Author: jc8017

Link: https://github.com/320834/Poemsite

Design:

Phase the name of our project is a website that facilitates the creation of interactive poems and short stories. The user can create these poem templates which allows the user to create stories. These templates must have spaces or blanks in which create the interaction for other people. Other users can fill in those blanks to create different stories. Below is the process of creating a template.

Once a template is created, the users can go to the template page to view the created templates. The user can select a template in order to fill out. Below is the design of the template page.

The user selects one of the templates by clicking on one of the moons. This will prompt them to another window in which they can fill out the blanks of the template. Below is an example if a user clicks on the puppy’s template.

The user can choose from randomly generated words to create their stories. At the end, the poem is displayed, and the user can choose to publish it for everyone to see or delete it forever. Below is the result of filling the poem and the poem results appear.

Process:

            The creation of this website required for us to go beyond the standard html, css, and javascript format. Instead, in order to keep track of the templates made and the number of uploads, we needed a server to house the entries and templates. Therefore, the framework to we decided on is express and mongodb. Express will serve as a backend server that will handle the http request, while the mongodb will serve as our database for the entries. The plan went according to plan as we were able to successfully implement the server and the database to develop the website. The user can upload their templates to the database and each of the templates can be fetched by other users. 

            The issue we ran into was the problem of scalability. If thousands of poem templates or entries were created, how would the server handle the requests of fetching thousands of entries and templates. The time and the strain of the requests can be limited by the server. To resolve the issue, we made each poem template under 10 lines in order to limit the data transferred. The second is to use a database to store the templates and entries. Originally, we were going to store the entries and templates on a local file. However, the use of database will lower the cost of writing and finding documents.

            The other issue is how to deliver our message of wanting the users to create their stories online without any excessive instructions. We wanted our design to be as intuitive as possible and allow the users to understand on how to use the website. Thus, the design of our website is trying to reflect those goals. The introduction page is the first page the user sees in order to let them know the goal of the website. Then, the user is sent to options page were they can chose to either create a template, fill a template, or look at user generated poems. We hope the design was intuitive enough let the user know of our goal.

            Future:

            The project is considered a success. We were able to accomplish our goals. If we had more time, we would like to tweak the design more. The design could be better. Some of the elements based in pixels rather than percentages. Furthermore, we would like to add more options regarding the selection of the words. For example, we could implement a theme in which the user can choose a set of words.

                                            IMA Comm Lab Final Project Proposal

            Since the 90’s, the internet has exploded with an unprecedented amount of user created content. For years after the creation of the net, the driving factor that enables users to come back online day after day is the content created by millions of the hosts on the web. Therefore, the importance of user created content cannot be undermined. In fact, the content created by the users ties us together, creating this internet culture that makes the world a smaller place. The web is also a place for expression, a continuing medium that enables everyone to share their idea or thoughts. Without it, society will become closed minded, only having the perspective of the local area in which they live. Therefore, continuing the tradition of providing a place for people to express themselves is one of the themes of our project.

            A good artist should make their audience uncomfortable. In a general sense for any creator, the creation itself should make the audience react. This reaction can come in different forms of disgust, awe, or even uncomfortable. The piece of work in question should invoke a sense that something is not right. For example, the visceral carnage of aerial bombing of civilians depicted by Picasso’s Guernica provided this raw uneasy feeling to the viewers. The concept of journalism follows this theme to the core. Journalists should report on the topics that we don’t want to hear, the topics that make us feel uneasy. Thus, we want to invoke the same slightly less nuanced feeling in our project. With that direction, one of our themes is to invoke an uncomfortable feeling in our users as they interact with our project.

Our idea is to provide a service that enables people to upload a template of their story, poem or any work of literature, and have other users use those templates to create outrageous stories of their own.

             The concept of our idea will be divided into two parts. One part is creating story/poem templates. The second part is other users taking the story templates and slightly altering it that may give it a personal flavor. For those who are familiar with madlibs, the concept works relatively the same. In the first part when the user is creating a story, he or she will input blanks into the story. These blanks are the what the other users will fill in to complete the story. However, the users will not simply get to fill in whatever they want. The users who are using the template will have a deck of words that they must use to fill in the story.

