Infomania

I've started a blog for work, & I'm training some colleagues too. I must be completely out of my mind.

I'm still a bit puzzled by the blog thing. I enjoy meeting people in person. In cyberspace, are people even real? And the relationships are very different; a bit detached? Intimate in a sort of anonymous way. It reminds me of backpacking in Europe. Friendly strangers, who shared such details, then moved on.  I like the connections - the people are real, by the way! And I like the way ideas float in & out of my head & end up on the screen for me to see later. And for you to see, I hope!

My array of blogs are meant to have individual themes run through them. This works to an extent, which might seem to contradict the words above. All a bit odd.

And as for information overload... I read on the Macquarie Dictionary site the word infomania is back, the meaning slightly altered. I think Arthur C Clark came up with that, in the 70s? He saw it as an obsession, a mania, & risky too.

It's got this strange pull, this blog thing. It's the modern pamphleteering, and oddly addictive. 

Use it carefully (ho ho), & you get a lot out of it.

Isadora

Just downloaded a copy of Isadora, a real-time interactive performance program (THERE'S a mouthful of words). It allows dancers on a stage to interact with a computer, which is connected to... whatever you like.

The application holds a hundred different actions, which are programmed to respond to events, times, to sound or light inputs, even motion - via a camera "talking" to it. That's the "interactive performance" bit of it. The output can be projected onto a screen (or the dancers), or fed into another program. Images, sounds & movies can be preloaded, or you just see what the dancers create on the spot. We saw a short performance today using Isadora; the techies said the show was quite different from four rehearsals they'd had just earlier!

It calls to mind a fantastic Australian invention, 'Stagestruck' which was created for the centenary of federation (8 years ago). It is a brilliant virtual production program, with costumes, sets, music, choreography, etc. all in the program. But Isadora is for real dancers.

Yeah yeah, it's not strictly Web 2.0, but wow it's exciting... getting computers to respond to creativity always stirs me, & this piece almost gives you the spectrum of immense artistic control, to "let the computer have a crack at it". The interactive web and the interactive stage are just tools for human ingenuity.