I-Media

Here is where I rant all about my time on the Interactive  Media Masters in the University of Limerick 2009/2010. It starts with the latest blog post first so scroll down to read back and there will be very regular updates on the main blog and here in this page :) feel free to comment as always :)

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29th August 2010

DAWN 2010 Digital Arts Week Now

Our Masters in Interactive Media and Music Technology Thesis projects go on public show starting 6pm Weds 1st of september in the Computer Science and Information Systems building in the University of Limerick in an anual exhibition called DAWN (Digital Arts Week Now) and followed by a concert at 8pm in the Irish Chamber Orchestra Studio by the Music Technology students, all are welcome so please come along to see our projects, we have all worked endlessly to bring this to you so please, PLEASE spread the word and drag friends allong to experience our artistic, musical and technological projects first hand, play and ask questions, it will be fun :) Hope to see you all there, thanks :)

The poster above was designed by Keith Moloneyand Oisin Lavery, thanks to Triona Butler for all the help in organising the printing and organisation of DAWN too. Below is my own project poster as designed again by my wonderful husband, Keith Moloney. To find out more about the masters, what we got up to for the year and more about my own project please see HERE.

Much thanks has to go to Keith for his constant patience at my endless stupid and silly questions and requests, you are a saint love! Also a massive thank you to Mikael Fernström, my supervisor for all his endless help and another saint for putting up with the lot of us this year :)

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9 May 2010

Arduino Worship!

This thesis has turned me into a gadget freak altogehter, I know I was bad before but now its just crazy!

I had never heard of an Arduinoprior to starting this course, and as part of the installation in the IWAMD in UL, I had to devise a switch mechanism for starting and stopping a Max MSP Audio and video loop. I did it using an Arduino and following the Debounce tutorial to hook up the switch. Arduino is a really simple electronic programming board that you can use to do pretty much anything as simple or as complicated at you like. The site and the tutorials really help and as its the new ‘in thing’ in the world of gadgetry at the moment, there is almost nothing that hasn’t been done yet so theres a tutorial for nearly everything, I stress really though, however the programming is simple enough once you get your head around the basics of which I am currently in the middle of!

So I left working with Arduinos for a while only touching on them for workshops and things in college untill now. My Thesis proposal calls for me to hook up an exercise bike to an interactive visual display and currently one of the best options for interaction between the devices is with the Arduino. I started reading up and ordered a few cool gizmoes like an LCD and Ethernet shield and a shiney new 328 Arduino, and Arduino skinny  to play with to initially just get my head around the electronics before working on any project specific thing.

Followed a tutoraial to use the LCD and did this :)

Followed a few more tutorials with some more new gear and a beautiful little LCD Dot Matrix display and got these!

“Menacing Messages from Matrices!”

Then added a potentiometer to controle the speed of the text

So thats all I have for now, eventually I want to devise a way to get all the technology talking to eachother in my FYP, until then ill keep playing and experimenting :)

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9 May 2010

Puca Ar Scath

As part of this year‘Spirit Store Event’, we got together to do a live public performance as part of the Contemporary Art in the Public Realm module.

“Púca ar Scáth is a performance art work, designed and performed by the Masters students from UL’s Interactive media and Music Technology programmes.

The name of the work alludes both to the Ghostiness of Catherine Street (and any eventual Spirits in the Store), as well as an assembly of artefacts normally associated with the prevention of aquatic influences due to meteorological conditions often associated with the Midwest of Ireland.”

Performing this was terrifying, there I said it!! It was fun yes, the peoples reactions on the street were hillarious and overall we got a fantastic reaction. especially at one point today (Sunday) where a group of fellas drive past and start ‘beeping’ along to the beat :)

I was part of the drumming crew and was actually silly nervous, Im just learning hand drumming and have never ‘performed’ before so that was new, either way we went out and did it and had great fun. The umbrella people were amazing, worked really well today and the vibe really grew towards the end of todays performance and everyone started shouting, it was great!

