Combining New and Traditional Media

New Media Flash mob

Framing and Gathering: To create new media from a spontaneous flash mob mixed with visual art and music.

I plan to organize a flash mob in the school grounds with classmates using minimal choreography. After a few minutes of dancing, bystanders will be encouraged to join the mob to create an atmosphere of spontaneity and fun. I will use a mix of popular tunes that everyone will be familiar with to create excitement as everyone joins the mob.

Create and Reflect: I will have help from others in the technology aspect experience, as well as help from other dancers to create the flash mob. Next week’s blog post will include my interactions and experiences with all my plans and whether anything had to change. Although I will need a lot of help from fellow students that have technology experience, I would like to mix the filmed flash mob occurrence with visual lighting effects, music and voice-over to create a spontaneous new media experience.

Aaron Koblin artfully visualizes humanity and I think his work will be similar to my ultimate product. As Koblin specializes in data and data-visualization, I specialize in dance and movement so I will gear my visualization part of the project towards art and light.

I will be using Automation as my Principle of new media. In automation a modular structure (media elements such as images, sounds, shapes, behaviors) of a media object allows to automate the operations involved in media creation, manipulation, and access. I am unsure of which new media I will be using whether it is Windows Media Player, Camtasia, or Moviemaker. All of these programs are new to me, so any that I chose I will learn about and experiment with. In the learning and planning process of this project I have already learned about Camtasia and the interesting aspects of it as new media.

I like the excitement of a large group of people dancing in the fun of an impulsive moment. The energy served by a large group of people and others watching and joining in with the dancers. I want to create flashes of light in different colors to influence and symbolize all kinds of moods. The lighting effects will be increasing the energy through the new media just as the observers joining the flash mob will increase energy.

Talk: I will share my project on the Facebook group for others to view and discuss any comments.