Author: Madison Eberhardt

After reading “On the Rights of Molotov Man,” it made me realize how art today is so easily reproduced and decontextualized online. It seems like you can take just about any photo from the internet, instagram, facebook, and more without needing any sort of credit to use it. By screenshooting or copy & pasting it, it’s yours to use. Even if the author didn’t want someone using it, by putting it online for everyone to see, it is still super easy for someone to replicate without the author ever knowing. As stated in this reading, the artist needs to reclaim the context of their work. Nowadays with technology and social media, doing this seems almost impossible. 

I also thought it was very interesting when they were discussing the Molotov painting’s copyright. Nmazca asked, “Who owns the rights to this mans struggle?” I think she brings up an interesting point about how maybe it isn’t about the person who took the photo or painted the picture, but who was behind it. While everyone else is discussing the rights of the photograph or painting, nobody was really discussing the man within it and his story (or context). It is as if Pablo’s context was “stripped away” from him, nobody knew his story and were just replicating it over and over for their own use. Who can use and replicate these kinds of art then comes into question

For our comic project, we wanted to do something very interactive and suspenseful by incorporating ways that the player could make their own decisions and navigate throughout the websites (comic) based on these decisions. First, we created the characters in our story through sketchpad and photoshop. We drew pretty much everything that appears in the comic (buttons, objects, and characters). Then made a detailed outline of the storyline of the comic and numbered the html pages so that we had an idea of what to do for the coding. This allowed us to code along with the outline so that we didn’t get confused with the pathways of each html page and correctly followed the story (as it gets more complicated as the story goes along).

We ran into a lot of problems at the beginning of the project because our project required some coding we had never learned before. We wanted a flashlight affect with the cursor to read the text for our first page, so we needed to research this code (it involved functions with “getmouse” or “touch move”).

 Another aspect of coding the I learned was in CSS the position aspect of images. I kept having problems with it being “relative” and it messing with the animation of the image. I fixed this by changing it to “absolute” so the animation and position worked better with the entire page.

We also had a problem adding the music because it would play on loop instead of for a specific time. In order to fix this we had to change the javascript aspect of it by using “var x” and using a function to define the time. I learned a lot more about animation and CSS aspects of coding during the project, as our comic required a lot of it. I specifically learned more about how much the sizing and position of elements in CSS can affect the rest of the code a lot. Using the inspect tool really helped for this and helped me easily identify what to fix.

 

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~mne234/week%204/w04-exercise-JS-Conditionals/index.html

I had a bit of trouble getting the opacity feature to work at the end, but figured it out and changed the “visibility” to have all my images with “opacity” instead for the style. I also had some trouble with the counter function, but was able to fix it after using the “if” and “else if” functions.