chroma key test

Responding to Heidegger: Dirt Displacer

In order to create a conversation with Heidegger, my piece relates to certain elements of his article “The Question Concerning Technology”.. It addresses the  particular, the dangers of the essence of technology because it can be denied and cause us to experience “a more primal truth”. Using the technology offered to us from challenging-forth, this piece performs the primal, and menial task of shoveling dirt around the box. As one shovels further and further, you reveal the surface of object under it, which plays around Heidegger’s concepts of “revealing” and “concealing”. It also plays around Heidegger’s concept of “danger” by flinging rocks visibly toward the operator.

Difficulties encountered in the making of this piece include the crafting of the piece. As one who does not craft, it was quite difficult to cut wood and plexiglass using no power tools. The flaws in the craft presented by this fact represent the denial of technology and being exposed to a more primal essence of technology.

Isometric Scrolling Demonstration

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/51159222/

Used the same character as the pong game. The self centering function of Scratch made it so I had to spend at least several minutes positioning the sprites to look fluid. This game, while seemingly simple, is actually quite complex, if I say so myself. Several hours have gone into coding and testing this, with little details and kinks, of which I can go all into great detail, since no tutorial or help was used. However, it is quite unnessessary, and as such, I will omit it. Although, if only a demonstration took this long and still has bugs, I can imagine an entire game taking quite an impressive amount of time to complete, details included and bugs fixed (for the most part).

Pong Game

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/49804266/

The result of a pong game gone basketball. This interesting varient keeps track of who last hit the ball to keep track of score. Had to play with the code a little bit to get it to score as planned, along with simple practice using Scratch to animate and set conditions to realize the capabilities of it-- if at least a little bit.

modifier cards final

Slightly different from the character cards, these modifier cards are made to visualize the important parts of the events/ item. For example, the nuke has a tie in with Oppenhieimer in the tie-dye background, representing Oppenheimer's bonus. The pans and other metal items in The Great Leap Forward card represents the waste produced in attempting to industrialize China.

character card pictures final

These characters were used as my cards because I didn't really care who I did-- the result would be the same. It would have wound up having a similar theme to these three: Charlemagne, Oppenheimer, and Goujian. The idea was to transform historical figures into battle ready cards by taking a few traits they were famous for in their lifetime and using it as a weapon. The results are above. While perhaps not the most asthetically pleasing images, I believe they add a touch of fun befitting of the theme of the card game.