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 eam
reflections:
Ethan Smith
Jay Kelly
Liam Aleguire
Eric Cheng ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Ethan
Smith
My background has always been a little
mixed, I have had a lot of opportunities to specialize
my skills and minus a few exceptions, I have resisted
these opportunities. Being both a practitioner of graphic
arts and music, multimedia felt like a very natural
extension for me. My initial pursuit of a Master of
Arts in Multimedia derived from the idea that I wanted
to combine all my interests into a single field, and
expand my knowledge about what the real possibilities
were.
As the BetaSpace project grew from a small
idea in the summer of 2002, I have been lucky enough
to discover just how passionate I am about some of my
chosen paths. Secondly since this a a field that demands
diversified skill I can say that my refusal to specialize
has paid off. The art school gradate in me has always
wanted to create things that are both aesthetically
pleasing, but intellectually challenging. The music
school side has served to make sure that the ears are
just as important as the eyes when accessing a certain
state of mind.
Although I have been a practicing Web
designer for some time, I realized that my belief in
the Internet as a delivery medium for artistic purposes
was in need to more recruits. On top of that, more and
more of what I considered interesting on the Web were
places created for no other purpose than the art and
experience of it. This became a huge part of my present
personal convictions that the use of Internet for solely
commercial purposes is a grave disservice to the wonderful
implications of what it means to be a creator on the
Internet.
During the project the members of the
BetaSpace team tried whenever possible to have cross
over between what each member was doing. Usually all
the members were involved in each part of the process,
but to varying degrees.
Each member had creative and technical
duties to fulfill. On the creative side I was working
with Liam to develop our visual identity, coming up
with unifying metaphors to use in the design of site
elements, and the group was working together to define
the user experience at each possible step. Additionally
with a project this large there was the need to come
up with a set of visual standards by which the everything
could be unified.
Technically I also had a large chunk of
responsibility. I was busy developing the dynamic Flash
apps for use in our galleries that would accommodate
all our technical requirements. Also since I was the
most experienced Flash user in the group, I had to help
make sure that other group members were kept up to speed
on how the galleries worked and were to be updated.
On top of this I was equally involved with other group
members to hack the community ware to run our Community
Access and Collaborative Studio sections of the project.
Additionally I was lucky enough to work
myself into the role of gluing a lot of our chosen technology
together to work together. While other group members
were doing production art and database, I was busy mixing
all the ingredients together. This proved to be one
of my favorite areas of the project.
The most important things I learned from
the BetaSpace project have little to do with technical
details and everything to do with group process. Working
with the team in developing the project required a lot
of compromise and we always had to have a pulse of where
the other group members were at. Since we were often
handing off parts of the project to each other communication
was really crucial. Each member was responsible for
different aspects of the project - sometimes technical
and sometimes creative - so while all members had to
wear multiple hats, roles would also change over time.
For me personally the beginning part of the project
was much more theoretical and creative and slowly moved
more into technical areas.
In retrospect I would have used more time
to plan the project. Although the planning and architecture
phase took much longer than anticipated, I really see
the importance of making sure decisions are solidified
before building the project. Since so many of our early
decisions had to be rethought it was obvious that the
group needed more time in this area. Since this conflicted
a bit with our evaluation schedule a lot of our earlier
product that was developed in a hurry had to be scrapped.
Overall I am extremely happy with what
this project has become although it is light years away
from what I first thought it would be. The building
of something that is participatory and can exist over
a longer period of time has always been of more interest
than creating an installation based project. Since this
project really relies on the participation of other
people outside of our group I am really looking forward
to seeing what the members of BetaSpace turn the project
into in the coming months.
Jay Kelly
One of the reasons why I applied for the program was to acquire and improve
my skills in multimedia and (almost as importantly), to develop the ability
to work cohesively within a group. I was very glad to see the emphasis on working
and communicating in groups in the first year, as I can see now what a vital
role it plays in the development of a multimedia project.
Because one of my long term goals is to become a
professor at a post-secondary institution, I was particularly
interested in how the instructors structured
and taught the classes. Overall, the first year proved to be an excellent
prelude for the performance of the main event to follow.
