Flat UI

There are some places where spaces are much more limited. I lived in a small, cramped apartment (2m x 1.8m bedroom) in Mongkok, Hong Kong with another flatmate sharing the living room. This condition is common within the average population of Hong Kong, where housing is scarce and people are forced to improvise by testing the extend of the space that they could individually own or even share with others. Does that mean they are predisposed to lesser ability to have embodied thinking? I don't think so, gestures can be scaled down to microgestures, like shrugging, subtle shoulder or head movement. While microgestures may not be able to represent a physical metaphor that the speaker/thinker is trying to make, it still helps the brain to externalize the thoughts. Maybe you could imagine it as a derivative of our thoughts: a metaphor to it will be a battery heating up as the energy flows out of it, while the flowing energy is your thoughts, the heat is the microgestures that just can't helped but to be gestured.

As more and more people urbanize to big cities, it increases the population and gradually reduces the portion of space for each individual. Do the people evolve their gestural thinking into more compressed ones? Does the compressed gesture (microgesture) encode thoughts that can be conveyed with full body gesture (like how lossless zip files can be uncompressed and you still maintain the wholeness of the original files copy)? People may adapt to this behavior, they gain more skills in reading subtle movement, being perceptive.

I'm also thinking whether this limited space influences the uniformity/collectivity that's happening in big cities. I'm referring to the way a big group of people tend to traverse in similar direction to a similar place. Think about the subway rush, you're just following wherever the crowd is going to catch the next train. When there are so little space for one to do a full body gesture, maybe the full gesture of a whole group becomes more meaningful way to create and/or perceive thoughts. The trade off is that this will be an accumulation of thoughts, not just a single person's unfiltered thoughts. But this ties back to the collective consciousness / the school of fish concept that I read last week.

Make ->

I made a digital representation of the dancefloor at Memorabilia Mysteria (an Indonesian halloween party) at Brooklyn Monarch last Sunday. It doesn't work well with low contrast (due to the party hard colored lighting) and it jumps through frames due to frame rate. It reminds me that human eye itself has a harder time distinguishing an object that camouflages with the background, however, our eyes can still catch the glimpse of movement by the change of 'pixel', although we may not be able to make up the wholeness of the camouflaged subject that move.