I wont say I put my ‘back’ into the performance, I think my hands would gladly take my backs place after the last couple of days, im really out of practice! :p


Thanks toMikael for this group shot and of the shot of my ‘FaceDown Ireland’ Pose balancing on the head of my drum! :p

And thanks to Aladdin for these beautiful pictures :)

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7 May 2010

Masters Literature Review

Just completed a 3’080 word Literature review for my Masters dissertation, You may Download it here. Im a little angry at myself as I got pretty tired towards the end of the writing and forgot to talk about a previous students FYP Paper from 2001 that I had been given from my supervisor, but its been handed in now, ill know to add it in to the proper write up!! :p

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5 May 2010

Jason Holt From Google’s Liquid Galaxy gives us the go ahead!

I am so excited about this! As part of my Thesis resarch I have been looking into Google’s Liquid Galaxy, a 20% time project created by Jason Holt. A 20% time project is where Google employees are encouraged to use 20% (One day) of their working week to work on their own personal projects.

Holts idea was an immersive display consisting of 8 screens displaying one landscape, navigated by a flight simulator control where you can freely fly around the planet and travel anywhere in the world or even space.

Holt calls the end result “stunning. From his blog post: and you can read more on the project there too:

“…all of a sudden, flying around in Google Earth really felt like flying, and exploring the ocean trenches was like piloting a submarine. When you splashed through the sea surface you cringed slightly, expecting to get wet. You could even command your own lander down to the Moon or Mars.”

Anyhow, I was hoping to get in contact with him somehow to find out more about the project as well as hopefully getting my hands on the code to work into my own project if I was allowed. I spoke with my supervisor Mikael and mentioned he had contacts there that mey be able to help but I didnt hold out too much hope as Mikael also mentioned they are busy people and may not check their mails for weeks on end.

However, I woke this morning to a mail in my inbox from Mikael showing a responce to a mail he had sent Google, the reply came from Jason Holt himself saying he thought the project was a great idea as he said:

“I always said I wanted to see galaxies in old folks’ homes, so that people could virtually travel to places they can no longer visit in person.”

He also said in the mail that the code was ok to use and gave an indication to its setup and that if we needed help to let him know and he could see what he will do. I am very excited now to hear back from Holt as this was the one project I was clinging to as its closest to what it is im trying to do in my project. Also this type of thing hasnt been done before as such and trying to find reading material or resourses of anykind has been tough so this is a great bit of news.

Thanks here goes to Mikaeland of course Jason for getting back to us, Much appreciated :)

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3rd May 2010

Professional Issues Presentation

Well this was fun! :p

For Thursday’s presentation we took the topic of ‘Social Exclusion and Accessability’ with relation to Interactive media. You can see the comic intro video below, theres a lot of narration and reading so I left that out and will add a link to the written report in this post a little later.

We took it from the point of view of an ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence) class, where the teacher encounters a new set of students for the year, all of whom suffer some sort of social exclusion or accessibility issue, Poor teacher!

There were 5 on the team again, Aladdin who played the Visually Impaired, Colette who played the socially disadvantaged, Gill was the Teacher, Marion the Narrator who had to dredge through a serious amount of reading of laws, statistics and all the reasearch we had done for our individual parts and myself the Old Granny!

Hope you enjoy the video!

also…its getting lonely in here, leave some comments and feedback (Are you still out there!?!) :)

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23rd April 2010

Thesis Presentation

Here is a look at my Thesis Presentation Slides for the talk I had to give in The Principles of Interactive media module of the course, View the video of my talk Here and You will also find a full outline of my Thesis proposal Hereon my course website Here, Enjoy :)

Thesis Literary review will follow soon :)

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14th April 2010

Lighthouse Elemental

As I sit here in the dimly lit office watching my better half belt out a tune on his new Korg Electribe (Its soooooo kewl but more about that later!) and the fuzzball snoozing behind me, I felt it was time enough for an update from the course.

