Author: edp316

The internet art project I decided to reflect on was taken from the Rhizome database. Made by Brian Piana in 2012, Always Loading is an HTML-5 animation inspired by the loading icon Chrome uses inside of its tabs.

The project was simply a perpetually loading icon, inspired by chrome inside of its tabs, but blown up to a huge scale. When you see the loading icon on Chrome, it is normally a lot smaller, and a lot more circular, but when blown up, it looks a lot less discernable as a circle. 

The icon was designed to speed up in its rotation and change color the longer you view the page. In a way, it seems like its getting somewhere, but it’s not. It revolves or spins in perpetuity. To me, it dawned on me that when we navigate the online world, we rely on icons or visual cues to understand what is going on. These cues, to people who have grown up with the internet, like me, have become intuitive to understand. But when blown up, they can be meaningless. The color and the speed of the loading icon on chrome would normally indicate the speed at which the site is loading up, or how long it is taking to buffer, the same goes for the color. The longer I stare at the loading icon, the more I think it speeds up. I’d like to think it’s getting somewhere, but upon further viewing, I am unsure if it even is speeding up at all.

What does this icon say about the way society views the internet and its pages?

• Visual cues determine the discernability, legibility, and navigability of the internet. These cues can often be arbitrary cues that we ascribe random meanings based on context.
• On the question of whether or not the icon is speeding up… to this point, I am still unsure about whether or not there is a change in the rotation speed of the icon, what I am certain of though, is that it says a lot about the fast-paced expectation of society on demand. With shorter attention spans, the more impatient we get with the internet.One simple icon that is seen in everyday internet navigation for most of the world who use chrome as their primary web-browser, blown up and spun in perpetuity, made me think of these questions. Imagine what other random iconographic aspects when taken out of context, or when not operational, make no sense. I’m guessing, all of them.

http://rhizome.org/art/artbase/artwork/always-loading/
http://www.alwaysloading.com/

The project can be found here.

Idea:

Our audio-visual project explored the philosophical question of: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” It is a question that has to do with observation and perception.

The artistic interpretation of this idea came in two ways: audio (the sound of a tree being chopped down, it creaking, ambient noise that distorts the listener’s ability to hear the tree falling, and the sound of it eventually falling) and visual (GIF of someone attempting to chop down a tree, pictures of a forest from different angles “zooming-out”). 

In a way, there is a delay between what is perceived (visual) and observed (sound). You see when the tree is being chopped down, but you don’t see how it looks like when downed. One can only make the assumption that it was the same tree that was observed that was heard, but one cannot be certain. That is the idea we tried to audio-visually execute 

Implementation:

We first came together to work on a way to interpret the philosophical question into a project. We then story-boarded how our project would look like and the sequence of events that would take place.

1.) Actual Zoom Features:
While initially, we were working on a zoom feature that was defined and implemented in magnifier.js, which I was initially trying to work on with the first picture, it was too difficult to integrate into our project. There seemed to be a problem accessing the library of code that the author wrote. Scratching that idea, we then agreed that zooming out could be visually represented by making the picture smaller and smaller. Abdullah was able to write his own javascript functions, manually hard-coding the initial size, then shrinking it proportionally across its height and width.

2.) Adjusting Volume/Sound distortion.
3.) Hover effect with distorted sound.
 
Division of work:
Abdullah worked on most of the functionality of the project, while I worked on the visuals and CSS elements of the project.

Post Mortem:

I found that we were successfully able to interpret the question audio-visually. Abdullah was a great partner, it was truly an educational experience in observing how he implemented the functionality of the project through javascript.

Yoko Ono has the peculiar habit of interpreting everyday sounds and translate it into musical notes. In the interview, she describes a time in her life where she attempted “to translate the sounds of the symphony of birds into musical notes. Then I realized that since the singing of many, many birds was so complex, I could not possibly translate it into musical notations.” It was a musical interpretation of something which seems overwhelming, the cacophony of screeching birds that don’t seem to have any pattern, yet to her, she was able to envision notes that they possibly represented. 

