#electronicrituals

[jackieisonline]

[Electronic Rituals Final] Crowdsourced Automatic Drawing

For my final, I’m working with my fellow classmate Aileen to create a system for crowdsourced automatic drawing.

In our case, we will be building a glove that guides a drawer’s hand to move in 4 directions (up, down, left, right) via vibration motors, and a system to allow any other participants to dictate the motion of the drawing via their own devices.

Overall System Diagram

1. Participants can press up, down, left, right on their devices 2. Participants’ direction choices collect on a server 3. Direction choices affect 4 corresponding vibration motors on the glove in real-time 4. The drawer moves the pen according to what they perceive while wearing the glove

Contributions

To divide the work on this project, I’m going to be focusing on the wearable vibrational glove side (I’m combining this final with my final for Intro to Wearables, where the prompt is to make any wearable garment), and Aileen is going to focus on creating the server and participant experience.

This blog post will mostly cover my work on the wearable glove, while Aileen’s blog post will go more in detail about creating the crowdsourced experience.

Building a glove prototype

Because this concept is heavy on the physical computing side, I started this project by prototyping the electronics needed to create a haptic glove that can receive many directional commands over serial communication.

Design decisions

The main design choice I made in this glove was how to specifically translate directional commands into vibration. There are plenty of different routes one could go with this - read each successive command from the group and vibrate each corresponding motor one-by-one in order. Or, read each success command and use that information to update a global state of the glove, which can include multiple vibrations of variable intensities at any given time.

I ended up going with the latter; I think having multiple vibration motors go off and having to use intuition on what *feels* strongest is in the spirit of automatic drawing/writing in the formal sense - i.e., being guided by intuition and whim rather than certainty and lucidity.

More detail on how the glove receives directional commands and translates them into vibration can be found in a separate blog post here.

Some main challenges that I had to work around include:

Coordinating the reaction of the vibration in real-time to the inputs of users

How to account for very large amounts of data being sent to the Arduino 

Designing the final form

After some quick prototyping, I realized that a one-piece glove out of fabric wasn’t going to do the trick.

My early “oven mitt” prototype revealed to me that the vibration motors would need to be closer to the skin to feel anything, so I opted to try a version where three tight rings would hold the left, top, and right vibration motors, and the bottom vibration motor would sit around the wrist.

The glove (right now) is made out of white fleece and velcro. I used silicone stranded wire (this is the white stringy mess that’s linking each of the rings to the base of the glove) to connect the system.

Documentation From Class Presentation

This next video is a snippet of the collective drawing experience I had in my Electronic Rituals final presentation on May 8, 2019.

The following images are 3 collaborative drawings done through this process during the presentation.

We set up an overhead camera to livestream the drawing process to the class, and told classmates to go to http://eroft-final.glitch.me/ on their own devices to make their votes.

The image below is a screenshot of the site that classmates can choose their directional commands on, side-by-side with the code used to control the glove via serial on the wearer/drawer side.

Future directions and improvements

From the Electronic Rituals, Oracles, and Fortune Telling side, we got several compelling discussion points for future work in this project. Some of the most memorable ones (according to my increasingly frazzled memory) are:

It would be worth experimenting by doing a blind test and compare receiving random noise direction inputs versus actual human-contributed direction inputs. What would the drawing look in one scenario versus the other? As the wearer of the glove/drawer of the drawing, how much does being in the same room and understanding there are people behind the directions influence my drawing habits?

It would also be worth experimenting with a version where users can see what other users choose. Right now we have this visible only on the drawer’s server, but maybe if participants can see what other participants choose they can collectively make decisions. (i.e. a twitch plays pokemon style experience.

From the Intro to Wearables side, I really would like more time to explore this glove visually. Jingwen (our instructor) gave great suggestions of using gold thread to evoke a ritual/mystical aesthetics. Unfortunately I didn’t have the bandwidth to focus on the aesthetic side of the glove, and instead focused on getting the functional component locked in.