This week has been a whirlwind of adreneline, motivation, teamwork, spirit, emotion, just a little frustration, breaking spirit and bringing it all back together again for what turned out to be a pretty cool event for the Interactive media and Music technology students. Not so long ago in our workshop module we were given the brief for an outdoor live installation, after some strenuous discussion it was decided we were to group together in the same teams as with the IWAMD installation to project onto the facade of Plassey House on the University of Limerick grounds.

We were in groups of five people, with five groups and we took inspiration from the legendary Captain Planet of all characters and we took the five elements, Earth Wind, Fire, Water and HEART… cough, I mean Spirit as our themes for our projections. I was part of the fire team and had never really any proper excperience with video editing software outside of the utterly simple iMovie, so I had to roll up the sleves and start learning a half decent programme so I looked up ‘How to make Fire’ tutorial online and many came back for Adobe Aftereffects, and sure, that was as good as any!

The learning curve was pretty big I have to admit, its not the same as Photoshop no matter what people say, not to me anyway, I found finding my way around AE’s interface at first a little daunting but I found the basics quick enough and threw a few things together that looked only ok but were better than nothing to begin with.

Here is my first flame I was quiet proud of this! :p

Then I slowly got the hang of layering and had a bit more fun…

Eventually the team got talking about what we were going to project and we decided as part of it to see in through the walls of the house while it was on fire, I took the bathroom and came up with this very rough first idea for my piece and threw together a quick trailer for the giggle!

Eventually after very hard work, some long hours and one allnighter we got it together in the last minutes before the show to produce this 20 minute live outdoor installation which went quiet well, despite loosing the final credits to a cable malfunction, all in all we learned tons, had fun and had a great show in the end with some fantastic feedback from people afterwards, Well done to all involved :)

I have said it before that what I adore about this course is it allows for you to quiet literally ‘THINK BIG”, with very little limits and somehow through gritted teeth and barefaced motivation and hope together with a few people in a team, we always seem to just about pull it off!!

Here are some pics from the show you can see more over on my Flickr :)

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April 6th 2010

This is Not a Thesis!

Threw this together in hope a René Magritte style outlook would come back into fashion before I have to hand in my Masters Thesis in September… however I dont think they will accept just a photo!  ill just have to write the f3cker!!

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March 28th 2010

Interactive Media Installations in the IWAMD in UL

Its been a hectic few weeks on the course, we were asked to do an installation as part of the opening of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in the University of Limerick and it would also be graded as part of our Mid Term assessments on the Masters in our ‘Contemporary Art in The Public Realm’ class. We were divided into 5 groups a mix of interactive Media and Music technology students. I was part of the ‘Musical Chairs’ group made up of, Gill, Ciaran, Brian, Eanna and myself. A lot of prep work, constructing, programming, lifting, hauling and manual labour and love went into this project and I couldn’t help but be a little bit proud when it all came together and actually worked on the day! My main involvement was in creating the Arduino switch and designing the mechanism for the stool button top. Eanna and I constructed and Gill did great with the decoration of the stools while Brian and Ciarán worked their programming magic with Max MSP and Jitter creating the content for the audio and visuals.

It was a great project, challenging in the sense that things could have been prepared more in advanced and a little less rushed in the final week, but that is what the learning curve of installation art is all about. I personally learned lots of new things in this project, I had never touched electronics before and I learned how to light LED’s and make On/Off Switches with the Arduino. I learned that when faced with a deadline practically nothing will go according to plan no matter how well you prepare and that Improvisation of the highest order always works!! Also, even though I have been directly part of Installations before while in Art college, working on a team this year has been a new concept to me, one of which if I am honest, I didn’t like initially as it harbors the risk of ‘carrying’ individuals who may not want to pull as much weight in a project, however it is a concept I have grown to respect as it is abundantly clear in this particular project that it would simply not  have been at all possible without contribution from all on the team :)

Here are some Pics and below is a video of the Installation day, giving a brief clip of each groups project, From about 2 mins in you can get a proper look at people having fun and interacting with our “Musical Chairs” installation: Some Prep Shots may be seen on my Flickr Photo Stream Here :)

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March 9th 2010

What It Means For Me To Be A Designer/Creative


I will say I am not excellent when it comes to writing so my imedia blogging has been stale as of late. I know in my head the majority of times what it is I want to say, I can research pretty well to back up most statements I come out with however I can struggle to get the point across at times, this is my reason for explaining why I am a designer creative, or at least try!