            Examples:

            The user will obtain the words they will use randomly and must strategically use them to finish the story. Due to the randomness of the card words, some stories will turn out disastrously. However, that is fine as this is point of the project. Some stories will not make sense and that is the charm of the interactivity. We want the user to try to use the best method to make a comprehensible story with the choices given to them. We want them to solve an issue where given an uncomfortable situation we want to see how they overcome a problem.

            Currently, no artists were referenced to come up with this idea. Instead, this concept is an offshoot of different concepts. One is of these concepts is derived from madlibs. Originally a children’s method of enabling them to learn their parts of speech, the concepts of filling in blanks to create outrageous stories is the impetus behind our project.

            The website will be entirely text based. No audio, or video will be used. The stack technology to implement this idea will use the following frameworks and runtime environments: express, mongodb, and nodejs. The mentioned technologies will be used to assist in serving the users with the environment to upload their template stories or create their own stories from existing templates.

            For example, when a user wants to create a story, he or she may upload their templet to the server. The server will store the template. When users want to create a story with the stored templates, the server will provide the user with these templates. If the user decides to upload it online, he or she can do so and everyone can view the ridiculous story they have created.

            Overall, we hope to provide a medium for expression but place obstacles to solve. We find that people are more creative when they are given an obstacle to overcome. This feeling of uneasiness is what enables people to rise up to solve a problem.

The article covers the history of the web art during the 90’s. While me and other of my classmates were born at the turn of the new century, the web art of the 90’s seems like a distant past. Thus, it is difficult to contextualize the extent of 90’s web art due to the fact that most of these sites may seemed forgotten. However, although these sites are the relic of the past, the article does mention the effect net.art and its dependencies have on the influence of the future internet art.  This project perpetuated liberal ideas that may have been rejected if expressed in real life. The internet initially allowed the artists with artistic freedom. The content is irrelevant but the idea behind the content is what survived today.

Another interesting topic the article mentions is the domination of mainstream media. What was interesting was the concept behind the name.space. This creation enabled an infinite amount of domains that would not be dominated by the mainstream companies. I thought this was an interesting concept and the more I thought about it, much of the internet employs this method. Today we have weird sites that obscure domain names. Without this name.space concept, the internet wouldn’t have had its this user created content.

r/place was a subreddit that featured a blank canvas in which users can select a pixel and create internet art. The catch was that each person only can change one tile every 20 minutes thus enabling community wide efforts to create art. At the end, the board was filled with different pieces of art, ranging from flags, university logos, and meme art. This is the final result

Link: https://draemm.li/various/place-atlas/

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~jc8017/VideoWebsite/index.html

Description:

For this video project, we adapted a short story called Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. This particular short story is part of a collection of short stories, each with it’s own peculiar theme. 

Process:

The project consisted of two parts, shooting the adaption and formatting those films onto the website to create a narrative. For our purposes. we adapted certain chapters of the short story. Each chapter has it’s own story. The general premise is that this man has died and he is wandering in an un named place. He is writing these letters to a significant other, often the content is contemplating his life and his relationship to significant other. Adapting those chapters were difficult as we didn’t any prior filming experience. Nevertheless, we managed to film scenes that portrayed certain aspects of those short chapters. The scenes were shot on a samsung galaxy s9. The reason for this selection is due to a the equipment available to us. One of us had a dolly made for phones. We were able to take scenes with a lot of movement.The footage came out okay in the end. After some editing, we pieced it together to create three different scenes. Each scene is an adaptation of one of the letters of the short story.

For the website, we wanted interactions that look at certain scenes from different perspectives. For the first scene, we had two videos shot from two different perspective, one from over the shoulder and one from the ground. Both simulated the motion of walking. The second scene we had different filters. The third one generate several videos that hopefully create this creepy feeling.

Overall the project met our goals. We wanted to adapt the short story. However, one aspect we would like to work on is the interaction. As of right now, the interactions seems disconnected with the story. With more time, we hopefully could include interactions that matches the story.

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