My decision to use white fabric and create different segments of the glove, in retrospect, was slightly influenced by another ITP student’s  (Teresa Lamb) Cyberknitics https://thenewstack.io/cyberknitics-translates-knitting-ethereal-electronic-music/ thesis project, which we saw earlier in class. I think her work sets a great precedent on how to aggregate electronics in a linked system, in a way that’s both durable, clean, and aesthetically pleasing.

[jackieisonline]

[Wearables / Electronic Rituals] Automatic Drawing Glove

Concept

For my Wearables and EROFT finals, I’m going to work with a partner (Aileen) to build a system to do automatic drawing. Automatic drawing (and writing) is the process of letting go of intention as you make marks on paper (or other mediums), and invite the subjective to take over. 

In our case, we will be building a glove that guides a drawer’s hand to move in 4 directions (up, down, left, right) via vibration motors, and a system to allow any other participants to dictate the motion of the drawing via their own devices.

System Diagram

Participants can press up, down, left, right on their devices

Participants’ direction choices collect on a server

Direction choices affect 4 vibration motors on the glove in real-time

The drawer moves the pen according to what they perceive while wearing the glove

Breaking up the work

To start off this project, I’m going to be focusing on the wearable vibrational glove side, and Aileen is going to focus on creating the server and participant experience.

Starting on the wearables side

To start my side, I created a basic circuit with a breadboard and a regular Arduino.

I connected 4 TIP120 transistors to PWM output pins, and connected two of those transistors to vibration motors.

My main goal in this first phase was to get some basic code running so that the Arduino could take in data through serial (that correspond to directions), and translate those to vibration.

I struggled a lot figuring out how to communicate effectively between a p5.js sketch and the Arduino via Serial. My first thought was to aggregate directions into one long string (i.e. send something like “12341323413131″, where 1/2/3/4 correspond to one of four directions), but this turned out to be really difficult on the Arduino side, which couldn’t reliable read these strings.

In the end, I got help from a friend and decided to send from the p5.js side one byte at a time (i.e. simply sending “1″, “2″, “3″, “4″), keeping track of all directional inputs via a queue and sending them one-by-one every 100 milliseconds. This worked so much better, especially since I wouldn’t have to do any parsing and splitting of strings on the Arduino code.

p5.js code

Arduino Code:

One communication was nailed down, the next challenge was to create a way of mapping directional data to vibrational intensities on the 4 motors.

I did a bit of thinking through this “algorithm” on paper. It goes a bit like this:

Store the last N direction commands as a list (more specifically, a queue).

Each time we read a new byte (i.e. a direction command), add that one to the list. If our list is over length-N, remove the “oldest” direction command from the list.

When we have a new direction command, calculate the proportion of UP commands, DOWN commands, RIGHT commands, and LEFT commands there are in the current list.

Assign the motor vibration strength for each direction by calculating (# of list elements of this direction) / (# of total elements in list ) * (Maximum vibration strength = 255)

I got this system working for two motors at the time of taking this documentation video, but it ended up working! Just took some careful debugging of Arduino code. (Forgetting to properly work between floats and ints is what got me in the final phases of debugging)

Next steps:

Next steps are to actually build the wearable version of this, which involves using components that can be sewn onto a glove-like accessory.

I plan to use the Circuit Playground and the Flora BLE Module for the final wearable glove.

One of my next steps/challenges are to properly think about the layout and wiring for the glove. The transistors are quite bulky and might not look great to have in mass on the glove, so I’m curious as to if there is a smaller version of these transistors that I can use. I’m also considering whether to use a premade glove or make it by scratch, or whether or not there should even be fingers on the glove or if it should be fingerless, etc.

I think I have to sit down and sketch out how this will work!

[jackieisonline]

[Electronic Rituals] Creating Randomness

Prompt

First, produce your own implementation of digital randomness, without using any pre-existing implementation (e.g., you can’t use the random() or noise()functions in p5.js). Consider mathematical solutions and physical solutions. Aim for a generator that produces randomness with a uniform distribution.

Second, incorporate an alternative random number generator into one of your existing projects. You can either use the generator you implemented for step one or a generator that produces random numbers with a distribution other than uniform. Be curious and creative!

