And Finally:

Please find my finished website here...

http://www.wix.com/nicolaballingall/nic-on-the-net

Enjoy!

Light bulb....

At the beginning my story was about displacement: how people move and how I move where I could be in that moment (Ann Arbor for the moment), but I ended up discovering that this was more than that. Since I arrived to this city weird things have happened to me.. good weird things... so the gathering of elements to build my story turned out becoming a whole new story. Started to take my camera everywhere, and to take video and pictures of all of those things that had important mean in my stay here... then I wanted to tell how those things I care about and that call my attention affect me in somehow: like translating sound to color or being extremely sensitive to colors. After making a mental list of all those things, I realized that I was gathering all of my IMPUTS.... understanding IMPUT as the object-situation-action that enters a system and activates an action-process... that's exactly the word I was looking for. Through this story I found out more than what I wanted to tell, realized a process more than result and even more that I collected all of the most significant things for me in AA.
I could explain the whole story here... but you better go to the source: www.forkedjourney.blogspot.com

Provecho!

This past weekend I made cinnamon buns for breakfast before the big chill hockey game. Mostly I made them for my friends since I can't have sugar unless it is from fruit. I was feeling brave and I really wanted to eat one (they had orange zest frosting which is super delicious.) YUMMY. Knowing that my day would suck if I ended up getting a migraine from the sugar, I had a cinnamon bun anyway! Surprisingly I didn't have a migraine, just a small headache instead which was fabulous. It turned out to be a great day & I was so happy to have had a cinnamon bun- it's been a while. (We also made an egg sausage bake. It was so good.) This all is relevant to my multimedia story, sort of =)

Obligatory Post :)

I kind've froze up and babbled during my presentation so If anything about it sounded interesting I have long thought out meaty paragraphs on my project blog explaining stuff [4llm1x3dup.blogspot.com], which this post is taken from. I didn't include the images here because I've been having issues trying to resize images to fit in the blog nicely. Anyway here's some of my thoughts.

Over the summer a friend of mine kept mentioning the fact that within 50 years or so we will have computers capable of running realistic simulations of reality complete with artifical consciousnesses. I tid-bit I forgot about until We started talkign about the multiplication jars.

The jar has a whole world inside of it and within that world more jars exist with more worlds and so on... Christopher Nolan probably read this book as a child because that shoulds kinda like 'Inception' only instead of worlds within jars, its dreams within dreams.

Now as every critic and haughty hipster I know pointed out: Inception is kinda like 'The Matrix', which is kinda like 'Dark City', which is a totally ripped off from Plato's 'Allegory Of The Cave.' In any case I thought about what if I combined all three of these movies premises into one.

Simulated 'realities' like The Matrix, Layers of 'reality' like 'Inception' and 'Aliens studying us by manipulating 'realities'. So I arrived at the idea that If we build a simulation to study people and the people in that simulation build a simulation, what happens?

I started researching the theory Shane had mentioned in the summer and found out about 'Simulism'. Essentially the argument is: If it is possible to build reality simulators with autonomous intelligent digital beings inside one of these three things must be true.

1. Species are wiped out before reaching the level of intelligence and technology to build such simulations.

2. Species with the capacity to build such simulations don't choose to build them.

3. We're probably living in a computer simulation.

So once again I decided to pursue 'All of the above'. Option two could never be true on its own because of the whole Pandora's box argument. Option one is too absolute to occur naturally, so there would have to be some consciousness causing that to occur.

So I decided that the situation would be:

Simulation B is running Simulation A, and is actively trying to prevent Simulation A from creating a Simulation A'. Thus fulfilling rule 2. But somewhere up the hierarchy of simulations, lets call this layer X, a rule was made that effected all subsequent simulations: If a simulation runs a simulation of itself both worlds would be destroyed.

From there I plugged in my story. The strange Zolo being was to be some kind of avatar for the beings running Simulation A to interact with it and thus change things.

Other things I considered was the connection between the computer/machine running the simulation and the simulation itself. Such as what if the program glitched how would this effect the simulation? If too many simulations were run at once would there be problems, would the realities warp together briefly? Ultimately I decided this distance would be expressed two ways: Anachronisms/out of place objects resulting as a glitch would appear in scenes, and that Zolo could only appear in simulation A and not A' because it would be too difficult to invade one simulation and then invade another within it.

memory

my dear shroo.

don’t rely on talking to me for courage (though i’m ALWAYS here to provide it!) you must build your strength up! i feel as much as i’m dispensing advice, from old experiences, i hurt very much too. and it’s nice to know that no matter how much strength you have in you, sometimes you must be weak and have a support system. and you have me for that. always. you are doing wonderful things for yourself and there’s SO much i admire in you! i have no list. i try. but i go wandering away with life. i’m trying to stock my mind with things of the world around me to create a travelogue- but i have committed my life and blood to working VERY hard in school and i haven’t had a spare minute in weeks. the hassle of getting through certain days wears me out most often and the pain has become a part of the struggle. whether the struggle reflects in my work or no, i can’t tell. but it reflects in me, my being, my body language. and i know people can tell. its both alone and lonely sometimes. and i think of my thoughts. and i’m stuck in my head sometimes. that’s become the latest struggle. sometimes i can’t identify myself when i look for an escape. but i am looking for one now. every minute. currently a friend and me are talking. just talking. it has released me in wonderful ways.

its been a long and frustrating time for many reasons. after a point my work was stagnant and i lost all interest. but its reaching an end now. will try and send you a picture of what i created! im hoping all of this will add value to what i do when i come back. its adding value to me and thats important! but i feel like i’m living in a bubble here. and im scared to come back shroo! very scared. i feel like i can't not do everything i’ve been doing here for 3 months! i cant get back to that kind of life, work and the negativity. not thinking about it too much anymore. but it rises in me from time to time. its much colder here now and sometimes the weather has COMPLETE control over my emotions.

more soon.

xoxox
me