Author: Kat Valachova

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Week 11: Net art – post on project “StarryNight” – Kat Valachova

Link: http://archive.rhizome.org/starrynight/index.php

StarryNight is a net based art project, that works with the texts posted on internet all over the world. It collects data on how many times a text has been read, assigning a star to it on the project’s “sky”. Based on how many hits the text receives, the star becomes brighter and brighter, signifying the importance or perhaps the confirmation of its existence on the internet. Another feature this website offers is selecting between the keywords linked to a specific star (text), linking it with the other texts having the same keyword in common. This feature is represented by a visual “linking” of stars, that create beautiful constellations the same way real constellations have been represented since ancient times.

I really like the way this project captures the manner in which, in the same way as the brighter stars are easier to get noticed by a mere human eye, the specific texts rise from the depths of the internet towards the imaginary sky, becoming brighter and brighter, easier to catch the eye of the other internet users as well. This project is symbolical, which gives it the spark I believe every art piece should have and that sets it apart from other items meant simply for amusement.

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Week 12: response to Rachel Greene’s “Web Work: A History of Net Art” – Kat Valachova

As a form of art based solely on internet as its platform, net art seems be able to open new doors for contemporary artists. As Greene mentions in her article, one of the net arts’s greatest advantages is its immediacy, that complies with the modern world’s cry for immediate action and reaction, in the highest speed possible. Another of the net art’s advantages is, I believe, the depth of the source this art can build on. Internet is a space that gets every minute, very second richer and bigger, allowing the artist an immense library of sources for his projects, by doing so tearing down the limitations the material projects would pose. Despite the net art|s nature being nature non-material, with modern technologies that allow us to bring the electronic image to perfection even in third dimension, the net art still seems to have a lot to offer to the art community.

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Week 7: Response to Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk: “The Danger of a Single Story” – Kat Valachova

In the age of an easy access to gigantic number of sources of information thanks to the various media and internet, it may seem the problem of single story is a thing of the past. With the countless articles and researches on various topics, one could think it is impossible to even have just a single story. But the reality seems to be different. As Chimamanda Adichie mentions in her speech, there are various versions of single stories being circulated, which subsequently makes them appear more valid. One may think the number of what we deem to be official and trustworthy sources, such as the journals, books and newspapers, on a topic further proves its credibility. Nevertheless with the number of sources sharing the same opinion as a proof, he may become a victim to a rather common practice of taking over ideas, parroting of information, or simple omission of information (such as happened in the books Chimamanda read as a little girl), that inherently happen when the media are worldwide, but the topics they many times talk about are local or too far away to authenticate. The call after information is huge, but the media are located in physical places with limited resources and thus also limited access to genuine verified information. So in order to meet the needs of viewers, the media source from each other and so support the single story, rather than shedding light on it. A completely another aspect of media may be, more in accordance to Chimamanda’s speech, the simple omission of information. This way, there can be “only white, blonde and blue-eyed people in children’s books, drinking ginger ale, talking about weather” (Chimamanda). Without critical thinking and acquiring information from various sources with different backgrounds, it is more likely to take over a single story that is being served to us through media. One should be responsible for his opinions and make sure he builds them on information, that is as close to reality as possible.

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Week 11: Video Project Documentation – Kat Valachova

Partners: Cecilia, Angel, Lily

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~kv795/week11/index.html

Our project is in the form of a web-based interactive diary. The story of our project is based on two friends – Miju, who is very popular, but inconsiderate towards others; and the owner of the diary, who over the time uncovers the true nature of Miju and reveals it to the rest of Miju’s followers. The visitor of our website can then follow this revelation through the diary, day by day learning about the diary’s owner’s feelings. The video is a form of visual representation of the story and is incorporated in the diary pages as clickable images, that enlarge themselves and automatically start playing. To scroll through the diary, one has to click on the right bottom of the page, so touchpad or a mouse are necessary. 