Part 1: My own implementation of randommness

Link to p5.js sketch: https://editor.p5js.org/jackieliu/sketches/kb_fBA4wq

For this part of the assignment, I decided to look at the digits of pi as a source of randomness.

I copied and pasted pi to a million digits into p5, and then created a simple function that took in a seed value, and looked at sequential substrings starting at the index of the string given by the seed value.

In a way, the digits of pi acts essentially as a book of random digits (similar to a One Time Pad used in cryptology).

var piString = "141592653589793238462643383279502884197... var seed =0; var piLength = piString.length;

function myRandom() {    if (seed+6 >=  piLength) {      seed = 0    }    substring = piString.substring(seed,seed+6)    seed++;    return parseInt(substring) / 1000000;

}

The preview of the randomness looks like this: at first glance, it looks pretty uniform! Not super surprising to me, but still kinda cool to validate.

Memorizing and reciting pi was this thing I used to do when I was age 11/12/13 in order to “feel smart” and “mathy”. I cringe about it now, but this is me paying tribute to my embarrassing younger self I guess.

Part 2: Incorporating an alternate Random function into a previous project

I wanted to build upon my Hyper Personal Tarot card project for this part of the assignment. In my original app, I had simply used JavaScript’s Math.Random() to select tarot cards to be used in a spread.

The one aspect of this electronic tarot that makes it unlike the physical experience is that the drawing of cards has no influence from physical factors (i.e., the fact that some cards might be bent or distorted or very slightly different, as well as cards not being shuffled really well).

Math.Random() selects a value over a uniform distribution, but is that *too* uniform for the feel of tarot?

I was curious to see what drawing tarot would be like over a normal distribution rather than a uniform distribution, so I included d3′s random library which includes picking a value randomly from a normal distribution (among other distributions).

Original code for picking tarot cards (uniform distribution):

for (var j=0; j < 4; j++){

     var randIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * items.length)      while (selectedCardIndexes.indexOf(randIndex) >= 0) {           randIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * items.length);      }      selectedCardIndexes.push(randIndex);

}

**Modified** code for picking tarot cards (normal distribution):

for (var j=0; j < 4; j++){

     var random = d3.randomNormal(0, 1);      var randIndex = Math.floor(random * items.length)

     while (selectedCardIndexes.indexOf(randIndex) >= 0) {           var newRandom = d3.randomNormal(0, 1);           randIndex = Math.floor(newRandom * items.length);      }      selectedCardIndexes.push(randIndex);

}

I did about eight readings of four-card spreads, and here are the cards I saw sorted by frequency of appearance:

impulsive haircut (4) therapy (4) saying something dummb in class (3) being active on insta (3) bullet journaling (3) prozac (2) romanticizig mediocre bois (2) being the youngest (2) they great depression (of 2017) (2) [nsfw] (2) sad new career in UX design (2) relationship with [redacted] (1) glossier and k beauty (1) my dam taurus resolve (1)

Honestly I’m not sure if enough trials were done to conclude anything, but my guess from this result is “impulsive haircut” and “therapy” are somewhere in the center of the hardcoded list of my personal tarot cards.

This got me thinking about what it would mean to put the digital equivalent of notches in the side of paper cards, and an expression of wear and tear. How would we determine which cards are more “worn”? In my creation of hyper personal tarot, maybe is it cards that we spend more time drawing/coming up with? If we shuffle cards (with a uniform distribution), can we then pick from them in a way that clusters the probability on and around “hot” cards (i.e. cards that are more poignant or personally relevant?). Idk, just a thought.

[jackieisonline]

[Electronic Rituals] Creating an Emoji Ouija Board

Prompt

Make a prototype of an electronic spirit board or other method for facilitating automatic writing (communication from unconscious/subconscious/collective gesture.) (You can use procedural methods like those discussed in class, or invent your own method.) Questions to consider: How does your spirit board produce “coherence” (if, in fact, it does produce coherence)? Who is participating?

Coming up with an idea

I bounced back and forth between several ideas while trying to come up with a concept for this assignment: 

What would a spirit board that used pictorial symbols (rather than letters) to spell out messages look like?