When I look back on the first
year, I see what an enormous amount of progress the entire class has made
since our ‘green’ and humble beginning.
The concept
of BetaSpace arose out of our desire to create an online
community for artists to display, view and collaboratively
create works of new media
art. On a deeper level, we wanted to, “…transmit our own voices,
stories, and experiences in a highly influential, unrestricted way to those
who care enough to listen, and to those who would like to contribute to that
artistic sentiment as well.” This seemingly simple mission statement
turned out to be incredibly challenging.
Perhaps the most challenging of all
was the task of building an online community. It became clear to me that
we were up against what was coined by Paul Kedrosky
in July 1999 as The Network Effect - phenomenon whereby a service becomes
more valuable as more people use it, thereby encouraging
ever-increasing numbers
of adopters.
According to Kedrosky, it’s a feedback phenomenon that exists whenever
it’s in people's best interests to be where everyone else is, and so
everyone ends up flocking to the same place. So far, there are many examples
like Amazon that gets scores of visitors because people hear about it more
than other online booksellers. Or E-bay which reportedly has one of the highest
numbers of visitors of any Web site partly because it’s better known
than any of its competitors. Therefore because both are extremely widely
recognized names in their industries, the process feeds back on itself.
I
felt that The Network Effect was like a strong tide we had to swim against
near the launching of BetaSpace. However, later on as our marketing efforts
intensified and people began to discover the unique features of BetaSpace,
things began to change. Suddenly, the number of new memberships and submittal
began to increase and I began feeling like the tide was shifting in our favor—the
Network Effect can be your friend as well (albeit, we experienced it on a
small scale.)
So what did I learn from all this? It’s difficult to list because there
are so many intangibles… I will try to cover them briefly and broadly.
What
struck me as one of the most valuable facets of the project was the challenge
the group faced with reckoning our ideal vision, with the cold, hard realities
of multimedia production. This ongoing theme of ‘making it the best possible’ within
the limited resources available to us while upholding our main principles is
a direct representation of what it’s like in the ‘real world’;
outside of academia.
Even though we were able to meet, and in some cases
exceed our objectives, the continual problems we encountered to
achieve those objectives
made the
process similar to ‘two steps forward, one step back, another step sideways’...
I believe this process of having an ideal objective, planning how to achieve
it, designating who’s going to do what, to what extent, how long it will
take, contingency planning, troubleshooting, managing resources, budget management,
crisis management, and evaluating the results is the core learning sets this
program fosters. It’s learning often times without even knowing you’re
learning because you’re so deeply immersed in the process and its challenges
and achievements.
Another valuable learning experience pertained to
the personal project that each of us worked on. My
project involved the photographic exploration
of Japanese
culture, which therefore meant a very costly journey to Japan. Knowing what
limited funds I had available, I made it my goal to have a least 2 corporate
sponsors that would be able to either lend or donate their products in order
to help defray the costs.
I began a lengthy campaign which involved countless
long distance calls to a long list of companies such
as airlines, battery manufacturers, compact flash
manufacturers, camera manufacturers, lens manufacturers, Japanese-American
Trade organizations, and Japan Rail. Half the battle was finding out who the
right person was to send my letters to. Once my letter was received, frequent
phone follow ups were required just to reach the person in the office—it
was a very long and somewhat discouraging process. I was however rewarded for
my efforts. A total of five companies offered their sponsorship by lending
or donating their products: Sigma Lenses, MindStore Corp., Lenmar Batteries,
SanDisk Corp., and Nixvue Corp.
Overall I was pleased with the results, as their
combined donations would’ve
been equivalent to over $900 in production costs. The experience of raising
support was extremely valuable in that I will probably encounter a similar
situation; perhaps as a faculty member at a post secondary institution.
Some
of the tasks of our project were shared; others were assigned specifically
for each of us. Generally, it was a very collaborative effort and we supported
one another during each step of the project.
