I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to the SFPC and also enjoyed meeting and speaking with the creator, Taeyoon Choi. The school setup reminded me a lot of ITP, although it was much smaller than the ITP floor it felt larger because there are fewer people who inhabit the space. An interesting point Taeyoon made was that a lot of students find out about the program by word of mouth. They might know someone who attended, or they may have found out about it from attending an event put on by the SFPC. Another thing I found interesting is that for Taeyoon, this school is a form of activist practice where the culture of diversity is celebrated. He had a lot of interesting things to say about learning and teaching as activism, access to tech and resources, community learning. Most people who attend SFPC are older and have already had work experience but want to learn more technical skills.
Learning Space
NY Simulation Center & Project Update
In the simulation center I found interesting that what I thought was going to be there, complex systems based in virtual reality and in devices like the da Vinci surgical system, was instead replaced by an infrastructure designed to have physical / tangible simulations. I enjoyed looking and thinking about the human-centered focus of those training settings. Based on the discussion about the threshold need of realism in the simulations, I wonder what would be the lower limit, and to what extent some of this equipment can be replaced by lower tech with similar results – for example in places with
For my project, I decided what to do and I developed this prototype of library to be used with p5.js: p5.choreograph.js
This is the description (in progress) that I wrote there:
The idea is to shift the usual paradigm of what can be created with creative code: graphics, text and sound. Here, instead of having an instantaneous feedback for the written drawing commands in p5.js, those commands get translated as instructions that a person can follow moving in a space. Basically the lines in the programmed drawing are converted to trajectories to walk on.
The graphical output of the commands is omitted on purpose for several reasons:
- The person following the generated instructions has to follow them without a reference of the intended result, making its execution more authentic
- The visual thinking of the programmed drawings has to be changed to a certain extent to a spatial thinking and to a thinking involving other person(s) in a space.
- It is challenging and engaging
- The feedback on the result of the created code is slowed down, and that may help thinking further what to write before actually executing it
- It allows a new way of human interaction
- The graphical output can always be drawn with the normal p5 functions