What do processes for automatic digital art look like? Can digital art be produced automatically (i.e. divorced from intention and influenced by our subconscious) and if so, what types? (Drawing on a tablet vs. doing an expressive p5.js sketch?)

What place does automatic writing/creation have in the place of DESIGN?

How could digital processes assist in “interpreting” our handwritten automatic writing/drawings?

Although I was really into ones that dealt with drawing, in the end I went with the first option (a spirit board that used pictorial symbols) because it seemed the most feasible to do a prototype around.

The concept

A web-based spirit board that spells out a message (or answer to a question) in the form of emojis.

What the querent sees:

The querent starts the process by writing a question they would like answered by the spirits. Then, they are presented with the Emoji board. After a few seconds, the planchette starts to shake and they are told to focus carefully on it (via gaze) in order to move it. (this functionality, i.e. the gazing to control it is shallowly implemented right now). The planchette animates out the answer to their question.

What happens behind the scenes:

The underlying process behind how the message is generated is that it tracks the user’s gaze through their webcam using Webgazer.js, and notes the top emojis that the user looks at when the board is first being presented to them. Then, when the planchette begins to move, its path is already predetermined by what the person looked at the most in the initial phase.

Here, I’m trying to play around with how to emulate (if it’s possible) the ideomotor effect in a digital form. In our readings on Ouija board, it was revealed that the way the planchette moves is due to the fact that participants are subconsciously moving the planchette in the direction of where they want it to go. This process is also inherently very visual - during studies of Ouija in dark room, the resulting messages were nonsensical.

In this project, I’m trying to play around with one example of how our subconscious could manifest in a digital interface: what draws our attention, where our eyes linger. However, there’s also an element of making this a hidden process: if we request the user’s webcam and give them a board, of course they’re going to think that they’re eye movement is going to control the board. 

In my prototype, I tried to intentionally divert expectations for control from one part of the narrative to another, by tracking gaze at a point in the narrative where users don’t expect that their behavior will have any output. (Honestly, not sure how successful this actually is, because I couldn’t get the gaze to at least stop and start the planchette movement which would help solidify the feeling of control)

Video: Run-through with visible gaze tracking behavior

Video: Run through in user-facing mode

Precedents

https://www.bustle.com/articles/46786-emouija-board-is-the-emoji-fueled-ouija-board-you-never-knew-you-wanted

I found this, but it looks like it never got beyond the paper prototype/kickstarter stage? Also says nothing about what mechanism they’ll use to generate messages.

http://www.brainjar.com/dhtml/ouija/

I also found this early-internet version of an Ouija board, where you type in questions and get somewhat sensical responses back

Challenges/limitations

Webgazer wasn’t super easy to get set up. Although it says you can run it with a few lines of code,  I had trouble setting up a local server that supported HTTPS when I tried to start from scratch. So I built my “prototype” off of some example code from Webgazer’s that provided a simple way to train the model by clicking on dots while gazing at them. I recognize that this is definitely not a good experience to package this if I wanted others to use the app.

Emojis as a substrate for language? Designing a spirit board constrains you to a certain number of symbols, so it wouldn’t be feasible to put every emoji ever on a single page. One of the open questions I have is: does it even make sense to use emoji as a substrate for messages, the way letters in the English language are in traditional Ouija boards? If so, which emojis provide the best bases to span all meaning? In a way, it’s sort of similar to the design of oracle decks.  Currently, I address this by randomly generating a handful each time the experience loads. This introduces an element of randomness that constrains behavior, which does not seem to be a formal characteristic of traditional spirit boards.

Lack of language processing. I currently don’t process the question at all, but I wonder if that could result in more tailored responses. I.e., if you ask a yes or no then we’d track if the gaze falls more towards the “Yes” emoji or the “No” emoji (which are the two emoji that are currently not randomized).

[jackieisonline]

[eroft] Readings from your Favorite, Obsolete (childhood?) Website

Github Link to Project

Prompt

Invent an “-omancy,” or a form of divination/prophecy based on observing and interpreting natural events. Your reading of “natural” should make some reference to digital/electronic/computational media. (What counts as a “natural event” on the Internet? What’s the electronic equivalent of phrenology, from both a physical computing perspective and a data analysis perspective? Does it count as “interpretation” if it’s being performed by a computer program?) I’m especially interested in responses that take the form of purposefully inaccurate data analysis.

