This submission is part of the Purple Monkey Dishwaser race.

Check out the other race finishers here.

The rules of the race, as laid down by Mink, were as follows.

Summary:

*Make up a task which could apply to any (or no) groups. Complete this task and submit proof of it to another player but do not tell them what the task was.
*Ask them to guess what the task was and submit their own completion to it. (If they agree, add them to the task - make sure your own task description is not written down anywhere)
*Get them to continue on the chain until every group/non-group is represented.
*The first complete chain to hit the praxis wins.

Rules of Play:

*No use of sockpuppets permitted
*The praxis will let us submit without a non-group player, but to be fair to non-group players, the chain must have 6 people.
*If your chain goes dead you are permitted to choose another player, but only if the last player in your chain has missed any reasonable deadline you have set.
*There are no extra points for accuracy, so there is no need to 'help' people further down the chain with hints to the nature of the original task.
*All new players in the chain must be made aware of the rules.

Also challenged are: Sean Mahan, S P A R, The Vixen, Charlie Fish, Susy Derkins, Hey Man

What say ye?! Arrggh!

The race begins by sending out your task completion to another player on the 15th Nov 2007.

Mink x

Our Purple Monkey Dishwaser chain ran from Charlie Fish > Herbie Hatman > Loki > Flying Duckmonster > Flitworth > Devil Duck

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Charlie's task completion (EquivalenZ):

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I sent Herbie Hatman twelve photos, as shown below. Can you work out what the task was?

0800


0821


0859


1050


1205


1215


1530


1616


1750


1901


2158


0003 (over to Herbie Hatman!)


The original task was: Life Tourism - Give an inanimate object a tour of an average day in your life.

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Herbie's task completion (Aesthematics):

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1103


1207


1210


1649


1659


1827


2037


2038


2152


2242


2306

Verb: action word.
They say that life is defined by key moments. Document the moments of transition in a day.

I thought that doorways were the most clear physical transitions I could represent visually. Thusly, the above are all of the doorways which I passed through in an average day. The last two are a chocolate dumpster, and an organic bread dumpster. Mmm... free food.

At first all I could see was the Teddy Bear. I thought back to my inanimate objectification praxis. I fought desperately to simply mimic the praxis by Charlie Fish. Though Beau is more of an oatmeal type than a fruit loops sort. But then my brain saw the numbers. I found a calculator and tried to find a pattern. I'm not as good at finding patterns as I used to be, but I'm pretty sure that the number sequence in Charlie Fish's praxis is not based on math. I started looking for other clues. Colors. Pattern. The only consistent thing was the bear. I had to ignore that the bear was a bear and think of it in a different fashion. Inanimate object? Anthropomorphized object? No. People don't sit on tables at the workplace. Avatar? Metaphor? I thought about how the bear almost seemed to spin during the course of the photos. I saw no two identical perspectives on him, but a couple were pretty close. I thought about the actions for the bear. Waking. Eating. Traveling.

It seemed to me that the praxis was full of verbs.

The addition of numbers made me think that the moments were important. It all happened in one day. I felt that I had to try to avoid the bear in creating the task. Now I see the irony in that.

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Loki's task completion (BART PA):

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The task: Notice things - Choose a common, every day object. Document each one that you encounter throughout the day.

Herbie's completion: Herbie chose the doorway, documenting each with a time stamp. To fulfill his UoA trajectory, he chose particularly interesting looking doorways and took artistic photos of them. Using art as a factory of meaning he re-imagined dumpster lids and big, red, curved pipes as doorways.

My Completion: I chose to document stairs. On an ordinary work day I counted and filmed every step. I then strung them together, in order, in the video above. The title is the total count. I then sent just the video to Flying Duckmonster.

Commentary: This macro-task was really fascinating. Trying to come up with a task description that's general enough to be a worthwhile task and also fits the previous completion is an interesting challenge. My first guess, "find the rear exit," had a lot of promise as a task, but it didn't hold up to a close examination of Herbie's images. (But then, the future only has seven legs, so anything is possible.)

The micro-task was also pretty interesting. I knew I climbed more stairs in a day than the average Mississippi congressman, but would have never guessed the number was so large. The day I chose turned out to be fairly average. At least it would have been, were it not for constantly getting to the end of the staircase, realizing that I'd forgotten to film it, and going back to start over again. I was also surprised at the amount of time spent on an activity I never think about. Most of the video is paced at three times normal speed. In real time, I spent around 11 minutes just climbing stairs in a day, which works out to more than two days per year.

