Author: Abdullah Ruzni Zameek

I would have never expected “art” to be a thing of the Internet as early as December 1995. I know that sounds strange, but my previous background knowledge on anything Internet related would support my claim. JavaScript, the language that backs the functionality of the internet’s UI/UX came out on December 4th 1995. This was almost at the exact same time that Vuk Cosic received that spam email with the phrase net.art. Secondly, my understanding was that the very early internet was primarily used by governments,  intelligence agencies (Hi ARPANET) and by a select number of universities for academic reasons. 
However, it seems that I couldn’t have been any more wrong. But then again, my perception of what constitutes to “art” might have been restricted to a very narrow domain of content. 

One of the most striking features of internet art (and the internet in a broader sense) is its ability to bring people together from different backgrounds and cultures to collaborate and create new and exciting pieces of work that would have otherwise not been possible. Once such example was the “Net.Art Per Se” conference in Italy in 1996 where  a group of net.artists met up. Another important feature of the internet is the fact that it gave underrepresented groups and minor artists a platform to share their work and make their voice heard. Many female artists such as Rachel Baker, Beth Stryker, Josephine Bosma, amongst many others, were able to garner a commendable audience through the work that they published on the Internet. But, above all, the key feature of the Internet is the fact that it is ungoverned and there is no central entity that controls what goes on it. The democratization of a medium is what allows individual freedom and autonomy, and this is a  feature of the World Wide Web that every single individual should fight to protect. 

Project Concept:

Sam came up with the idea of creating a sort of fun, thought-provoking documentary whereby we go around campus and record peoples’ responses to a particular question. The question we posed was inspired by a popular album by Billy Eilish, “When you fall asleep, where do you go?”
Some of the respondents linked it immediately to Billy, while others were quite perplexed by such a random, strange question. The respondents first gave their initial thoughts on the question and then tried to recall an interesting dream of theirs, if they remembered any.

The link to the project can be found here  and the code can be found in this repository. (Note : the assets are not available on the repo)

Implementation

Sam, Kyra and I were able to divide the work up among the three of us reasonably evenly. Initially, all three of us went around campus to collect the audio and video for the project. Afterwards, Kyra and I did  a bit of sound editing on Audacity to remove the background noise from the audio clips before synchronising it with the video. The initial results were reasonably satisfactory so we went along with it. However, after the initial feedback, Kyra re-shot more video and put together a second rough cut, while Sam worked on the first rough cut. 
Deciding the interaction was quite a challenge, and the three of us finally decided to go with a simple concept whereby we present two videos, a regular one, and one with a “dream” filter. The user can then swap between the two videos in real time by clicking a button.  The dream filter was meant to have an effect that is very reminiscent of what it means to be in an actual dream. A common response was that people often forgot their dreams, or it was very hazy and they couldn’t really distinguish the faces and voices that they saw, and that is precisely what Sam implemented in the Premiere Pro filter. 

Since Sam was already well-acquainted with Adobe Premiere Pro, she handled the bulk of the final edits and adding of effects, while Kyra focused on creating the rough cut storyboard that Sam would then polish. Meanwhile, I gathered a couple of image assets that would be used in the final video.
In addition to that, since the concept revolved around dreams and the ethereal, I created a short intro clip using DeepDream, which is a machine learning technique developed by a Google Researcher. It is essentially a  computer vision model that takes an image and amplifies certain features present depending on the parameters that were set. 
Here’s a clip that shows the raw, unedited DeepDream video:

Sam and I put together a simple website for the rough cut, where I provided a basic HTML skeleton to work with and Sam worked more on improving the visual front of the site through styling with CSS. Afterwards, I worked on more of the Javascript functionality of creating the toggle between the reality and dream modes. 

An additional feature I wanted to add was a  basic p5js particle sketch that would run in the background of the video in dream mode. But, because of a few last minute, technical issues, I removed the sketch since it was interfering with the functionality of the rest of the site. 
Here’s a quick demo of what the sketch would have looked like:

The actual website, however, was quite straightforward. We went with a  very simple layout to make it as intuitive and as easy as possible to navigate while retaining the video as the center of attention. 

Final Thoughts:

We took a bit of time to decide on a concept and means of execution for this project since we changed our project idea completely from the initial proposal. The actual question itself sparked a myriad of responses which was great because we wanted to see how people would react to such an “odd” question. 
Once we decided on the concept, we were able to expedite most of the technical tasks reasonably quickly. However, once again, the matter of interactivity was a huge question to address and we couldn’t necessarily come up with more ways to make the video more interactive without distorting the overarching theme of the project. I feel that if we had more time  to conceptualize and think about how we could approach the question in a more engaging manner, we might have done  things differently. But, given the time frame and the scope with which we were working, I think I’m reasonably satisfied with the outcome.