Sians Blog 30/04/08

Today we watched the video "Pi" which is a disturbing film which many would find hard to understand, it is about a mathematician Maximillian Cohen who is tormented by a severe migraine since he was 6 years old when he stared at the sun. He is a lonely man, and his only friend is his former professor Sol Robeson. Max has the following assumptions, which rules his life:

• Mathematics is the language of nature
• Everything around us can be represented and understood from numbers
• If you graph the numbers in any systems, patterns emerge

Therefore there are patterns everywhere in nature. Based on these principles, Max is trying to figure out a system to predict the behavior of the stock market, he becomes obsessed with numeric patterns. Due to his research, Max is chased by a Wall Street company with interest in the results of his studies, and by an orthodox Jew follower of the Torah, who believes that this long string of numbers is a code sent from God.
Driven to madness, Max experiences another headache and resists the urge to take his pain medication. Believing that the number and the headaches are linked, Max tries to concentrate on the number through the pain. After passing out, Max has a vision of himself standing in a white void and repeating the digits of the number. Whether he is facing God or the vision is just another product of his own mental disorders is not confirmed.

A Fibonacci spiral approximates the golden spiral; unlike the "whirling rectangle diagram" based on the golden ratio, above, this one uses squares of integer Fibonacci-number sizes, shown for square sizes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34

After watching the film i looked at the bacikground of the film and the mathematical pricipals used. Now i am going to carry on with my research and development of ideas.

Sians Blog 23/04/08

Nigel went through the Multimedia Design Assignment, this module will enable me to develop strategies for multimedia storytelling and narritive creation. It was explained that we have to complete a digital multimedia outcome with the following criteria lists to form my outcome:

• Mood: Happy, Sad, Ecstatic, Melancholy, Reflective, Indifferent.
• Object: Large, Small, Significant, Insignificant, Countable, Non-countable.
• Habitat: Wild, Tame, Dark, Light, Rough, Smooth.
• Lifestyle: Aspiration-al, Reclusive, Representational, Non-representational, Organic, Chemical.

we can choose to use a number of different forms of digital multimedia such as sound, video, images or text. At the moment i think i will explore with video to work towards my final outcome. I can either create a video with a word from each group and stitch them together or collectively create a whole video using a word from each group.

For example: a video that portrays Happy, Significant, Light and Representational. x