Blog | Terrence Scoville | New Media Artist & Designer from California

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Implicit Crowdsourcing

According to Wikipedia:

Implicit crowdsourcing is less obvious because users do not necessarily know they are contributing, yet can still be very effective in completing certain tasks. Rather than users actively participating in solving a problem or providing information, implicit crowdsourcing involves users doing another task entirely where a third party gains information for another topic based on the user’s actions.

A good example of implicit crowdsourcing is the ESP game, where users guess what images are and then these labels are used to tag Google images. Another popular use of implicit crowdsourcing is through reCAPTCHA, which asks people to solve Captchas in order to prove they are human, and then provides Captchas from old books that cannot be deciphered by computers in order to try and digitize them for the web. Like Mechanical Turk, this task is simple for humans but would be incredibly difficult for computers.

Piggyback crowdsourcing can be seen most frequently by websites such as Google that data-mine a user’s search history and websites in order to discover keywords for ads, spelling corrections, and finding synonyms. In this way, users are unintentionally helping to modify existing systems, such as Google’s ad words.
Pareidolia

While experimenting with the facial feature detector in Quartz Composer, I thought about how humans often see faces in inanimate objects. After some research I discovered that once again, someone had defined this phenomenon. On the Pareidolia Wikipedia page there are some great examples of the phenomenon in both natural and artificial objects along with the full definition:

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.

I began constructing a Quartz composition that would scan photographs for faces. After testing the composition with my own photographs, I decided to use the RSS Importer patch to download the latest photos from Flickr and scan the images for faces. The Composition then displays the images detected for the viewer to see. As of now, the Composition works as intended; however, I have been looking into the best way to encourage the Composition to display only faces in artificial object. I’m thinking this could be accomplished through the use of a specific search tag or image filter that can determine rather or not the scanner is detecting a human face or not.
Ideasthesia

In the past, I have produced work that dealt with the phenomena of synesthesia and in my research I have come across a similar phenomenon, Ideasthesia. According to Wikipedia:

Ideasthesia (alternative spelling ideaesthesia) is defined as a phenomenon in which activations of concepts (inducers) evoke perception-like experiences (concurrents).

As I looked further into the subject, I found an article about a swimmer that experiences the condition when seeing different swimming styles. In the article, a quote on Ideasthesia from a researcher at the Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, caught my eye:

Nikolic suspects that all forms of synaesthesia are triggered in part by concepts, rather than sights, sounds or smells, and that many more forms of “ideasthesia,” as he calls it, await discovery. “Any concept, be it freedom, quarks or travel to the moon, could act as a trigger,” he says.

After thinking about this condition, I began to wonder if I could determine the color of a concept. I began to imagine a dictionary, with each word in the color most associated with the overall idea. From that thought, I came up with the idea for a perception dictionary, that asks viewers to define words through colors, sounds, or other perception based mediums.
Phonophobia

After discover Misophonia I began to look for other psychological conditions related to sound. That’s when I discovered Phonophobia. According to Wikipedia:

Phonophobia (also called ligyrophobia) is a fear of loud sounds. It can also mean a fear of voices, or a fear of one’s own voice. For example, listening to a CDthat starts with a minute of silence and then suddenly goes into loud rock music would be extremely startling for most people, assuming they had no prior knowledge of the content of the CD. Being startled is in itself a normal reaction, but the key difference is that people with ligyrophobia actively fear such an occurrence.

Once again my mind went to trying to create this fear among the viewer. I imagined a room with videos projected of someone about to rev a motorcycle, pull a fire alarm, hit a gong/cymbal, start a truck, turn the amp to full volume and strum guitar, load and shoot a gun, light a firework, or pop a balloon. The subtle sound effects of each video would begin playing at a very loud volume, giving the viewer the sense that the impending loud noise would be at an earth shattering volume. The sound would continue to play right until the loud noise, when suddenly the viewer would hear a much quieter sound then they were expecting. My hope is that the viewer will experience, at least for a moment, a sense of phonophobia.
Misophonia

According to Wikipedia:

Misophonia, literally “hatred of sound”, is a form of decreased sound tolerance.

Immediately I was struck by the literal meaning of Misophonia. Hatred of sound? How could someone hate sound? I continued my research into the condition to better understand the condition.

According to Misophonia.info:

Misophonia sufferers typically have strong negative emotional reactions, ranging from annoyance to extreme rage, to a variety of sounds–frequently associated with mouth and nasal sounds such as chewing, slurping or breathing. However, reactions can be triggered by many different sounds such as sniffing, pens clicking, heel-tapping, typing, dogs barking and so on. For some, simply the sight of one of these behaviors can trigger an intense reaction. Some Misophonia sufferers also have purely visual triggers such as jiggling legs or other repetitive movement which can set off a reaction. Each individual has different triggers and also has different emotional reactions. While mild sufferers of Misophonia may feel tense or irritated, more severe cases involve uncontrollable outbursts of anger and even the visualisation of violent encounters.

I also found this video from an ABC News program on Misophonia:

So I started to think about how I could recreate what someone one with Misophonia experiences. I thought of a room with a projection with random flashes of videos and sounds of common triggers (chewing, coughing, cracking knuckles, etc). Perhaps slowly fading to white-noise, bliss for Misophonia suffers. Maybe I could provide headphones with white noise to listen to or earplugs for viewers to escape the torture of the sounds.

