Derek!

What is Information Aesthetics?

Information Aesthetics is a website about different technologies and neat ways they can be used. Usually when I read a post from Information Aesthetics, I mostly see technologies used in forms of art. Information Aesthetics is also on my “required reading” folder on bloglines.

Ambient Clock

This post was written yesterday. It is about the ambient clock. I found it interesting. It’s neat how a clock can remind you that you had to go to a meeting that day. That was just an example, it can be used to remind you about anything. I also thought it was neat how it showed it using colour. For example, it might show red for you have something to do right away. I thought it was neat that ambient clocks are powered by Google Calender. Don’t worry, ambient clocks don’t read your mind! To conclude my response, I thought this post was very well written and the subject of ambient clocks was very interesting. Whoever wrote this should give him/herself a pat on the back!

Visual Poetry

This post was written October 24,2006, which is two days ago. The post was about Boris Müller’s new visual theme he puts up every year for an international literature festival. This years theme is visual poetry. Here is an explaination of how visual poetry works mentioned in the post. “each words correspond to a numerical code by adding the alphabetical values of its letters together.” I could never put that in my own words. Anyway, just from reading that and looking at the picture above, I have a few questions:

1. What do the shapes mean?

2. What do the colours mean?

3. What do the lines mean?

4. How are numeral codes shown to the visual poem?

5. How can I read this?

 This next quote from this post shows some of the answers to my questions. “this number is mapped onto the position on a circle, & marked by a red dot. gray lines connect the dots in the sequence the words appear in the poem. the diameter of the circle on which the dots are placed is decided by the length of the poem.” I thought  it was neat how everything in a poem can be made as a shape and colour. To conclude this response, I thought it was very well written. The only problem is that there are a lot of words that I don’t understand. Other than that, the person who wrote it shoud give him/herself a pat on the back!