Author: hkg245

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~hkg245/week01/Final%20Project/

In making my project my original plan stayed largely intact. The main difference is that, while I initially planned on making each data-point clickable, I chose to make the key clickable instead. 

Concept: As someone passionate about public health, Internet Art with elements of data visualization presents an exciting opportunity to make global health issues better understood by a casual audience. Our attention to a disease is often not proportional to the danger it actually poses.  In response to this I want to represent the loss of life by specific illnesses by the appearance of differently colored polka dots.  Based on the number of people killed by a disease each year, a dot will appear in a color representing that disease. For example, every ~1.5 seconds someone dies of heart disease, so every 1.5 seconds a dot appears on the screen. 

Process: My biggest concern in making my project was making the timing accurate. Initially I wasn’t sure how to accomplish this at all, but it ended up being a much simpler calculation and line of code than I expected. I used p5 to draw ellipses in particular colors and used if statements to dictate when to draw the ellipse.  

I used data from a 2016 WHO report that stated number of deaths caused by each disease that year. I then divided number of deaths per year by 525600 (minutes) to get number of deaths per minute.  I then divided 3600 (the number of frames in one minute) by the deaths per minutes to get frames/death. Using the code above, I was able to make a dot appear after the correct number of frames. I’m very glad to have learned if(x%1350==0) because I otherwise would have struggled to convey the idea of “every 1350 frames” to the program. I also feel that this simple line of code is applicable in numerous other situations as well. 

My biggest challenge ended up being the clock in the corner, which I had previously assumed would be easy to fix. My main issue was making seconds reset when they reached 60 instead of counting into the hundreds and making the time something like 03:135. 

The two lines of code directly above displayed the time elapsed. Below is the code that eventually worked, after I sought help.  My problem was that I was initially using one variable ‘seconds’ however in order to make econds “start over” and count again from zero after reaching one minute, I needed another variable “new seconds” to set it equal to. This seemingly simple exercise helped me to understand the iterative nature of the draw() function and how if-statements work when values are being manipulated. 

For creating the key and making the information popups, I created a class key-values in which I created a separate div for each disease. I used onmouseenter and onmouseleave to queue functions that opened and closed the corresponding pop-up. This was also something that I initially didn’t know how to approach because I was initially only familiar with onmouseclick and oncmouseover, which both didn’t allow me to make the pop up disappear easily. 

Overall I am pretty happy with the result because data visualization is something I find both very interesting and very important. However, I still think the project could be improved if I had more time by having multiple screen for different world regions, etc. Right now the project provides insight and comparisons between diseases, but not between different areas. While I feel I accomplished my initial goal, I think the project requires itself to be expanded upon in the future so as to encompass more data, which I am eager to do now that I understand how to approach the task. 

Internet Art allows us to make our message visually engaging and interactive to hold your audience’s attention much more effectively than traditional media. As someone passionate about public health, Internet Art with elements of data visualization presents an exciting opportunity to make global health issues better understood by a casual audience. Our attention to a disease is often not proportional to the danger it actually poses. In response to this I want to represent the loss of life by specific illnesses by the appearance of differently colored polka dots. Each ailment will be represented as a different color, and the dots appear at the rate the disease claims lives. For example, approximately every two seconds a person dies of a heart attack, so a new dot will appear every two seconds. The dots accumulate to illustrate the scale of each illness’s impact.

“earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos” –Yayoi Kusama

My project is partially inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s use of polka dots in many of her works, as each dot is both aesthetically and symbolically significant. In the context of my project, each dot will represent a data point, which is also a human life. I hope that by visualizing the quantity of dots (lives) over time, the users will be influenced to think more deeply about the global health issues we face.

Functionally and aesthetically my project idea is also inspired by The Memory Project, which is comprised of countless dots that each represent a memory shared by a user. While my project’s dots will represent statistical data rather than user input, both represent the experience of a human being. My project will also allow the user to click on a dot to read about what it represents, in this case being a health condition and its prevalence or global burden.

The project itself will involve mostly CSS, JavaScript, P5, and some background audio. The user will initially be shown short series of messages introducing the project and its purpose. After the viewer clicks next, the screen is initially blank but begins being filled with polka dots at the rate of the ailment they represent. A counter of seconds is also displayed in the top corner as well as a simple legend at the bottom to specify which color represents which illness. Once the screen is entirely filled with dots, a closing message will appear. Programming this will require me to create different classes of polka dots that appear at a specific rate and correspond to a pop up with health information on the condition.

The visual effect will be illustrative of the pace at which illnesses claim lives and which are the biggest health challenges. The goal is for the user to come away with a more accurate understanding of the scale and impact of leading causes of death rather than presuming the most dangerous illnesses to be the ones most frequently talked about.

Reading this article I was struck by the novelty surrounding the net in its early art work. Many projects, which I suppose is true also of today, center around the idea of connectivity on the web. I especially liked the idea of Kings-Cross Phone In because it takes the connectivity of the web and applies it outside of it. Much of the web art, such as the cyberfeminist manifesto and the web art piece I viewed last week (http://www.no-limit.org)  also used strong language against the status quo, suggesting a sort of revolutionary changing-the-future mindset enabled by the web. The prevalence of anti-capitalist rhetoric also surprised me, since I presumed net art to be relatively unpolitical like many other forms of art or spaces on the web (not that these can’t also be political). The article show-cased the way in which we view the web as a vector for spreading an idea and a mission to a greater extent than I had realized before. Personally I view the value of the web to be more for providing information of a less biased nature than for persuading people of an idea, and I wonder how in the coming years the use of the web will change. Will the culture of web art become more casual or light, or will more sinister? And how does the web evoke different ideas of use from its artists? Or the time period require a different usage of the web?

www.no-limit.org from Ubermorgen on Monoskope Net-art

The project I viewed appeared at first like an ordinary photo gallery or music webpage. Below an esoteric photo of modern art there are two paragraphs, one English and one German, starting with “evil transcends our imagination.” When I coincidentally hovered my mouse over the text as I was trying to read, the letters began rapidly warping into nonsense and slowly reordering themselves back into text when I removed my mouse. The background also flickers from black to gray occasionally. As I kept scrolling down, I saw more photos of art pieces in a museum of shorts and text in German that addressed me a the president. To be entirely honest, I don’t know what to make of the project and I feel that I’m missing some important context. I then noticed some links on the page which led me to more interesting pages, including stories of people’s experiences/perceptions that in some sense harbor evil. I still don’t fully understand the context of the piece, but the message appears to be a statement on how external factors influence people to become “evil” and imparts sympathy to them.