As far back as I can remember from the earliest memories right up until now I have always been stimulated by visual thinking which apparently goes hand in hand with creative people, our brains are simply wired different to the logical thinkers as highlighted beautifully in ‘this video‘ where Temple Grandin, an Autism Activist tells us that the world NEEDS all kinds of minds, I simply have to agree :)

I cant clearly remember my learning abilities prior to starting school only that from when my hearing started to deteriorate at the age of 7, the years following actually seem far more ‘colourful’ to me in my memories. Of course what I mean is, I learned to use my eyes and touch as my primary senses and my world began to change substantially. I learned to look and touch everything, ask questions and now it seems to me like a light switch turned on, just as my hearing turned off! Even now, should I walk beside a railing or textured wall I have to rub my finger tips across it, anything that looks unusual to me I simply have to touch and inspect up close. It looks to others usually that I just have quirks but I know these are. ‘Learned Quirks’, unique to me and my adapting as I grew with a broken sense of hearing but an overwhelming sense to know about everything.

I have always had serious difficulty in academics a little because of my hearing loss but also I just couldn’t  understand certain subjects no matter how hard I tried. Maths and almost anything with numbers throws me off and gives me an overwhelming fear! I understand that its in the logical structured thinking I have the main problem.  I excelled when it came to being creative, visual and questionable things Like Art, Woodwork, Crafts, and the un-mathematical sciences like Biology fascinated me. It was a way to express myself without the difficulty of barriers like language, in the other more academic classes it meant I had to listen and learn through hearing and lip-reading, this quickly got tiring for me and my brain would switch off from concentration fatigue after 3 hours of classes, so after lunch nothing was going in.

The older I grew and through secondary school I really discovered my passion for creativity. Here I could elect these subjects and they were my freedom classes. I would go in, be given a brief and simply lost myself in a world of colour, lines, textures, smells, paper cuts, splinters, everything to feed my favorite senses, my eyes were wide and my hands were filthy and I loved every second!

Later after secondary school, I got a little side tracked and did a year long course in Health and Fitness and Exercise to Music in UL, this ruled my life for a few years before I properly realized I can not leave art out of my life and I pursued a dream to become an Art Teacher. I can thank that exercise course though because the exercise to music part made me discover a fascination with sound, something I though I couldn’t do before. In the course we were trained to listen and use music times to cue in aerobics and step routines, this really benefited me and I seemed to have a natural knack to understand rhythm and music timing. Also I found anatomy, physiology and biomechanics, how the body is made up and how it works amazing, I could look at a diagram and learn by doing, I moved my arm to learn the action of a certain muscle and moved something else to lean another physical function and from this I continued to learn by doing, for me practicality is the best policy!

I did a portfolio course after this to help me get back on the track to art college and discovered a new and tantalizing visual tool that I fell head over heals in absolute lust with, Photography. What was different here is, this time I was being TAUGHT to look, something I had been doing as a necessity for years. I loved it, I was in my element, colour, monotone, composition, bokeh, slow shutter, fast shutter, aperture, the different effects you can get by simply ‘playing’ with the way you look.

Finally completing my portfolio year, I got into The Limerick School of Art and Design and got my very first computer. I had very little experience with any sort of computer prior to this and had to learn quick. First thing I wanted to learn? Photoshop! Now I could have photography and something to play digitally with it was incredible. Throughout the four years of my degree, multimedia, digital editing and general gadgetry became a slight obsession to which I try to add something new and every day still. I then learned about the masters here through my husband, I saw what the course consisted of while he completed it and I saw what it consisted of and here I am.