Coming up with an idea

For this week’s project, I was thinking about a lot of ways to frame “natural events” in the context of digital media. Allison’s reference to our browser search history being a possible “natural event” made me think about internet history on a broader scale: what sites did we frequent when we were much younger? Which ones remain in our memories? Which ones are sentimental to us and what could that imply about who we are and how we’ve grown?

In a sense, the first websites we interacted with could be considered a “natural event” in the sense that its embedded into our history (like our IRL birth place and time), and we didn’t really think consciously about it or navigate the web with some higher meaning in mind (likely, people just went on whatever site was cool or fun).

I decided to make a python program to engage the user in a reading, first querying for some key personal details, and then generating a brief reading based off of keywords scraped from their favorite childhood (I’m saying childhood here because that’s how I experienced my first time on the web, but I realize there are people whose first experiences on the web were much later) website. The old websites in question are scraped from the Wayback Machine, which over the years has saved snapshots of websites and lets you make API calls that link you to a certain website’s view at a given time in history (or the closest possible snapshot to that point).

Some other things I tried but ruled out:

A web-based js program: this didn’t work out because I intended to embed the result from the Wayback Machine into an HTML iframe, and then do the parsing. This didn’t work because you’re not allowed to access the HTML in an iframe embedding a site from a different domain. 

A browser extension: I guess this would ideally display as a popup over the given wayback machine page in question? Couldn’t really figure out if this could help calculate which page to go to in the first place, so I went with a simple python program instead.

System diagram + implementation

Here are the general steps my program takes:

 Query for the user’s birth year, favorite website, and what age they remember using that site.

Use Wayback Machine API to request their view of the favorite site at the year they likely used it (or the closest year).

Scrape all text with BeautifulSoup Python library and segment it into “words”, i.e. strings containing only alphabetical characters.

Use a master list of all English words in ConceptNet, and filter out “words” from the website that are actually English words in ConceptNet.

Select a few of these resulting keywords from the website. Use ConceptNet’s relatedness API call to compare these words to common Personality Adjectives from the Corpora project. Keep track of the adjective with the highest relatedness for each keyword.

Use the best adjectives we’ve tracked to construct a reading.

Some notes:

The list of resulting English words from the HTML page tend to be long, so I have a way of randomly selecting a few of these keywords to be used in the reading. Currently, my randomizer works such that words that appear more frequently have a better chance of being selected, proportional to their frequency in the HTML file.

I realized early on that comparing selected webpage words to *every single* adjective in the corpora project (there are >300) via the ConceptNet API wasn’t going to work. So I reduce down the pool of personality adjectives randomly each time the program runs. This likely weeds out adjectives that could be better fits for a given word, but it’s unclear how to work around that and make more API calls without making the program run too slow.

The program breaks if you don’t put in a valid website (that has archives on the wayback machine) and other valid inputs.  It also assumes that the website you used to go on has text to pull from (so websites that are made in all Flash are a no-go and will break the program).

Program Walkthrough

Hey there! This is a program that peers into your formative internet days and from that, tells you a bit about yourself.

To start, what's your name?

> Jackie

Hello Jackie! It's nice to meet you. To give us a bit more information to work with, what year were you born? Please format it with four digits, i.e.: '2019', '1991'.

> 1996

Now, dig deep into your memories and think of a website you loved to go on in the past. Type it here. Some tips: don't include www. or https://. If your favorite site was google, type it like 'google.com'

> oekakiart.com

Now, final question. What age were you when you used that site? Type in a single number, i.e. '9' or '16'.

> 11

* Formulating your reading... Please be patient :)

*~*~*~*~Your Reading~*~*~*~

Growing up, you've been somewhat lively at your core.

You've learned some sullen tendencies in more recent times, Jackie.

Try playing around with a deep point of view.

This is a canned structure I currently have in place for all readings: “Growing up, you’ve been somewhat [Adjective 1] at your core. You’ve learned some [Adjective 2] tendencies in more recent times, [name]. Try playing around with a [Adjective 3] point of view.

