In this article I really did not understand what exactly was going on. There were several short explanations of certain ideas the writer was trying to relate. I think the overall point might have been to show us the different ideas of art forms. The way the article was presented was difficult to follow. I believe one of the reasons this happened, at least for myself, was the pages were all from different chapters of the book. I did enjoy the way the writer explained the different points of view. He talked about left to right, top to bottom, and big and small on a two-dimensional plane and the front to back as in a three dimensional plane. The difficulty I faced with this article was some confusion. This was because of going from one idea to another. One disadvantage of this was possibly this being the first article I read. I did not know what exactly I was looking for. Another difficulty was trying to figure out what the enemies had to do with. I had to go back to the beginning and re-read but still couldn't figure it out.
Hickey The Heresy of Zone Defense
This article was particularly interesting in the sense of the history of basketball. I did not grasp the concept of how this relates to art form. This article was simply written and easily read in my opinion. I was wondering throughout the article what the story in the beginning was going to relate to. I did not find it relating much at anything. I think the concept the writer presented was the newly found game of basketball and the rules that had to be addressed. So, when the game originated it had very few simple rules. I think the creation was just to get the kids indoors and moving. When basketball caught on, the rules had to be modified to prevent and alleviate some things. One of the interesting thing it alleviated was the guarding the goal at all times. It made people move around the court. I also liked the change of dribbling the ball. For us today it seems like it wouldn’t be basketball without the dribbling the ball. I can only imagine how it was in the beginning. One guy has the ball and is taking it down to the other end without ever dribbling it, like a football player does. There wasn’t much difficulty in this article. Like I said before, I was looking for the beginning story to fit in somewhere and missed it somehow. What I did get from this article is the rules are set in place for one reason or another. As it relates to art, the rules can be bent in ways to fit your style, to get outside the box.
Weschler Uncanny Valley
This article was particularly too drawn out in my point of view. I did enjoy reading this story about the facial expressions in the animation and filmmaking. The writer also talked about the robotics and the facial expressions being the key to the soul. I know we have come along way in making robots learn like children do in a way. I can relate to the facial expressions by using different muscles, as I just finished reading the book “Blink”. In that book there is a chapter that talks about how each muscle of the body has an interpretation like nothing else. This allows, I believe just around, 500 trained people in the world right now to watch a subject and know what the subject is thinking and if they are truthful or not. In Japan, there is a robot still in development, that can read human facial expressions. When I was reading this article about animators and actors, these are the two concepts I kept in mind. Another interesting idea the writer brought up was having animation completely take a leap in another ten years. Where the computer can be programed to do an emotion and without taking up 5 hours per frame, perform this task. Now from the other book I read, it said the trained person still can not hide his thoughts and emotions when he is trying to fake his facial expressions. But when you program the computer to do it and have the robot evaluate it, I believe it might be very genuine concept. To touch on another point, the soul is absent in the machine/robot. Unless you are a Japanese follower of the religion that all things have a soul. This was a little difficult for myself to grasp. From what I can understand the robot can be programed and taught all the things as a human could learn, even more. But I don’t see a robot having a soul because it can not feel the human emotions. I am not sure how this article relates to art form, so that was another difficulty for me.
