Week 2

Experiment:

For my experiment, I took the lyrics from the song "Killshot" by Eminem and ran i through Google Translate multiple times and collected the results. The order in which I translated the lyrics was:
English -> Swedish -> Hebrew -> Vietnamese -> german -> Thai -> Icelandic -> Spanish -> Japanese -> Norwegian ->English. I then used text to speech to convert the lyrics into audio. Afterwards, I played the text to speech audio over the song's instrumental.

It's interesting to see how different the lyrics of my new version is from the original. An interesting thing to note is that "Killshot" is a diss track, where Eminem berates and mocks his rival (MGK). However, in my version, there is a lack of vulgarity and, in some cases, it almost seems as if Eminem is being quite friendly towards MGK. The dramatic change of lyrics between the two versions highlights how imperfect Google Translate is.

Link to original song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxQTY-W6GIo
Link to my experimental version: Killshot by Eminem, translated 10 times

Readings:

I found the LOLCat and Doge reading to be quite humorous. I never thought I would see a linguistic essay about memes. It is interesting that LOLCat emerged from funny pictures of the animal in general whereas Doge came from a specific dog picture. I think its interesting that the author calls Doge the "antithesis" of LoLCat because I believe the frequent creators of these memes most likely enjoy both. I think that both memes are humorous in their own ways and that the incorrect grammar and spelling adds to their charm.

FlatLogic talked about the shallowness of interacting with technology, but I feel that advances in technology are making tech interactions feel more lifelike. With all the research going into virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing, etc. I feel that technology is becoming more and more immersive. Additionally, with the physical immersion, I feel that these technologies will also add emotional depth because the user will feel more connected to the experience.


Art:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BmcrF6RFxcI/?taken-by=internet_poetry. This particular piece is interesting because it lacks punctuation.

http://vispo.com/uribe/metalico2.html - I actually found this one amusing because it uses letters to emulate a zipper opening and closing.

Week 1

"Principles of New Media"  talked about continuous an discrete media. For example, a song (in real life) is continuous because there are no breaks, but in a digital photo, everything is made up of pixels and everything can be represented in a numerical form. Because new media is programmable, we can sample continuous intervals and make it discrete. Modern digital media technologies are discrete because language is discrete; Sentences, words, and morphemes are all discrete.

Additionally, modern media technology is both modular and discrete. That means, that an artist can combine singular objects together to create art. In terms of variability, it makes it easy for artists to split up other works in to form new pieces and make a unique piece of media themselves.

In"Prosthesis", Ian has a collection of songs that sound very choppy and robotic like. A lot of the songs sound like he's doing programming syntax (e.g. for loops, i++, recursion, do while) and he builds upon those elements. In this way, he uses discrete objects to build something greater.

"The Listener" is an alexa skill that performs a conversational performance. It is interesting because alexa has a voice that seems human, making it seem like the user is talking directly to the artist. However, Alexa is purely synthetic and is an example of human aurality. The human-like features of Alexa makes it invited to the household and almost makes it part of the family.

In "Long Rong Song", OTTARAS repeats "LONG RONG SONG TONG", except uses different vowels each time. He uses discrete elements, but in a way "programs" it to be slightly different. Additionally, he uses discrete objects (in this case, words) to create a song.