This project really made me think about what those containers actually do, organizing, sorting, and providing a sense of control over their contents. The cornerstone of my project, and my thought process about Tupperware in general, was the idea of Tupperware as a system of inputs and outputs. I became fascinated with the idea of mapping out the way that food gets divided up into Tupperware containers, and then how those containers change the way a person can interact with that food.
Another thing that I found very interesting but was unable to capture was other people's experiences with Tupperware. When I mentioned that I was doing my project on Tupperware, specifically my mom's huge drawer of it, I got so many knowing nods in return. It seems most mom's have a similar drawer chock full of a wide variety of containers. The ubiquity of this phenomenon was amazing. But, looking back on it now, this really isn't that surprising. Containers are so important in our everyday lives, and the practical implications of being able to contain food are so strong that NOT having some sort of Tupperware collection would be surprising. I guess this means that I'll have to stop making fun of my mom for being such a container freak then...
And, as promised,
LIFE IN GENERAL:
As you may have seen on Amara Humphry's project on Photoshop, I do some work with Digital Art (check out the page Can Pixels Replace the Paintbrush?). I use a few programs, one of which is the very basic Bryce 5, a fairly simple program for 3D computer generated graphics. It took a little getting used to seeing everything in 3D on the computer screen and in wireframe, but I got used to it after a while. And once I got a handle on that idea, it blew my mind. I started seeing everything in wireframe in my mind, imagining surfaces as collections of points drawn out by little gray squares. I imagined complex shapes as booleans, intersections of positive and negative geometric shapes that come together to form an entirely different object. A similar thing happened in this class. My perception of things was blown wide open...I still can't get over the door lecture. Nearly everytime I open or close one, I can just see myself having to knock down or rebuild the whole wall each time. Also, as I mentioned before, the long reaching applications of the ideas we've been discussing in class are fascinating. As I type this, I'm staring out the window behind my computer screen, looking at the roofs of Manzanita and a couple of other buildings. Just thinking about the roof tiles, and how they are informed by the thousands of years of ceramic innovation. I'm looking out on several thousand years of human progress, manifested in...roofing tiles? Amazing.
On that note, I guess this project is just about done. Thanks for checking this page out...I hope you found at least some of it interesting and informative. If you have any questions, comments, or general insights you can drop me a line at svraspir@stanford.edu. Thanks!
FIN
Author: Stefan Vraspir
