For our final project presentation, Kat and I decided to follow some sort of narration throughout piece. We start off by being in a crowd of different people and the person suddenly receives very stalkerish text messages. Essentially, the goal is to find who the stalker is by clicking on other people’s faces to receive a limited amount of hints while the person keeps receiving texts. The story will also be divided in three parts, or “days” in which the viewer has to be able to find the stalker. At the end of the third day, however, the viewer is unable to find out who the stalker is and then the scene is changed.As it turns out, the whole scene was an imagination of a schizophrenic person who wakes up in an hospital bed with his psychiatrist telling him that he forgot to take his medicine.
We drew inspiration from the artists of Starry Night. In this piece, the viewer is supposed to click on what seem like stars in outer space, and then a specific email from the archive respective to the star pops up. Initially, we had a very vague idea of what our project should look like but we both agreed on the fact that it should include objects on the screen that when clicked, would become brighter. Now that we have a very good idea of the direction of this project, we want people’s faces to become brighter as they get clicked on for hints. Moreover, another artist that inspired us is a modern impressionist painter Lenoid Alfremov, whose almost overwhelmingly colorful and vivid images are something we wish to reproduce in our own way with the aid of sounds, text and images, creating the impressions memories are consisted of. We would like to adopt his use of colors, and bring it into the way we use these media.
For the project, we want to use the different types of mediums that were taught to us this semester to create the finish product. We want to incorporate the use of html, css and javascript, and the use of audio to give to give the viewer a memorable experience. In terms of interactivity, the viewers get to click on certain faces in order to get the hints provided, they will also get to choose the face of the character they want, even add a name of their own.
Video Project – Manal Masood
For this project, Billie Jean, Yue and I decided to make some sort of a mockumentary. We watched a few “survival” videos where the participants are sent out in the wild to survive a few nights or so. We wanted to do something similar so we decided to make a mockumentary on surviving a night at the academic building. The video is supposed to be a trailer for a specific episode of the show. We filmed everything in pieces, where Yue and I shot some shots around the AB and then there was an interview piece where two “survivors” were interviewed. We chose Billie Jean as the survivor and I was the interviewer and Yue was the cameraman for the interview piece. For audio, Yue rented the equipments for us and I was the narrator for the trailer. For the site, we used the same logo as Cartoon Network and edited it making it into “Shanghai Network”. We decided to make tabs where one of them was for the trailer, the others were for further details, and meet the survivors page. After the post production, which was done by Billie Jean, I think our project turned out to be great. I definitely think this was my favourite thus far although it was far more stressful than the others. I feel like I learned a lot in terms of video making, and had a great time working on this project with my partners.
Response to Web Work: A History of Internet Art
In her article, Rachel Greene talks about how internet art was in the past. It’s interesting to see how much the net itself have changed in terms of putting up art. Most of the content on the net today would be considered as corporate content. Back when this was not the case, people had way more freedom to put up their own desired content. There is much more moderation on the net now than there was before, in the past it seems like people could almost put up whatever content they wanted to.
Response to Long Live the Web- Manal Masood
In Long Live the Web, the author discusses how the rights of internet users differ from each other. He advocates the right and the freedom that should be given to every internet users. He brings up the issue of censorship, how certain governments restrict the usage of certain sites which the citizens should have the full right to. Moreover, the government also has the access of what the users can view online. Even though it is for the safety of the citizens, it still is invasion of their privacy. The government should not have the right to either invade the citizens privacy, or regulate what they can or can not see.
Response to EM Foster- Manal Masood
This narration focuses on the people’s dependence on the Machine. These people have been so used to living in the machine that they have lost their desire to explore the world as it is. All these people accept whatever the Machine tells them to do or to not do, showing how people have lost their humanity to this Machine. To a certain extent, I wouldn’t be surprised if this story is a prediction of the future. Even now, we’re so consumed by the use of smartphones that at times even we unwillingly choose to ignore the world. Our opinions and information on many topics are also build by what we see online in the media. Many people blindly believe what the media chooses to show them. It’s almost as if the Machine is an exaggerated depiction of technology in today’s age.