Author: Winny Wang

This week Kat and I have almost finished visual elements including pictures and comic drawings. We just started to put them on the website and working on the slides for iterating through the pictures in JavaScript. The problem we are thinking about right now is the positioning of the comic drawing. One option is to put them inside the realistic picture, which may or may not seem contradicted; the other option is to put them on the edge of each realistic picture. For the next few days, we will focus mainly on this problem and set up javascript page. 

My family listens to podcast/radio in car when we drive out, but the radio programs we listen to are mainly commercial ads, quiz games, etc. When I was in high school I listen to some Chinese podcast programs, they played songs, had some talking; I even listened to a NYU podcast program before coming to NYUSH, which I downloaded from App Store, they played music and talked a little bit too. This podcast is the first audio program for me that has rich contents, and I feel it achieves some goals that a visual program would never do.

The first goal would be that a podcast can free your eyes. I listened to Serial, Season One: Episode 1, The Alibi when I was taking the shuttle. The sounds compose the story perfectly, sometimes I feel like what I’m listening to comes from a recorder that the narrator took to the scene where the story really happens—but alas, of course that is not true. The podcast captures all the sounds that are necessary to rebuild a real scene; and by freeing my eyes, I can check my surrounding environment with my attention on different kinds of sounds: I hear a car honking in the podcast, then I check what the car just outside the window really sounds like…I feel less focused when I listen to a story than watching a story, but I embrace more through sounds. I hear and think, using my imagination for the fictional world, while also for the real world.

The other goal would be to bring the story into real life. With the podcast, it does not free my eyes, it also frees my body. I walk around listening the podcast, the background music takes me to the countryside of United States. In videos, it would be someone else walking into that world; but here, with the music going in my brain, I feel I can walk in this small town and take a journey with the narrator. The background music plays an important in raising listeners’ imagination: sometimes the background music seems relaxing, it gives us a sense of surrounding. And sometimes it stops at certain point when the narrator starts talking. This is how the music keeps the storytelling at a good pace, letting the audience follow the narrator leads the audience to discover the story with her. For example, after the narrator talked about the event she was investigating, the murdered girl’s boyfriend, “(has) been in prison ever since…” afterwards, a peaceful country music starts. It wasn’t too sad, but it felt like taking me along a narrow road in the countryside, where a young has missing and the mystery has not been solved. It takes the story into real life.

After watching the TED Talk, what impresses me the most is how a single story is told by and to more than a single person—the danger that exists in telling and forming a single story is very common and invisible, which means people are used to it while can’t see the problem in it.

By elaborating what danger that single story has, the speaker actually answers the question about diversity and its significance. Even till now, there are unimaginable scale of people doubting and questioning the significance of diversity, as well as many related policies. People question why school administration should think about diversity, and sometimes administration department would consider diversity over other elements such as individual academic performance. Or in other times, people don’t understand the influence behind the use of language of a published book. It should be seen that such people dismiss the danger of a single story.

It is natural reaction that people pay more attention to what they are used to, or in some cases, the more dominant situation. However, even though nowadays the world is more connected than ever, many people can still be largely biased because they are unable to receive critical knowledge. This is actually very sad in my point of view. The creation of a single story attributes that some people are less concerned about real situation of people in other societies; they can easily find information through various media, but instead, they choose to form unreal images of real people, fix diverse people into a single frame. This is irresponsible, disrespectful, and more a sad fact everyone is facing now.

Title: Type Your Xmas Song

Link: click here

Conception & Design: My partner Vivian and I came up with the idea of recreating a well-known song. We picked the song “All I want for Christmas is you”, which can be related with our audience and provides us a Christmas theme for our website. Inspired by the interactive website typatone.com, we decided to invite our users “type out” this sweet song. We collected audio elements in our daily life, such as piano tones, the sound of microwave, etc., to build the sacred Christmas atmosphere. Also Vivian designed our visual elements of Christmas. Coherently, we hope our users enjoy the journey of audio and visual Christmas Day.  

Process: In the general process, we had some twists and turns about the final idea of this project. We first collected all the audio elements to decorate the Christmas vibes, at the same time we made clips of vocal singing. However, we found that vocal song is not a good choice to combine with typing since continuity of the whole vocal singing will be lost. We made quick decision and chose piano tones instead. Later on, I mainly focused on coding and Vivian focused on visual design. Connecting typing and playing sounds took me much time, I mainly struggled to make the function of playing song as dynamic as possible. But at the same time I learned about properties and functions such as how to input and submit the text, how to manage array, etc. Moreover, I recorded the final singing and used Audacity to play with the pinch and effect. Finally, we put our work together and completed this audio webpage.

Reflection:Generally, this project met goals, the only concern I have is whether the instructions are clear enough, and if we had more time, we can design the webpage using more elements like gifs. I think I really like my idea of “typing” and “listening”, it is a new way of thinking how a song is presented. And it breaks the convention that song is “sung” or “played” by people. Now we can “type” song, and maybe in the future we can play with song more freely.

Conclusion: Vivian and I had good collaboration and we didn’t rush. We had good communication, brain-storm, and work distribution. This project meets my expectation, and in future I think the website can be improved to a great degree and be applied in many areas.

Response to On the Right of Molotov Man:

It’s very meaningful to look at an event from two perspectives, and it’s not for the purpose of comparing or choosing from right or wrong. “Indeed, Joy’s practice of decontextualizing an image as a painter is precisely the opposite of my own hope as a photographer to contextualize an image” (56). Listening to voices from different perspectives enriches the content of the event itself, where the readers could discover profound meanings. This is my general feeling after reading On the Right of Molotov Man. On one hand, the open questions raised by Joy Garnett are closely related to daily life. The sharing of documents should be carefully considered because it is concerned with the protection of authenticity and the need of tolerance. On the other hand, I think Susan Meiselas’s clarifies a more important point concerning the general modern online network. By explaining the background of the photograph and her own experience, I can see that many ways of sharing, and recreating a photograph without references dismiss the original content in real life, associated with real men. If people lose track of where the image comes from, people lost the meaning behind the original image, which contains many real life histories that shouldn’t be abandoned. In all, like Meisela says, artists “owe this debt of specificity not just to one another but to our subjects, with whom we have an implicit contract” (58).

Response to The Ecstasy of Influence:

Although the subjects that this article and On the Right of Molotov Manare similar, both on copy right, recreation in the field of art. However, I find these two articles talking from different angel; The Ecstasy of Influence carves in details and talk about appropriation in literature, television shows, and so on. Generally speaking, the author clearly distinguishes the copy of shame from the copy of glory. For example, he mentions The Simpsons on Page 61 and reflects on the question “Animation is built on plagiarism!” In a sarcastic way, the author expresses his idea of copying: “If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism” (61). The works from former generations are accumulated resources that later generations can always turn to for appreciation, learning, and being inspired. And among all these resources, the idea of originality may have already changed. The originality of modern times is different from the originality in a time where you can easily say “Let there be light: and there was light”. In Jonathan Lethem’s words, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos”; what an inventor can carve his or her own path through the chaos is what matters for real art creation (61).