Reflection

I guess one of the reasons that this concept stuck with me is that I personally have a strong sentimental attachment to websites from my childhood. The one I selected: “oekakiart.com” was an online drawing community (that also intersected with fandom/anime cultures), where I first developed an interested in visual/digital art.

I recognize that my program is slightly imperfect: the fact that I only ask for ballpack dates, rather than specific dates for birth year/age, makes the Wayback Machine website query susceptible to finding a version of the page that the user doesn’t remember.

For example, when I put in age 10, I got this version of oekakiart.com:

I don’t remember seeing this homepage ever, even though I started to interact with the site at age 10.

Meanwhile, when I typed in 11 as my age at the time, I get the version I was acquainted with:

With some more time, I’d like to explore how to make the canned response for the reading less canned. Perhaps there are ways to explore how adjectives are semantically different, and structure the reading in a way that can allow for sentence structures like “You’ve been brave recently, but in the past you’ve been trepid”.

There’s also something really impactful and melancholy to me about seeing the broken vestiges of a site I really used to love and frequently daily in conjunction wistful phrases that make me reflect upon my life/personality. I’m super curious to how other people would use this and what they’d feel.

[jackieisonline]

[eroft] My hyper-personal tarot deck

Prompt

Invent your own “oracle deck.” Your deck doesn’t have to be a physical object (though it can be). Keeping in mind the formal characteristics of cleromancy discussed in class, consider how digital media can complicate/diminish/augment the parts and processes of a reading. (Some questions to get you started: Who gets to participate? Can a computer program be a “reader”? A “querent”? What can a “card” be? What can a “deck” be?)

What I created

I prototyped a system to let people generate their own tarot cards, i.e., picking visual symbols from their own lives and experiences that personally represent the set of ideas (and also the ontological space of life-concepts) that traditional Tarot decks do.

I prototyped (with some pieces implemented shallowly and some in full) an app that lets you build your own deck, card by card by referencing descriptions of each tarot card from the tarot card json corpora and drawing a symbol from your own life experience that best aligns with the Tarot cards meanings and keywords. 

Currently, I don’t have it built so the images you draw are saved on the web - I was hoping to use Contentful to store this info but it was a big headache to figure out.

After you create enough cards, you can randomly draw from your own visual symbols to generate readings.

Ideally, this would be some app that anyone can use to build their own library of visual symbols/personal tarot cards, and something they can use to get a “daily digest” of their life story, or how their day will go.

Coming up with a concept

I think since starting this Tarot unit, I’ve been really interested in how meaning is derived from visual symbols. This interest in visual symbols made me brainstorm a lot about comics, generating comic narratives through random, oracle-like readings.

 My interest in comic x tarot had some influences in the final meditation; the ideal scenario of this being a “daily digest” of your own personal story mimics daily comics, both of which establish a ritual through periodicity and waiting that would other cheapen the delivery of the story.

It also influenced the “spread” of the personal tarot cards, I wanted it to look like and be read as a four panel comic: which would evoke a narrative structure common to comics (situation, complication, resolution, denouement).

The other axis of my meditation is the nature of personal symbols. traditional Tarot is designed with Universal symbols in mind; but I wanted to explore what it would be like for people to have cards that are hyper personal, and what implications that would have in your understanding of a reading.

In a way, the reason why personal tarot can work in this digital reading and perhaps not a traditional one (unless the reader knows you REALLY well) is that you’re the one mentally stringing together the narrative.

Shifting towards personal symbols was interesting to me, because, although tarot is based off of universal symbols, it’s quite difficult to build literacy for the different nuances of cards, especially when the name or images might bias you. For example, when I was looking at “The Lovers” meaning on Aecletic, it was strongly emphasized that “The Lovers” meant less about being in love, and rather about making choices.

I was interested in what it would be like to build that symbol for yourself, blind to the traditional tarot cards’ name and illustrations, going off of the multifaceted definitions.

My cards

In total I generated 20 personal cards from this process. I found this really interesting and definitely feel like the story of my life can be told from it... in a way it’s building a semantic model for my own little personal universe. I was really interested in how certain symbols I chose to draw (I tried not to look for the most part) related to the actual Tarot symbol.

