Lately. But I make sense of places with things in this order: food, architecture, vegetation, fashion so…food tops. No really, this is a happy find. I am in the Boulevard, a new coffee house on campus. It’s an alright place. Big, full or students but the sound level is not too bad, and I am enjoying the current artwork. A little expensive…when you see a student spend 4.45+tax on a chai latte you wonder how tuition can be complained about but…
…they have onigiri here! I was told you could find it in Vancouver but was not sure where. Now I have a source!! Chicken, tuna and konbu varieties. Bought one for lunch so today will be a happy day. (As long as the onigiri high can mask my tax return emotions.)
Speaking of tax return…
…actually no, let’s not talk about that.
Actually, I am reading a paper right now: Crafting participation: designing ecologies, configuring experience (Heath, Luff, vom Lehn, Hindmarsh, 2002) and in the beginning they talk about how visual art from the Renaissance onward (use paintings as specific examples) were designed to engage a viewer more and make the viewer an “active spectator”. The context of the spectator - their location, perspective of the artwork and the relationship between the viewer, the artwork, and surrounding physical elements were taken into account to create different viewing experiences. An example given is of artwork in a chapel. A figure on an altarpiece might be gazing towards an image of a saint in the roof of the chapel. Upon seeing the figure a viewer will follow its gaze and discover the saint.
I think I have read about how artists do this before but today I am relating it to research considering a person’s location, physical relationship to other objects, etc. in the design of new technologies. How our devices might respond to our physical context, how technology can be used to create even more drastic variations on how we experience our environment, depending on our location within it. Just thinking about examples of that…none of them all that well formulated in my head so I am gonna stop here and go pick up my T4.