Being a creative to me as I have long windedly explained above is the freedom of expression that disregards all boundaries, language, culture, race, religion, whatever, it doesn’t matter. It simply brings me joy to get lost in personal creative work or contracted work for others. I love to please but I think my driving force is the need to share. I still want to eventually teach and the teacher in me wants to share everything I find fascinating with others no matter how trivial, everything in life should be relative. I take videos, photos, draw pictures, hack things, make music, make noise, break things and put them back together differently, you name it and its all an experience for me to learn, enjoy, create, express and SHARE :)

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5th March 2010

Movement

With the increase in the daily use of technologies in our lives it makes groups of people gather from around to world to inspire eachother in many fields and interests through online video sites like Youtube and other social networking sites and movement in the form dance is no exception, however in this TED Video you will see young talent simply moving their bodies in a way… other than what you would call dance, it is simply movement in the most extraordinary way, Enjoy :)


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4th February 2010

Inspirational Videos Week 1

Here are some inspirational videos to help spark ideas in the many projects we have going on at the moment ill do these on a regular occasion, we need to do an interactive exhibition for an opening in ul, a presentation for principles of iMedia, My Thesis and many other little things that all need motivation, I find these videos inspiring, funky and fun and all based around what I do in college and that is; CREATING WONDERFUL IDEAS! plus having them all here in one easy accessible place will help me keep track of them too! :) Enjoy :)

Interactive Projector Screen:

Walking through a branded city:

Drum Rings!

Funkay Clapping!

Same Guys playing dustbins!

Steve Reichs Clapping Music with BOUNCY BALLS!

Wall E meets Bouncy Balls, old but fun!

Clapping :)

Finger Drumming, EVERYONE does this :)

This is a long one but interesting! International Body Music Festival :) (2 mins in is cool)

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Personal Thesis Proposal

February 1st 2010

An Immersive guided imagery installation using a modified game
controller with gyroscopic control (Like a Wii Remote) to facilitate
navigation and exploration in both a motivating or recreational manner
for use by palliative care, elderly and other patients working in conjunction with Milford Hospice.

Using a number of projectors to display a single landscape on all walls
surrounding the patient, the roof and celling may also be included in the
immersive display. Connected to a laptop, the projectors could use
programs like Google Earth and Street view to display a real journey to
anywhere on the planet. Using a program like Celestia (An astronomical
program for stars and planets) Patients could expand their horizons of
travel outside of the natural limitations.

To navigate through space or the world, a gyroscopic control like that of
a Wii Remote could be modified to work in conjunction with the laptop
along with sensor bars to help locate an area on the displayed projected
surface.

Should the system be setup to connect with the bikes in the physiotherapy
gym for example, patients could point to where they want to go, click on
the destination and pedal there. For the patients who may not have the
physical capacity to pedal their way they may opt to use the arrows on the
gyroscopic control to direct themselves to the desired destination.

This potentially can be used by any person with little limitation for either
motivation or recreational use. Other software could be fed into the laptop to display any desired imagery, photography, video and even audio could help add to the
immersive experience.

Difficulties

The major difficulties I feel will be encountered with this project will be
programming the device for everything to work together as I have
practically no experience with programming. Also external lighting will
be an issue to think about. When in Milford for the show around, we saw
that the physiotherapy gym, which this project is mainly aimed at, is a
very bright and excellently lit room with all the windows allowing light
to enter situated on the roof. Also patients with sensory issues may not be
able to use this device should certain displays set off unwanted side
effects, like flashing lights may trigger epilepsy attacks.

Portability will have to come into question, ideally this should be for use by everyone but
if we are talking about a number of projectors, a laptop, sensor bars,
controllers as well as connecting it to the bikes to allow those in the
physiotherapy room to pedal to their destination it will need to either be
easy to transport or simple and quick to set up. ©

If you wish to read the full Project Proposal please see the PDF HERE :)