I particularly thought the “Prozac, 20mg” as “The Magician” really interesting --- psychiatry is modern day magic tricks?

[jackieisonline]

[Electronic Rituals] DROP HIM: a ritual for letting go

Summary

Link to Drop Him

The “electronic ritual” I designed is a small game called Drop Him. when you decide you want to “drop someone” (i.e. to let go of toxic people and/or relationships). For many people (including myself), committing to a decision to “drop someone” is difficult and often easily retractable on a whim. See the following memes for example:

My goal was to make an experience that can potentially allow people to be more committed/invested in their decision to drop someone by ritualizing that experience, i.e., introducing some formality to a decision that is otherwise very internal to our own thoughts.

Coming up with the concept

To generate ideas for electronic rituals, I brainstormed several rituals I find myself doing. One that I immediately came up with (that I also wrote about last week), is the ritual of deleting a chat conversation to feel less embarrassed about my interactions with the other person and/or get the person in question out of my head.

I dug a bit deeper into why I felt compelled to delete their messages, rather than letting them sit in my inbox and go on with my life.

For me, the values embedded in this action are aligned with clean-slate, and purification. To me, deleting messages has been associated with some sort of behavior change I want to enact. Some use cases of this action have been:

1. This person I’m interested in has been very flaky, sometimes they don’t respond to my messages. If i’m feeling embarrassed about being left on read, I’ll delete the thread as a way to formally tell myself to not put more effort  into or think of this person. (whether or not this actually works is debatable...)

2. This person I have history with and the bridge is pretty much burned, and I know I shouldn’t contact them, so I’ll delete the message in order to remind me to put that in the past and to not dwell. 

Overall, I think the big thing is that there is some sort of formalized action that happens. I can’t Eternal-Sunshine-Memory-Wipe my brain, and I don’t have any physical letters to burn, so deleting messages is my only way of coping or creating some sort of ritual-like experience around my decisions.

For my electronic ritual this week, I kind of wanted to extrapolate on this concept of ritualizing this experience of cutting people out - that is typically not expressed in a formal way (apart from divorce papers, moving out, etc), and create a scenario for people to reinforce their decision to let someone go by creating a game-like ceremony. 

My decision to use a game came from the idea that typing some sort of accomplishment to the act of dropping would help people be more invested in their decision.

Drop Him

I created a web-based game where players can “drop” their person of choice as if they were playing an arcade-style claw game. My intention was to be a bit subversive with this: instead of trying to grab and get their affection as a prize, they would instead have to shake the claw machine in order to “drop” their person of choice before it makes it to the end of the machine (denoted by a heart).

Title Page: Tired of unreciprocated emotional energy? Are you done constantly mentally forgiving people, even though you say you’ve already drawn the line? Play this game to help you let them go!

Settings: Who do you want to drop? Tell us a lil’ more about this individual so we can work our magic.

It was important that the game could be customized by putting in the name and a photo of the dropped individual. This is currently an entirely client side app, so no data is stored on my end.

Instructions: How to Drop [insert name here]. Your heart may want to hold on and win them over patiently, but your mind tells you to let go, once and for all. Whatever you do.... do NOT let them make it to your heart!

Game Play: Win-state: Congrats, you dropped [insert name here]! Now go move on to something bigger and better.

Once the player successfully shakes the claw machine enough to drop the ball (their person of choice), they are greeted with a “You Win!!!”. I also wanted to explore what it would be like to share this achievement with others: I can imagine a use case for people wanting to announce to their besties group that that they finally dropped the person their friends have been telling them to drop for months.

Other feature(s)

If I had the time to explore this more, I think I might prototype what “dropping” someone multiple times looks like, and if having to drop someone you’ve already dropped, say, 4 times in the past month looks different than dropping someone entirely new. Would the game get harder, as some sort of penalty? Or maybe to make the accomplishment of dropping a second time stronger? 

Reflection

I used this game briefly with my phone , where I still have pictures of someone I cut out a while ago, hidden back in my camera roll. Honestly that was probably the most uncomfortable part of this experience. I wonder if the action of including a picture of the person to drop can be streamlined to avoid uncomfortable experiences digging through their social media, etc.