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Duckmonster's task completion (Biome):

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Flying Duckmonster had such a cool thought when she saw Loki's competion. Obviously, the task must be "Make a music video out of something mundane." And she thought very hard about how she'd like to complete that, only to realize, after a couple of days, that someone else had said their completion was a set of photos. And now she was torn: to meta-game, or to go with her first thought?

Deciding she must be wrong, she thought for a while longer, and the only other thing that really came into her head was "Document ascent and descent." (She does love puns. So she named the task "Yes and No" in her head.) Here's her completion:

Yes and No (sent as a PDF):

I thought my completion was rather clever (though I do have a way of convincing myself of such things): I climbed the parking garage at the highest point in my county, to get a set of pictures at sunset. Therefore, I was sort of taking pictures of both halves of the equation at once, in my mind. … And those who are astronomically inclined can probably figure out, if they can tell the position of the sun from the pictures, just how long it takes me to climb a level of a parking garage. ;)

A couple of preliminary pictures… I first checked the view from the top floor—to confirm that there were no higher parking garages around--and then took the elevator down to 1 to start. On a lark, I tried to get photos as I descended to the bottom of the garage. It seemed appropriate. My flash is slow.



Level 1 of the garage: not that exciting. You can’t really see out.



Level 2 of the garage.


Level 3. The sun is fading. Ironically(?), you can see it better from here.


Level 4. There goes the sun.


Level 5. So many lights!


Level 6. I could have picked a less cloudy day, huh? It was super windy, but at least the sky was reddish: good weather’s coming!

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Flitworth's task completion (Humanitarian Crisis):

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I pondered over Duckmonster's "both halves of the equation" comment the most when trying to determine the task at hand. Both halves...So there are two key elements, I thought. It seemed as though Duckmonster was transitioning: going up to the top of the building to catch the sun going down. The task must be to document two opposing transitions! That was the easy part. I spent much of the next few days trying to figure out what transition to document. I wrote a list of things, I looked up the official definition (as I often do when stumped), and decided I needed to focus on something essentially human in order to remain within my trajectory of desire and so was born two videos documenting transition. One a transition from simplicity to complexity (eventually leading to humans and, of course, SF0) and one of complexity to simplicity (an autobiographical account of my attempts to move from a wasteful life that contributes to many complex environmental and humanitarian problems to living simply):


I fear this might be a bit of a bugger for Devil Duck. We shall see...

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Devil Duck's task completion (EquivalenZ):

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I noticed a few recurring themes in Flitworth's videos: Complexity, Evolution, Networking... and their counterparts: Simplicity, Solitary. I took these themes, ignored what I thought to be a Humanitarian ethos, and reduced my new task to, "A simple solution to a complex problem." I took the ExistenZ(ial) problems of reality and came up with a simple solution.

Please look upon these videos before reading the text below...

Please note that my proof is directed and not directly created.







We have here the problems of Free Will, Mortality, and Regret.

I am a man that learns from his mistakes, moves on, and does not worry about things which I cannot control; thus, I never have regrets. I consider every moment either pleasant, or at least a learning experience. I suppose some would call this realistic with optimistic tendencies; that isn’t to say that I do not prepare for the worst. But there is a nagging question that may seem a very simple solution for the many a problems that arise from reality: “What if reality incorporated ‘save points?’”

If you could go back in time and retain the memory and knowledge that you had from your learning experience, would you? How can this be done in a simpler form?

Self inflicted inhibition of long-term memory acquisition brought on for a period of time by alcohol could be a form of “save point.” One could get away with what would normally be a permanent reputation stain and call it alcohol poisoning.

I, as Devil Duck, the character, must insist that I am using the Webster’s fifth definition of “simple” to define my rules:

5. Lacking mental capacity and devoid of subtlety.

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Therefore, the evolution of the task was:

1. Life Tourism - Give an inanimate object a tour of an average day in your life.
2. Verb: action word. - They say that life is defined by key moments. Document the moments of transition in a day.
3. Notice things - Choose a common, every day object. Document each one that you encounter throughout the day.
4. Yes and No - Document ascent and descent.
5. Both Halves of the Equation - Document two opposing transitions.
6. A simple solution to a complex problem.