Author: jhr360

“Ecstasy of Influence” raises questions about cultural property and access to various forms of media, whether it be artwork or music or literature. It also touches upon the originality debate—does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? Is anything ever truly original? Artists, writers, and musicians all draw upon preexisting themes whether they are aware of it or not, as nothing in the world exists within a vacuum. Objects cannot be placed outside their contexts because, in a sense, art imitates life, and the nature of life is that it overlaps with other lives. Copyright is a controversial issue here, but giving credit where credit is due seems only natural.  It’s impossible to track any and all creations that might be similar in some way, and one creator can’t simply claim ownership of an idea or thing. Where would we be if the composer of “Happy Birthday” demanded royalties every time it was sung?

“On the Rights of Molotov Man” by Jonathan Lethem confronts issues of plagiarism and reproduction in art and media, as it is now easier than ever to reproduce an image to suit one’s purposes. What I found most striking about the article was Susan Meiselas’ response to Joy Garnett’s appropriation of her photograph, because Meiselas chose to highlight not her photography as the main issue, but the appropriation of the subject, Pablo Arauz. Taking context away from art is often the essence of reproduction, and it is unfortunate that people viewing Garnett’s painting of Arauz or the many reproductions of the original photograph will not know who Arauz is or his role as a Nicaraguan revolutionary. Art is often built upon taking ideas from other sources, though the literal translation of Meiselas’ photograph into a painting by Garnett is almost exploitative. After all, no one can own Arauz’s actions or his experiences but himself.

URL: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~yz4970/week5/start/startpage.html

For the interactive comic project, Jannie and I split the work by dividing the web design and the artistic components. I worked on the art while Jannie worked on the coding.

To create the comic, I knew I wanted to use my artistic skills and familiarity with Photoshop, which I have previously used to draw recreationally. I initially wanted to take preexisting photos and draw on top of them, though this proved to be difficult when taking photos off of Google, since the resolution and size were quite poor. I did attempt this in three of the panels I drew: 

Drawing the dog to scale proved to be very difficult, so I decided to simply draw the panels completely by hand, and included real photos within the panel:

This made the aesthetic seem more akin to a real comic, so I stuck with this method because it was easier and quicker. I also learned how to create gifs in Photoshop, which was a lot simpler than I originally thought it to be: 

Another thing to note is how time-consuming art can be, and I often underestimated how long each panel would take to draw, which affected my time management. I spent most of my time since this project was assigned drawing, yet I still feel like I did not make enough panels. As such, I was not able to help Jannie with the coding aspect because of how time-consuming both aspects of this project are. It is also difficult to collaborate on a coding project remotely, and we were not able to meet up very often due to conflicting schedules. Nevertheless, I was able to learn a lot about content creation through this project as well as interactivity, even though I was not directly involved in the programming part of the project so much as the content.

In “The Alibi,” Serial utilizes music to heighten mood in different parts of the narrative. They open with a sharp, high-pitched piano tune that keeps you on your toes, which goes along with the narrative of a somewhat unsolved murder case. The combination of dialogue and exposition gives the essence of a clearer narrative where listeners can visualize the setting, in a way that is different from print or video. This makes the podcast more engaging. Hearing only the participants’ voices, listeners can hear their emotions rather than see them, which heightens these emotions in a different way. As a medium, sound has its own unique way of affecting our emotions, and this is made clear by how podcasts work.

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~jhr360/week4/

Through this exercise I became more comfortable with the button function in JavaScript as well as if/else loops, which I had seen before in Python but had trouble understanding how to use them in JS. Formatting the images in CSS was easy enough with <div> tag, but I initially had no idea where to begin with getting the button to work. I first set up a counter that would increase by 1 every time the button was clicked in order to keep track of which panel was active, and made sure to log the counter into the console. I then used if/else loops to switch between opacities based on the counter. However, I was not able to solve an issue I have with the opacities not changing when the button is clicked only once.