This was a quite profound observation for me, much of what we are doing are mere interpretations of the world. As Yoko Ono said, they don’t have to be limited by time, space, dimension, even seeming to be “unfinished.” But really, it is filtered by human perspective. Art is very much up to interpretation. From now on, I hope to make work that while may not fully encapsulate the real world, a fair approximation.

Auld Lang Syne Millenium(remixed by Kenny G):
I found the lyrics here: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/kennyg/auldlangsynemilleniummix.html
It was basically an anthology of important quotations (from pop culture to politics) mashed together. In my eyes, it was as much a visual anthology as an auditory anthology. It is mostly a statement and response format, much like a dialogue. Again much like Yoko Ono, they took the foreign stimulants and used it to make new art. Kenny G took seemingly unrelated statements on mass media and remixed it to one piece. Again, it was taking stimulants and interpreting that as art and expression. 

TL;DR: art is an interpretation of the observed.

Christine Sun Kim gave a TED talk entitled The Enchanting Music of Sign Language.  Initially, I found that the title alone seemed to be quite oxymoronic. Music inherently, to me, is an auditory art form. You have to hear the sounds of music to properly experience it. Coming from Christine Sun Kim’s perspective, sound is not necessarily the only component one can consider when listening to music. While for those who experience the auditory stimulation of listening to music, it is easy to take for granted audio, Christine says that the way she experiences sounds comes from observing other peoples reactions and the emotions evoked when they here the sounds. 

In this regard, what I got out of listening to her speech was the response to the audio is just as important as the audio itself. It kind of reminded me of the death of the author idea brought by Roland Barthes. He posits the notion that once a work of art is published, the intention behind the work is less important than the response of those who consume the work of art. Good art, in my view, is when the intention and the response align. Artists or sound engineers (even coders) have to have a very keen awareness of how human emotions can be triggered when exposed to certain stimulants. They need to have empathy and the foresight to predict how people will respond to their art. 

TL;DR: empathy is a necessary trait for artists.

You can find the link to our comic here. 

Project Idea: Lost in Translation

For our comic project, we decided to have an interactive story where the user navigates as the main character through a new, unfamiliar environment. The story is a metaphor for feeling misunderstood, and this misunderstanding plays out in the main character’s interactions with others where other people do not understand the main character. The concept is that although it may be difficult, the more the character interacts with people and the world around him, the more understanding is gained. Throughout the comic, the user will make decisions about whether or not to interact with others. Depending on the decisions, there will be a couple of different outcomes. The more the user interacts with others, the more colorful and realistic the world becomes, while the less they interact, the more black and white and comic-y the world stays. 

Because of the visual choice to show a gradual shift from a colorless-comic-y world to a colorful realistic world, or slight shifts, or none at all, the comic has multiple outcomes. If the user gets to an undesirable outcome, they will be prompted back to the beginning of the comic and have the option of restarting. 

Challenges:
The first challenge was making explicit the metaphor of our comic was. We were unsure if users would understand the theme and message of our comic. The fix was to make an “interactive” about page/explanation page that would introduce, hopefully subtly, a worldview that the comic was based on. The other fix was linking back the outcomes with undesirable comic-y and colorless outcome back to the about page to prompt the user to restart.

There were also the challenges of implementing our ideas. While we made an interactive chat, it was hard to predict what the user was saying. We made an array that had set responses to jumbled text, but not to clear text. So, we limited the number of inputs that the user could possibly be able to do. 

Making the chatbox in itself was also quite hard, it took a lot of trial and error, and consultation. But overall, manipulating the code to fit our needs, in the end, came out with a favorable result for our group.

Conclusions:
The ideation process for coming up with an interactive comic was certainly difficult.  In fact, it resulted in us changing the concept for our project after our initial proposal. Once we had a clear vision though, we were able to come up with a coherent project. While it was frustrating when we couldn’t come up with solutions, even trying to debug didn’t help as much as we wanted, finding fixes and seeing our project materialize was a very fulfilling feeling. Through our teamwork, I think that we came up with a project that we can be proud of.  

 

 

 

 

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