Documentation

Because this project is an interactive video, I decided to shoot a short video on my phone as a form of documentation in order to better demonstrate its flow:

The Process

Our goal was to create a story, that would somehow relate to our university, common space and relationships. This is how our prototype came to be. Our first plan was to capture the story of a vampire on our campus and his interaction with the school’s environment, as a reaction to the issue of the recent hotly discussed topic of abandoned things of the others in public space. He was meant to be an outstanding and popular person, who, due to his disrespect towards his friends, gradually loses his popularity and becomes an outcast. At the beginning, we hoped to create a multi-choice narrative, where the page visitor could decide if the vampire does (not) the bad deed and by doing so eventually deciding the vampire’s fate as the outcast. But due to various reasons, we decided go with the point of view of not the popular person, but rather his follower. And so the figure of vampire has become the model for our final version of our project, the school “queen”.

The picture above is an excerpt from our story-board narrating the story of the popular vampire finding a student’s card and tossing it away – the changing point of the whole story – as he is seen by his friends and finally abandoned. 

Post Mortem

Working in a group of four instead of two (as it was during the previous projects) was quite challenging in terms of communication. At the beginning it has on many occasions happened that the discussion about the collective project had accidentally lapsed into a heated discussion of just two people. Luckily, we managed to adjust this in the later stage, so everybody was engaged as evenly as possible. I believe this project has challenged me a lot in terms of being conscious of thoughts of not only one person (which is sometimes already challenging as it is), but the whole group. Before this, I was not even aware how hard this form of multitasking is. Hopefully, I have become a little better in it. In regards to the project, although the idea has changed a lot throughout the creation process, I believe that in terms of the final product and the overall division of work, we have done the best we could.

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Week 7: Audio Project Documentation – Kat Valachova

Project name: “The Sounds of NYUSH”

Partner: Ploy

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~kv795/week6/audio/audio_project.html

Me and Ploy have decided to make this project as much fun as possible while gaining valuable experience about audio production and further coding. This led us to creating a website with 4×4 square tiles, on which are 8 pictures of places around the AB and 8 matching sounds. Our goal was to challenge the senses of the viewer, as we believe nowdays the sense of hearing has yelded to the visual sense. So with this project, we wish to remind the viewers that everything around us is in a way unique not only in the way it looks, but also the way it sounds.

Photo Documentation

  1. After unloading the page, an alert window appears with project description.

2) After closing the alert window, the visitor clicks on the “start the game” button below the grid.

3) The pictures and audios are then randomly distributed over the grid. The pictures are draggable and if the visitor drags and drops an image over a matching audio (if the audio has been playing, it stops to play), both of the tiles change color and transparency.

4) The visitor can anytime click on the “reset game” button, that returns him to back to stage 2).

The process

The overall process turned out to be much more complicated than we first expected. We have decided to split the work as evenly as possible, recording together, later simultaneously working on sound processing and coding the functions in JS. Problems appeared on both tasks, first the audio recording was strange with strong background noises, while the actual recorded sounds were sometimes unrecognizable. These recording were not usable, so we had to do them again under different conditions. What concerns the coding, the first part of setting up the grid went pretty smoothly, the main problem appeared when we wanted to add the drag and drop attribute with the condition of matching IDs. This proved to be almost fatal to our project, as even after five days of rigorous online article and manuals reading, we could not find anything that would work for us. Luckily on the last day the hard work paid off. Next two challenges we faced in coding were in the form of autoplay, which didn’t want to turn off, as well as random distribution of the tiles.

Post Mortem

Compared to my last project, I believe we have managed to bring the communication and sharing of each others work to maximum. Which I believe is the reason we have, despite the multiple challenges we faced during this project, managed to finalize it. I first hoped we could create a multiple level game, with the second level memory based as turning&matching cards, add the “Start Game” button into the alert window that shows at the beginning, style the alert itself and play more with the visual aspect of the audio controls. But after encountering finding the solutions to the coding and audio issues we had, I am pretty content with the overall result. It has taught me so much and although on first glance our project may come off as pretty easy or simple, I can still see how much work and self-learning is hidden behind it. Working with Ploy on it was joy.

Last Note:

I believe others may find it useful how we finally cracked the drag&drop IDs matching issue.

in the tag of the object, which is being dragged:

draggable = “true”, ondragstart = “drag(event)”, data-target-id = “n”+i+”a”

In the tag of the place where the dragged obj. is being dropped: 

ondrop = “drop(event)”, data-match: “n”+i+”img”