Author: vsw227

I worked with Jon on this Net Art Project, and had a extremely fun time with it. I am sad that it is over, but also happy that it happened 🙂

VINCENT AND JON’S AWESOME NET ART PROJECT:

Design:

Our website’s final form is a website that is purely based around what Jon and I found interesting/amusing whilst we worked on the project. You mainly interact with the project through the mouse, playing around and looking for the elements that we’ve included within the website, hidden or not. As of now, there are four actions: bubble-wrap, basketball, British flag, and painting with Bob Ross. The point of the website is to show off both Jon and mine’s personalities, that there is no specific direction a project has to go in, just do something that you find enjoyable. What I had just said was a bit contradicting, but anyways, the point is we hope you found the website itself as enjoyable as Jon and I had.

Process:

The original thought process behind our project was to base it around “de-stressing”, which was what inspired our first action, the bubble-wrap popping. It worked really well in terms of de-stressing, because who doesn’t love popping bubble-wrap. Afterwards, we kind of ignored the entire “de-stress” part, not because we wanted to, but because Jon and I got engaged in discussing basketball, and it inspired us to make it a interactive page on our project. It was until after a couple of hours that we realized, it didn’t really correlate with de-stressing. As ironic as it is, we stressed too much over the de-stressing topic, so we decided to ignore it completely to make sure we had more content. If there was one thing that I would change throughout the entire process, it would be that we didn’t stress too much about the de-stressing, because we brainstormed and prototyped for too long and wasted a lot of time. We could’ve gotten probably one or two more interactive parts, but we had constrained ourselves too much with a specific direction.

What worked well, specifically for this project, was that Jon and I thought of all the ideas just based off of us chatting normally. What didn’t work well was when we didn’t think of ideas based off of us chatting, when we had to focus on the direction of “de-stressing”. We discovered this after the proposal, and implemented it into our final project, making it a masterpiece compared to what we had originally.

Future:

Had we had more time, I think we would’ve made something similar to the “take me to a random useless website”, but instead it would be a “make me do something random”. If we had more than 7 interactive actions, we had planned on making it the exact same format as the useless website button website. I guess in conclusion, we would’ve loved to implement even more interactive actions into our website, and made it more complete as a “random” website, once again contradicting myself.

I will most definitely explore more of these types of ideas in my own work, and I’m sure Jon will too as well. I loved having him as my partner.

Conclusion:

I have no idea whether or not you’ll read all the way down here, but thank you so much for a great class Moon! Although there were a lot of projects we had to deal with, I was always happy whenever we worked on them, and also just the overall atmosphere when working and learning in the class is just superb. I would’ve never thought how relaxed I could be in a classroom. It was an amazing experience, and I really look forward to taking more of your classes next semester/next time.

Thank you again, I hope you get wonderful students next semester and that you continue to be the awesome and perfect professor you are!

Vincent and Jon’s Final Project: DE-STRESS

Concept:

The idea we had for our website project was creating a website to de-stress the person interacting with it. We were brainstorming ideas and thinking about how stressful these couple weeks would be with finals coming up, then the idea just appeared. We think that this is important to the audience because during finals week, emotions spike up and the atmosphere everywhere feels tense. Studying in an environment like this would lessen productivity of students, but through this website hopefully the tension would gradually get smaller.

Within our website, there would be a specific action you have to complete, for example popping 15 bubble-wrap with background sound effects. Once you finish the action, the next action appears, for example squeezing a stress ball, etc. These actions are to stimulate a sense of completion for the user, giving them the satisfaction of finishing something and at the same time giving them a feel of calmness. We also plan to make the website look aesthetically pleasing, so it would make the website as least annoying as possible.

Sources:

https://theuselessweb.com/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/positive-psychology-in-the-classroom/201211/achievement-vs-accomplishment

Our sources are probably pretty weird, we weren’t really inspired by any specific artists, but more we were inspired by the website “theuselessweb”. We were playing around on the website and many of the websites that had shown up were just us clicking or scrolling around, and that’s where our idea of finishing actions had come from. The psychology study above was something that I had read a while ago, and it was something that I wanted to try and put into a project, because finals can be depressing, so hopefully if we are able to achieve what we plan for the website, students will have a better time studying for finals.

Production:

The main techniques we’ll use is probably javascript and maybe some p5. For the sounds within the website, we can look for sounds online or if possible, create the sounds ourselves, but with the limited time it’ll most likely be from online. There will be no video on our website. The user interacts with our project with use of the trackpad, specifically scrolling, clicking, and moving. We didn’t include the keyboard because that would be too extra for a website that is trying to stimulate calmness. The hardest part of our project will probably be thinking up of enough actions for the website so that it is varied and not repetitive.

Web Work: A History of Internet Art

This reading was pretty interesting because I’m pretty sure not a lot of people know about how “internet art” began. I would even argue that many of the meme culture today started through internet art. The fact that it began because of a glitch just makes it even more intriguing, something that was made by the internet itself, literal “internet” art.

From the reading, it seems that Net.Art was one of the first and biggest communities online to share people’s own creations, and me, as a person who engages in many online communities who share information and their own work, it is interesting to think that with sure scarce technology back then, people were able to make the best out of it and create something cool.

I feel that this reading was very different from a previous reading we did, “long live the net”, where they state there should be more laws/rules imposed on the internet, but Greene’s point was the exact opposite, proving to people that although there may be people who prank, the majority of the community work together to create a better place where people can share their works/thoughts.

Link: https://anthology.rhizome.org/the-world-in-24-hours

I chose this inspiration because the title seemed very interesting to me. The link to the livestream of the project doesn’t work anymore, but it didn’t stop me from reading about the project. From what I understand, the project was conducted by Robert Adrian and his team, and by connecting servers with other teams around the globe, they were able to “receive” art from all over the world. This was what the project was based around, to have art from all over the world sent to one place. Although the actual project took way longer than 24 hours, the run-time was 24 hours and with the 24 hours, they received art styles from thousands of other artists, having meters of paper printing each minute.

I thought this was inspiring because it wasn’t a very significant project, especially nowadays it wouldn’t be hard to do, but the idea of showing the entire world in 24 hours through art was pretty inspiring, because the artists would have to be brave and proud enough of their product to show to everyone, and that is inspiring.

For the video project, I worked with Milly and Oona.

My first impression of this project was that it would be a lot of work, and it was a bunch of work. All three of us didn’t have a lot of time to work together because of conflicting schedules and also all of us getting sick, but I am so extremely proud of us for pulling this through.

We first did most of the recording with the tidbits of time we had between our schedule, and it was really fun. Video recording wasn’t very hard, the hard part was the acting and trying not to laugh.

Milly and Oona did a lot of the video editing, and I was mainly just the person making sure the videos correlated afterwards. I worked on the website. We all wrote the script together and actually free-styled most of it.

Making the website interactive wasn’t hard this time because I’ve learnt how to use hover pretty well, and also flexbox is no problem for me anymore. Trying to make it look nice was probably the harder part, but that’s something that you can’t learn about, it’s something that you experience.

Some example coding:

Overall, I loved this project, Milly and Oona were great partners, I was extremely happy with the product we came out with.

Link:  CLICK ON THIS TO WATCH