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February 1st 2010

Interactive Media Online Diary

For the new year in the Interactive Media Masters we have new classes, Principles of iMedia, Contemporary art in The Public Realm, Professional Issues in iMedia and a Project Workshop. As part of the Principles of iMedia class we have been asked to keep an online diary of how our projects and  how my Thesis work is going, a place to document our progress, difficulties, questions, references and ideas as well as our finished works :) So finally I have a reason to actually keep this place updated, im now being graded on it! :p so bum in gear and im going to be back in here on a regular basis, I wont say daily.
My plan for this online diary is to use this blog for the moment but I do hope to add a wordpress blog to
my website that I had to design and create for last semesters project workshop, its the first website I have ever done and im happy out with it  (especially the worm at the bottom!) and hope to evolve and expand that site, updating it with regular posts and also links to inspirations all based around my course and Interactive Media so things will get a tiny bit more serious here but if your interested in iMedia you may find some of this quiet interesting and always fun!
I would ask if any of you are on
Facebook to link with my profile, I know the stigma attatched to the site but I have to say it is the only online source at the moment that I keep updated on a daily basis, I upload a lot of links and interests there and not always serious either :) So thats it for now, later today I am going to add my thesis Idea on here explaining what it is I hope to do for my Final Project for the MA, Also take not of the link at the top of the page, there is an archived page especially for all iMedia posts so if you just want a quick reference to these posts they will all be in there too :)

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October 11th 2009

I Know I Have Neglected The Blog But I Have An Excuse!

Hey guys,

Firstly thank you so much for still reading this place, im noticing the stats still ticking away even though I have completely neglected this place! if you check out my Facebook its about the only thing im keeping properly up to date at the moment just send a friend request and you’ll be able to see what im up to :)

The Masters is going great, its getting tighter with things to do and research every day but I am loving it. My favorite thing on the course to date HAS to be the visit from the wonderful Prof. Surdarshan Khanna who spoke to us all about toys, educating, creating, crafting good old fashioned traditional toys it was excellent and such a gentle kind of man.

I got a quick little video here of him teaching us how to make a paper growing flower :)

Then we have cracked into Acoustics too where we have to make our own instruments, sounds fun right? … well it is, but its also hard!! :p

Other than college work and all the usual worries things are tipping away nicely until I was rushed into A&E Friday morning with what turned out to be Pneumonia, where I fainted twice, frightened the living preverbial out of poor Keith and now he is minding me and giving me plenty of TLC++ as Mikael, one of my lecturers would say, hehe!

So in bed for the week, then have college for a few days until we get Married, I dont care if I have to be stretchered into the place its bloody well happening!! :p

Ill try to keep this blog better updated but Life, The Universe and pretty Much Everything is getting slightly in the way, ill do my best :)

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September 14th 2009

One Week Down And On To Another

Things have been a little quiet here on the blog over the past week initially I had Ice Broadband to thank for that once again but then time just seemed to run away from me.

All is well though and here I am again to report on the first week of life on the Interactive Media Mastersin theUniversity of Limerick. As a lot of tutors were away at conferences this week a few of the classes did not go ahead but there was still plenty to do.

I have to say I am loving UL, I have never attended there before as a student, I have studied there for other certs and courses but never as a regestered student and its such a cool college, Massive though and sometimes I wish I had a Sat Nav to navagate the place!

So I had said about a daily photostream dedicated to the Ma, I know I have been a bold girl, but its been busy so forgive me! I did manage to get photos on the mobile as I haven’t been brave enough to crack out the big camera just yet but that is changing this week so hopefully better quality of pics for you :) Here is what I have so far and all of these are now in a neat little set on Flickr Hereand will be updated very regularly.

Acoustics Gadgets!

Raining at the start of the week…                                           Mikael’s Office Door!

More Rain through the canteen window…

Our course modules consist of :Foundations of Interactive Media, Interactive Media in Society and an Interactive Media Project. Then we have to select one elective module from a choice of three: Midi and Computer Programming, Acoustics and Psycho-acoustics and Marketing, I have picked Acoustics and Psycho-acoustics (Nature of sound: psychophysics of audition: biology of audition: psychology of sound perception: introduction to psychomusicology.)

We were being urged to do programming if you hadnt done it before as it is a requirment for your end of year project but my reason for picking Acoustics and Psycho-acoustics is because I feel it will benifit me more in my project as I have had an idea for a while now to base my project around my hearing loss, yet, that could change drastically before the end of the course!