I was responsible for the grunt
work of setting up the domain name, ip addresses,
setting up the server software, installing hardware
as needed, setting up e
mail @ betaspace.org, ftp server software set up, setting up remote server
access (vnc) etc. Also during this period I was sending out my letters for
sponsorship for my trip to Japan.
Because of my experience in photography,
it was also my responsibility to develop the look
and feel that the main galleries. This turned out to
be very much an evolutionary process, because what we had originally
envisioned changed
over time.
Our first thought was that the galleries might be
based on a real world setting, such as the interior
and exterior of a warehouse.
Since we wanted the images
to be originally shot and not taken from somewhere on the Web, (where we
would have copyright problems anyway,) I set out to
find some buildings that could
be used as our gallery backdrop.
The problem I found was the barrel effect
that was apparent when stitching 4 or more images
together. Then the suggestion was made to use more
abstract images. To me, these images were leaning more toward something
that I found
more artistic and could open up many more possibilities. In the end, I re-shot
a series of warehouse looking buildings that were altered to be heavily vectorized,
which I was very pleased with.
In my quest for promoting BetaSpace, I was
able to set up a relationship with plado.org (a popular
local exhibition of multimedia and traditional artists),
whereby we were able to distribute promo postcards as well as get a link
on plado's Web site which gets hundreds visitors each
week. Also in the marketing realm, I was able to attract
many members/submittals to our galleries by posting
our message to art schools, film schools, video
forums, Flash forums, Photoshop groups, Craig’s list, personal contacts,
message boards, Usenet / Newsgroups, and search engines.
During the assembly
phase of our development, I was privileged to learn how PHP can be integrated
with Flash and html to produce the results we needed.
With Ethan as my mentor, I was able to learn a lot about the process and
collaborated with him in assembling the final stages
of the galleries.
Another very valuable learning experience was
the transition we made from one dynamic content generating
software to another. Having switched to a more
sophisticated software, I was fascinated by how to set it up, how it worked,
setting group and moderator permissions, getting the aesthetic look we wanted,
setting up dynamic voting capabilities etc.
My personal project in itself
became a crash course in Flash/Action Script programming
(and I’m
no programmer!). I had a great many difficulties getting
the look and functionality I wanted, and found myself having to
constantly
tweak the code and re-size the photos to make it fit into the gallery templates
we had created.
Overall, the experience I’ve had by going through this
program has been one of the most valuable learning experiences of my life,
and I would recommend
it to anyone.
Liam Aleguire
When I first enrolled in the Multimedia
Master’s degree
program at Cal. State Hayward, I have to admit, I was wowed by
the distinct nature of their graduate thesis projects. The interactive
displays, the real-time 3D exhibits, and augmented reality systems
were some of the core reasons why I chose CSUH over other graduate
schools—because they weren’t just producing CD-ROMS
or Web Sites for their graduate thesis projects. Ironically, almost
two years later, I stand at the conclusion of the program having
completed my own multimedia team thesis project- a Web site! Kind
of ….
"Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our
stories."
- Laurie Andersen
Like so many of my fellow classmates in the graduate program,
I was focused solely on the technological aspects of multimedia
throughout the first year of the program. When brainstorming ideas
for a possible thesis proposal, I became quite frustrated when
trying to come up with my own “immersive, interactive, dynamically
rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated
environment,” as Bruce Mau would sarcastically put it. I
was intrigued by the technology, but also hindered by it, as it
forced me to overlook what I cared most about – content and
meaning, which are things that transcend beyond any technology.
That’s essentially what’s at the heart of the BetaSpace
project – content and meaning, as it provides an open venue
for people to come together and communicate their values, ideas,
creative expressions, and personal stories to an appreciative community.
While the most recent version of BetaSpace is far from what my
team members and I had imagined back in the Summer, I’m very
pleased at how the project has evolved, and I look forward to seeing
its future transformation as well.
My contributions to the project were spread out over
several different
areas. It began with assisting with project brainstorming
and research,
thesis proposal writing, and project feature development
and organization.