Update: Interestingly, as I prepared to present this concept to my Electronic Arts class, I discovered that this was an updated version of the ABC News news special because the original contained sounds that would trigger reactions for Misophonia sufferers. This has led me to reconsider how my installation might affect those with Misophonia.
Electronic Arts Experiments February 9-10

After discussing our plans for a BFA exhibition entitled “Reclaiming Space” with the other BFA students I began to think about what I wanted to include in the show. As I was brainstorming at home, I saw a styrofoam head that had somehow ended up positioned on top of the TV stand in my living room. Looking at the head I thought about an exquisite corpse project that I had just taught in my Advanced Electronic Arts class. I continued this train of thought and came up with the idea of dividing photographs or videos of faces into thirds in a similar way and projection mapping them on to a styrofoam head. The features of different faces could shuffle to produce an entirely new face made up of three different people. Then I thought back to a trailer Nanette Wylde had showed our class in which a movie was written with each writer only being able to read a few pages of the script that came before where they needed to write. This reminded me a game played on message boards where a poem is constructed one word at a time.

With all these concepts floating around in my head I constructed a more complete idea: a projection mapped exquisite head featuring Chico State BFA student’s faces and voices reciting a poem that has been constructed one word at a time with each author only knowing the word that came before theirs. I quickly sent a text to my classmate and BFA colleague Kate Adams the idea and asked if she would be interesting in collaborating on the project by photographing everyone, especially since she is great photographer and has recently started working in a photography studio on campus. She replied with interest in the idea and we started discussing how to go about producing the project in time for the show.

Excited by this new idea, I quickly grabbed my computer, fired open Quartz Composer, and created a new document…
Featured in The Orion
Rest in Peace

Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011
Results of the 1st Los Angeles Beard and Mustache Championships

That trophy is amazing.
Tattly Temporary Tattoos

James Gaddy reporting for Fast Company’s Co.Design:

If you’ve ever wondered what a tattoo parlor run by designers would look like, look no further than Tattly, the new temporary tattoo web service launched yesterday by Tina Roth Eisenberg, proprietor of the Swiss Miss blog and the TeuxDeux to-do list. We can honestly say that there’s nothing else quite like it on the web.

(Via LinkedIn.)
Google Doodle Honors 450th Birthday of St. Basil’s Cathedral

Today, Google‘s homepage features a great illustration of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Dmitry Shvidkovsky via Wikipedia:

It is like no other Russian building. Nothing similar can be found in the entire millennium of Byzantine tradition from the fifth to fifteenth century … a strangeness that astonishes by its unexpectedness, complexity and dazzling interleaving of the manifold details of its design.

An architectural wonder and one of the most recognizable symbols of Russia, the cathedral has a history as colorful as its exterior.
Cy Twombly, Internationally Renowned American Artist, Dies at 83

Suzanne Muchnic, reporting for the Los Angeles Times:

Cy Twombly, an internationally renowned American artist whose lyrically evocative signature works blur the boundaries of painting, drawing and handwritten poetry, has died. He was 83.

The world has lost a great American artist.

Last semester, my drawing professor Maxwell Stolkin introduced me to the works of Cy Twombly and I really enjoyed his aesthetic. His work reminds me very much of contemporary graffiti and street art.
Beatjazz

TED:

Musician and inventor Onyx Ashanti demonstrates “beatjazz” — his music created with two handheld controllers, an iPhone and a mouthpiece, and played with the entire body.

(Via TPUTH.)
The History of the Space Shuttle

The Atlantic’s In Focus with Alan Taylor has a great selection of photographs covering the history of the Space Shuttle. Having lived for several years near Edwards AFB, I was lucky enough to see the Space Shuttle at various times both on the ground and in the sky. I hope that NASA continues where it left off and realizes that the true success of the Space Shuttle program was defined by radical ideas and experimentation.

(Via Shawn Blanc.)
Sinatra
Tex Winter Elected to Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame

Mike Trudell, interviewing Kobe Bryant:

I’ve been next to him on the bench and he’d tell Phil, you’re coaching (badly). He’ll tell me that I’m playing (badly). He doesn’t pull any punches whatsoever. He coaches the game, it’s nothing personal with him at all. He has certain principles that he feels like the game should be played by, and if they’re not being played that way he’s going to say something. It’s beautiful.

Long overdue.
Dodgers Blew

Greg Knauss:

Oh, sure, Matt Kemp is an All-Star, Andre Ethier hit in thirty straight games earlier in the season, and Clayton Kershaw is off to a terrific start and has a batting average that’s worthy of envy. But the team as a whole (the organization as a whole) is steadily going exactly nowhere.

Plus, Jonathan Broxton is going to come off the DL at some point, and that’s just going to make things worse.

This about sums up my mindset right now as a Dodger fan…
dJ DyNaStY

I’m hosting my friend Brett’s website and to help him get started I made a custom placeholder page complete with an animated GIF, a link to his MySpace, and an auto-playing background song.

What other web host gives you customer service like that?
Tokyo Researchers Hijack Your Hand, Help You Play the Koto

Joseph Volpe:

Reassuringly named the PossessedHand, this belt of electro-stimulation wraps its pad of twenty-eight electrodes around your forearm triggering a range of sixteen bewitched joint actions.

This is just creepy.