I also have a great advantage of having started to learn programming myself online during the summer and I intend to continue and as well as this, my better half is great at programming so I’m sure I’ll keep him busy with questions too! I really wanted to go onto this course and learn something new and exciting and relevant to me so when I had the acoustics class it was awesome. Very exciting (well to me anyway!) involves lots of juicy gadget fun which is always done deal with me and we get to build our own instruments!!!

Psycho-acoustics then is slightly different but I have touched on many aspects of it before which grabbed my attention very quickly too and sound has always been a slight obsession for me so I had to pick it as my elective and I cant wait to get stuck into the classes, my only dread is the maths but apparantly it wont get any harder than Pythagoras’ theorem so lets hope that is true, Oh and I have to learn everything in Metric instead of Imperialbut I should have been doing that long ago anyway!

Me being a fangirl at the bus stop!

So today is Monday and I should be starting the first proper week of classes but woke this morning at 6am with the worst tummy bug so I wont be kicking off the classes until tomorrow. One last thing before I go, one of the biggest kicks of being in UL is using the Bus, I know I dont get out much but meh! I pop on my ipod and look out the window its great, look I can prove it to you!

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September 4th 2009

And We Begin:

So today was the day, I woke up to grey skies and a little excited, I was like a child at christmas, I dunno why.
I dropped keith into work, grabbed a quick BB’s Hot Chocolate to warm my bones and set off for UL.
Traffic from town in was fine, its finding parking is the problem. I have to say, UL sucks for parking! After finding one at the complete opposite end of campus I bloated and heaved myself across campus in the rain towards main reception to enroll where the queue ended outside!
We got there eventually and I headed on home to relax until the class talk at 3pm.
After a lovely lunch with keith in Noor on Thomas Street I jetted off to UL again only to find parking again at the opposite end of the campus but this time I bloated and dragged my ass around campus in the blazing sun, the weather is awful indecisive at the moment!
I eventually found the Schumann Building and the lecture room by this time it had started to rain again.

Mikaelwas cheerful as always and made us all feel comfortable. We are an interesting lot, audio visual, multimedia, artists, product and graphic designers from a range of places, China, Egypt, Poland and all over Ireland. We went over the time table, core modules and electives, questions and answers and what we wanted to be when we grew up!
Then we were taken to the
CSIS Building(Computer Science and Information Systems) which our lab is for the rest of the year kitted out with 20 really tasty Apple Macs!
Overall I am very pleased and I cant wait for everything to kick off nice and early Monday morning, it is going to be a grueling year ahead but all I can do is my best, I am officially an
Interactive Media Masters Student now! :)

If you wanna see what students like us do, checkthisout :)

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August 16th 2009

No More Blogging Till The Masters Begins!

Hey all, sorry I havent blogged in so long, but its been a crazy summer and our internet connection sucks!
So the plan is I am going to do a little overhall on this site and ‘Lettes Photography’, where I will direct my blogging around my Masters in Interactive Media which starts in The University of Limerick on the 4th of September.
Here I will be adding general photos, information on how the course is going and also links and further information from around the internet relevant to Interactive Media.
On the photosite I have a plan to do a daily photo stream throughout the year where I will take the big digital for general photos and the Olympus XA2 or the Contax T2with one role of film a week or month and im thinking to make it really interesting I may use out of date Fuji Velvia and process through C41 and not E6 to give a lovelycross processed effect, not sure yet but thats the idea.
The reason? well like I said the summer has been crazy and I havent touched the camera really outside of the wedding and the MA will be intensive enough running from September to September so everything I will be doing will be based around the course so I may as well chronical it. As well as this, as part of the course there are some cool events going on that I will be attending, like the Tweak Festival.
Any requests or feedback would be awesome, there will be some videos as well as pics so I would like to hear your ideas and views.
I figure I am only going to sit a Masters once so it would be nice to have an album dedicated to it because I have very little photos from my Degree.
Thats all for now folks, see you on the 4th of September then :)


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