Next, I concentrated on the visual design of the BetaSpace
identity,
and also the preliminary design of the main site (betaspace.org)
and documentation site. I created many proposals for
the main site’s
navigation, some more experimental than others, and
after numerous
rounds, we finally decided upon a scrolling ‘virtual gallery’,
populated with silhouettes of people to interact with
and to assist
in the navigation of the space. The next phase I contributed
significantly
to was the implementation of the gallery design itself,
which required
3D character generation and animation (in Poser), and
Flash and
PHP integration to form a cohesive, working unit. I
also developed
and maintained the secondary footer navigation of the
site, which
we later significantly improved through the use of
a server-side
include file. In the next stage, I joined my team members
in recruiting
artists to submit work to fill the site’s gallery spaces
(I also designed the initial comp. for our promotional
postcards,
which were distributed to 1,300 FlashForward Conference
attendees),
in implementing those selected artworks into our existing
gallery
template (we had 2 separate releases during the last
quarter),
and I also took on revising the artwork template to
improve the
look and streaming functionality of the artwork delivery.
Additionally,
I advocated for and assisted in the overhauling the
site’s
community sections—Collaborative Studio and Community Access--
with a revised back-end integration. After amending
and significantly
improving these community sections, my team members
and I worked
heavily on developing the beginning content for the
sections, administrating
the sections, and also on publicizing the site to various
new media
related Web sites, online community groups, message
boards, etc.,
to attract more participating members to the BetaSpace
community,
and to recruit new artists and visitors to the site.
The last bit
of additional work I contributed to was filling out
various sections
of the documentation site, developing some of my own
personal artwork
for the Beta Genome gallery, and preparing for the
final defense
presentations at the end of the Spring Quarter.
Looking back on the project, I wish we could have thought more
thoroughly through how things were going to be implemented, before
spending the time to design and integrate them. I’m not entirely
sure how feasible this would have been, given the nature of technology
and working with a group of people who are each responsible for
different components of the project, but I feel much time and effort
would have been saved if we would have thought through and visualized
the finished product a bit more, to avoid some of the numerous
revisions that went on throughout the process.
Overall, I was very pleased with the success of the BetaSpace
project, and am proud to have been a part of such a worthwhile
endeavor.
Eric Cheng
During the first half of the project development, I had a chance
to explore different scripting languages for designing the back-end development
tool for the Community Access (CA) and Collaborative Studio (CS), both of which
utilized dynamic data access and display. ColdFusion (CF) was originally the
scripting
language selected by the team. While ColdFusion was an effective tool used with
Dreamweaver, my concern over the price of hosting a CF server, as well as
the availability
of free support was increasing. The team and I finally decided to look into other
languages that could provide the similar strength of CF. At the end, I decided
to go forward with using PHP because of its solid support community and it was
free. At the beginning, I wrote some scripts for login pages. However, there
had
been many free scripts written that offered the required components for CA and
CS. Leveraging the scripts available online and customizing them to fit our
project’s
needs was the best solution at the time to build a robust tool without having
to start from zero. Since CS was the core of the interactive unit for artists
collaborating online, it was developed first. I researched numerous applications
online and selected a few to present to the team. After numerous presentations
to the team and PhPBB2 was selected, I implemented Betaspace layout into the
tool
and refined the features such as changing the file upload size component.
Marketing the project site was another area of my contribution. I took on “Collaborative
Storytelling” because of my connections with writers in a weekly group in
Albany. Talking about the project face-to-face to people was definitely more effective
than online marketing. The project seemed more real to people than online marketing,
which included posting messages in Flash-related sites and groups hosted by Google.
From the onset of the project, what I learned most was Web development
skills from other teammates. All of them had a background either in Web design,
development,
or both. I learned technical skills such as Actionscript and PHP. Also, online
marketing was an exciting field for me. I learned about how my teammates
promoted
the project site by going through different venues of communication—verbal,
email, and submitting the site to search engines.
What I also learned in the project was project management skills. Working on
the dynamic data components of the project helped me further focus on the importance
of planning for a project. I learned to create a vision and expect changes along
the way of my vision. Defining needs for the tool, specifying the required components,
and finding resources to create the tool were crucial.
The project provided me with experiences that would help me build more solid
Web development skills.
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