Author: Jonathon Haley

If you haven’t seen it already, here’s the link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~jh5231/NetArt/index.html. I recommend opening the project in Firefox as it sometimes acts strange in Chrome (haven’t tested it in Safari)

Our project was intended to be awesome. You can be the judge of whether it lived up to the hype, but either way it was super fun to envision and create.

What we did was largely inspired by theuselessweb.com – our website, like its inspiration, is a diverse collection of short activities, each fulfilling a distinct (although sometimes unclear) purpose. Even the index.html page, commonly used to introduce and explain the project, is nothing but a redirect – it sends you straight away to one of the other pages, chosen at random every time.

But while the Useless Button redirects you to one of a number of unrelated external websites, our project’s various pages are held together by a few underlying themes, the most obvious being that you can go back and forth between pages with ease thanks to the integrated menu, as well as some shared visual themes. Of course, all the pages are also quite different from each other – the payoffs for the bubble wrap and basketball pages (that is, the thing that happens after you’ve done the thing that you’re supposed to do) apparently were quite jarring for some viewers, who thought the payoffs to be out of line with the main interactive focuses of the pages, and the overall “vibe” of the project. Still, as most audience members on the day we presented it concurred, there’s a kind of beauty in the chaos – somehow, the weirdness works.

If there’s one regret Vincent and I have regarding this project (Vincent, by the way, was an excellent partner to work with – truly an unstoppable creative force), it’s that we couldn’t add more pages to our burgeoning collection – quality over quantity for sure, but sometimes you need that quality in bulk. Though we had great ideas, not all our ideas were great ones – some of them we decided not to use. Given more time, we could have bolstered our project with even more weird random pages, but for now you’ll have to be satisfied with four. Funny enough, our original idea was stress relief, but now I think the page that provides the most actual stress relief is our Credits page.

Our ideal is stress relief – we want interacting with our project to relieve stress. Our project will include a number of small, simple activities such as popping bubble wrap or throwing ball in a hoop/bin. Once you do one activity, you can go on to the next one; each of them will be very different from the last, allowing us to try a lot of different types of stuff. The activities will probably be in randomized order, but there’ll also be a side menu where you can choose which one to do. We got our inspiration from theuselessweb.com’s random standalone, single-purpose websites. The bulk of the work will be done in JS and P5; we haven’t looked into specifics yet but it should be very doable. We haven’t yet decided on the art style or overall aesthetic (or if each activity should have a distinct style), that’ll come later. First and foremost is implementation of the interactivity and functionality.

In her article “Web Work: A History of Internet Art”, Rachel Greene touches on the major events and trends in Internet art from 1994 to 1999. Net art to me is interesting because it’s free-flowing, pushing the boundaries of art while at the same time acting as though boundaries aren’t even there. It was revolutionary, not only because artists could interact and share their work like never before, and also because now, anyone could become an artist. In the days before the Internet was filled up by corporations and large interests, back when most of the pages were personal sites and personal art, the artists had true freedom to do whatever they wanted without pressure from outside forces aside from fellow artists. After the subsequent “populating” of the Internet, it makes me wonder if the art community will ever again have such a pure, unfiltered artistic medium to utilize, and if so, what form it might take in the future.

https://www.cameronsworld.net/

I found this website through some Googling around, included in a list of notable Internet art. It’s a scrollable collage of personalized webpages that were created between 1994-2009 on Yahoo’s free GeoCity service, where anyone with the knowhow could create their own unique personal website. It’s quite fascinating, like looking backwards in time through an Internet looking-glass. There’s so many different kinds of designs, content, and visual details, and yet they all share the many characteristics that defined the early Internet, distinct (yet not separate) from its forms we know today.

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~jh5231/VideoProject/

This actually went even better than expected. Hard to believe, right? Originally we went through a few ideas, such as a cooking show where the user chooses the ingredients, or even the first conception of our final product where each of the videos (Expectation and Reality) would be played as continuous, 2-3 minute long videos which you could switch back and forth between. But the concept we finally went with has proved to be far more interesting and effective. I’m not gonna explain it in detail here – take a look for yourself!

In terms of the work that went into it, we divided up our work according to our individual abilities. Murray was in charge of the videography, Allie did all the video editing, and I coded the website. Murray and I are also the main actors, along with several friends. All three of us were, so to speak, directors – we collaborated to create the storyboard and overall project concepts, and decided together on the direction that the project ended up taking.

Filming was a lot of fun. Murray filmed using his own camera as well as a tripod he borrowed from a friend, and we also recorded additional audio for several scenes (such as dialogue, the WeChat ringtone, and the electric guitar) using a condenser microphone I happen to own. We took multiple usable takes (not including all the bad, unusable ones! Which were actually very important as they helped us refine the actions and dialogue we ended up using) for every shot of every scene. We decided on different camerawork and film techniques for many of the scenes – for instance, the shot where I’m doing homework and invited to go to a bar is just one long shot that pans around the room, while other scenes used cuts between multiple different angles.

The video editing I can’t speak much on – that’s Allie’s domain. I’ll just say that the editing was excellent and really brought the scenes to life in ways I hadn’t envisioned when filming, and the myriad of interesting soundtracks used only bolstered this impression. Props to Allie for the effective editing.

For the website, I made sure that the functionality worked 100% first, then implemented styling and designs, with an NYU Violet theme. The entire website is located in index.html, and we move between different sets of scenes using Javascript. I also found online a way to add a cool gradient effect to the webpage’s buttons; I credited the original example in a comment in script.js.

That’s just about everything. Hope you enjoy our piece!