Author: Madison Eberhardt

Project Reflection:  World Music Playlist 

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~mne234/FinalComLabProject/startingpage.html

A. Design

When you first open my project, there is a simple introduction page to offer quick insight into what the rest of the project will be about with a title and a start button. After clicking this start button, you will be taken to a hand-drawn/edited map of the world with specific locations marked with a flag. When you click on one of these places flags, a pop up will appear asking you about the mood you are in. Once you decide on a mood and input your answer, a song will appear in the corner and you can play it. This song will not only represent the mood you are in, but also the place and culture in which you chose before. You can pause and play the song to your liking and then begin the process again by clicking a new place to explore the music too. 

B. Process

When first beginning the production of this project, there was trouble with the idea of how to simply go about it and put my ideas into reality. An interactive map that one could click and navigate through was ideally what I wanted, specifically one that I created myself. Although, my artistic skills are not the best and neither is my extensive knowledge in coding past what has been taught in class. So the project had to be critiqued in some places to make everything work. The creation of the map as an image and allowing the user to click on certain places actually worked quite well. Initially, I was worried about this aspect of the project, but was able to easily figure it out with some guidance and looking up coding techniques. The coding for the transparent buttons over the places looked like this.

 

One aspect that didn’t work as well was the music player pop up. With more time spent in coding, I believe this could’ve turned out in a better style and design. I had trouble making this and the mood player pop up according to the specific place (such as block and none in the coding aspect). This took a lot of time to understand. The code ended up being written like this. 

C. Future

Given more time to complete the project, there are a few aspects I would like to add and change in order to further improve it. One of the first things I would like to change is the music player. I would like this to be more interactive with maybe more of a selection of songs (not just one per mood) that you could scroll through by album cover. In the future, I would change the overall style of the about page/introduction start page in order to apply more to how the project was more personal to me. The styles were different and didn’t cohesively match, as the critics mentioned, so this is something I would like to fix and work on in the future. For example, I should in the future make sure every aspect of the website (buttons, fonts, backgrounds, etc) all follow a similar aesthetic. Also, I would love if every capital city could be clicked on. Instead of just the selected countries I chose, I wish I could’ve had every capital in the world available for people to navigate music through. 

Concept

Music has always been such an important part of my life. It can bring together people all over the world and is enjoyed by every culture. This semester I haven’t been able to use this in a significant way in any of my projects. So for this project, I have decided to create a website in which has a world map displayed with various locations pinpointed. These locations will be California, Hawaii, France, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Nigeria, Sweden, and China. Each time you click on one of these locations, a pop up will appear asking about the mood you are in (happy, sad, chill, or gimme anything). A song from that region and language will then play to offer you a perspective on to the culture. I also will be hand selecting these songs. The reason for this project is because I feel like today people could use more exposure to music from different parts of the world so I think it’s important for my audience to be exposed to some of this.

Sources

My project was influenced by two websites (http://radiooooo.com/ & https://radio.garden). Both of these were introduced to me by Professor Eckert and gave me a lot of inspiration for the project. Both include depictions of the world map and offer various selections of music places around the world (some by different eras, mood, style, etc). The display of the websites is very creative and unique in the way it plays the music and allows the user to interact with the website. Through a collage of options that pop up on the page, it makes it easy and simple for the user to navigate through the site.

 

Production

In order to accomplish this project, I will first create a visual representation of it on paper. This includes an outline of how the website will appear. Then I will begin coding the first html page which will act as an introduction with a start button. Once you click this, it will take you to the page with the map and music. For the map, I will draw it out in my own style and apply it to the page. The same color palette will be used for the entire project to keep a certain aesthetic to the page. No video will be used as it will just be audio of the music included. Through buttons and pop-ups the user can easily interact with the site by choosing the place to listen to music from and can pick the mood they are in before listening to each song.

In Rachel Greene’s work, she discusses this idea and history of “net.art” in which is the communication of ideas through dialogue, images, graphics and more. I find it interesting how she mentions that e-mail played a significant role in those involved with starting net.art in the 90’s.  It was the enabling of people being able to communicate to each other everyday in a fast and equally grounded way that helped to create this platform of illustrating a new way of art through the internet. 

Before reading this, I had never really heard of the term “net.art” or understood the historical context behind this type of art form.  Through her explanation of creators of specific websites, cyber feminism, chat rooms, and email lists, she gives the reader the definition of what net.art is not only to the community of netizens who use it but gives people a space for creativity and inspiration. 

I did find this reading a bit difficult to understand at times, as she mentions so many projects and different creators that it can be hard to follow her. She provides so many examples that it makes following the history of Net art confusing. Although, it is from these examples that help give perspective to how digital art transformed the internet into more of an abstract way of communication for people and the creators.