Link to Drop Him

[jackieisonline]

[Electronic Rituals] Week 1 Readings

Assigned texts

Burroughs, Benjamin. “Facebook and FarmVille: A Digital Ritual Analysis of Social Gaming.” Games and Culture, vol. 9, no. 3, May 2014, pp. 151–66. SAGE Journals, doi:10.1177/1555412014535663.

Altglas, Véronique. “Introduction.” From Yoga to Kabbalah: Religious Exoticism and the Logics of Bricolage. : Oxford University Press, 2014-06-02. Oxford Scholarship Online. 2014-06-19. Date Accessed 8 Mar. 2017http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199997626.001.0001/acprof-9780199997626-chapter-1.

Alexander, Leigh. “Why We Still Practice Superstitious Rituals With Our Technology.” Motherboard,https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-we-still-practice-superstitious-rituals-with-our-technology. Accessed 5 May 2017.

Guiding Questions

What is a “third place” and what does it have to do with ritual?

A third place is some sort of community space, like a bar or coffee shop, that fosters community and civic engagement. It allows for “mediated informal sociability that can bridge social capital and forge emotional bonds”, can be “home away from home”, and has “regulars”. It seems like Burroughs argues that third places are venues for rituals: the regular interactions and behaviors of the people who frequent them contribute to building community in a grander scheme.

Do you agree with the idea that “if people take something as real, it is real in its consequences”?

I agree with this in the sense that if those people who take something as real are the same people who enact those consequences, then it’s only natural that follows.

Is the idea of “plabor” applicable outside the realm of digital games?

“Plabor” (play/labor) definitely exists outside of digital games. I think participating in “food instagram” is a good example: it’s fun and trendy to share aesthetic pics of your food and at the same time, it’s free advertisement. I’m struggling to think of non-digital forms of plabor though.

Do you agree with Altglas’ characterizations of spiritual bricolage and exoticism?

I agree with Altglas for the most part. I’ve definitely encountered people who behave in the way she writes about.

Can you think of examples that Altglas doesn’t mention?

I’ve been thinking about Headspace the meditation app after reading this. I’m an avid user of it, and it does borrow some meditation techniques Buddhism (the co-founder, and also the narrator of the meditations, is a white man named Andy from the UK who formally became a Tibetan Buddhist monk while studying in the Himalayas). In this case I would classify Andy as *not* bricolage, but I wonder if the incorporation of the Buddhist techniques in the app is some sort of bricolage?

The app also has really modern aesthetics and doesn’t reflect any type of exoticized “Eastern” aesthetic. I think this is a good and possibly respectful move, especially because a lot of meditation experiences can be Bricolage (like the paper suggested, playing tranquil music from one culture while burning incense from another culture, etc).

What “rituals” do you perform with your electronic devices? (Or would you categorize the behaviors that Alexander describes as “ritual” in the first place?)

I think the behaviors Alexander describes can be categorized as “ritual”, according to Burroughs’ definition. One type of ritual Burroughs mentions is an “action involving transcendent values”, and I think we can frame the example of blowing into a cartridge as one of those. Blowing into the cartridge is the action, and I think the transcendent value is the illusion of control, in other words, valuing the ability to have control over what we don’t understand. I think most people have some sort of disconnect between the action and the transcendent value: none of us blow into the cartridge thinking “I am doing this action because I as a human desire to make simple explanations for technology I don’t understand”, yet the transcendent value subconsciously guides us.

One "ritual” I do slightly in this pattern is deleting chat conversations on my phone, particularly if my relationship with the other person isn’t stable (e.g. i’m embarrassed by something I wrote to them, I’m worried they won’t respond and I’ll be humiliated, etc). Deleting the chat conversation is a ritual I do to “delete” it out of my mind, and avoid feelings of vulnerability.

I think the transcendent value at the core of that is the desire to have control over my own emotional state and control over being affected in a vulnerable position. I guess deleting the chat feels like a low-commitment, easy solution to a goal that requires much more complex work.