Taking into account of feedbacks from peer-editing yesterday, we adjusted our idea and decided to take another approach to present the theme.
1. Concept
Is social media a sincere outlet to express oneself and link among friends, or a veritable battleground boasting and gloating to get appreciation from others? While the answer could be subtle, it is undeniable that people are increasingly fascinated by the idea of “a perfect life” portrayed by Kim-Kardashian-like KOLs through social media posts. At the same time, people also indulge in hopping onto social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram every day, reading posts, checking notifications, and sharing interesting stuff etc. A report by GWI reports internet users are now spending an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social networking and messaging platforms. We cannot live without social media.
Therefore, a critical examination among relationships of social media, branding and the definition to a “good life” is a timely topic. What constitutes a perfect life at present? When you’re choosing brands online, what you are actually choosing?… And, what if all the crafting perfect lives are destroyed? By adopting a critical, sarcastic perspective, we hope our project not just reflects a layer of the phenomena happening in virtual world, but also leads the audience to have deeper thoughts upon how humans get interconnected, and impacted by social media.
2. Sources
Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections 2014-2015
Amalia used her social media profiles to stage a five-month scripted performance inspired by extreme makeover culture. She established herself to be a encouraging role through Instagram, profiling herself as what social media seemingly demands her to be. After repeating a lie for three months, she created a truth that she was unable to dismantle. We found this artist inspires us as she “boycotts” her online persona and criticizes the impact of social media. Our project is also about criticizing. However, instead of constructing perfect figure, we take a sarcastic perspective by making everything imperfect and ugly on social media, reflecting the topic from another extreme angle.
Victoria Siemer “Human Error,” 2014
Victoria is a graphic designer who imagines a world where everyday actions and scenes get a computer error message. She updates the photos of this series on her blog Witchoria every week. The photos look like Polaroid pictures, ranging from flowers to people to abstract nature scenes. On top of the scene is a modified error message. We get inspired in terms of the art of error conveying via her work. We had a difficult time thinking how to express the theme of our project, and we found exaggerations and sarcasm would be effective ways to present, and error art helps our project stand out.
3. Production
We will construct a “fake” social media webpage, mimicking the style of Weibo. When the users open the page, all the posts appear to be normal, with beautifully edited contents (such as pictures, texts, and videos). However, when users interact with the page, the contents will gradually break and become disordered. For example, when clicking on the pictures to enlarge them, a window will pop up showing the pictures, which, instead of applied with pretty filters, are intentionally made uglier. As for the videos, they would appear as a pretty frame, but on playing, their contents are actually messed up. As more interactions are generated, the webpage itself becomes disordered, with texts displaying randomly and contents not showing orderly. If the user tries to exit the page, an alert will be generated and the users would be unable to quit.
The production of our project will make use of pictures, videos and audios. The coding part will mainly be based on javaScript, HTML, and CSS, and we will also use P5 for some part of the web page.