Author: Ya-chi Chang

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Final Project Reflection- Selina (Kyra&Selina)

What is Beauty?
Design

Our final project aims to show people that there is no single beauty standard. The audiences of our website are children since we thought that childhood is when we form our perception about beauty.

To unveil our notion, we start from the scene “mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who’s the Fairest of them all?” from the movie snow white, which most of us have seen in our childhood. This is one example that there is only one beauty standard, so we want to make change of it somehow. By clicking on the mirror, we can explore the mirror’s answer.

 

We choose some cultures that we think are some of the most representative in terms of solid beauty standards, including oriental beauty standards such as Chinese and Korean which aspire for fair skin, US and Brazil for tanned and chubby body, and also unique standards from tribes in Ethiopia and Myanmar to show how divergent beauty standard is. When you click on the spots, it shows you the collages we made based on our research online.

When you hover over those collages, you can fit into the culture more by listening to the audio we’ve selected. After you’re done, it asks you to scroll down and solve this little puzzle! It’s not visually pleasing but we intended to let our audiences know that this is what beauty is.

Process

To address our moral, we first did research on the beauty standards around the world on google. This might actually be a weakness of our project, since online platform even though is convenient and easily see people’s ideas, it lacks authority. If I could start this project again, I would have put more into consideration instead of simply searching online.

Based on our research, we made collages of what we think beauty in that country looks like and what is the beauty trend under influence of. I also think we made a mistake here since we didn’t make selections wisely enough that we include something while excluding others and also choose images to present certain culture, which I think betrays our purpose, just as what we had been told in the presentation. This actually makes me think of whether I’m doing the what I’m trying to convince people to get rid of. We should have thought twice or third times how does the audience actually feel about the context.

In terms of the coding process, one major problem that we’ve encountered is that the dragging function does not work on Kyra’s computer, or that is to say does not work well on Mac for some reason. This is the major problem that we encountered but we didn’t get a chance to solve that till the day of presentation. If we got enough time, maybe I’ll try out some other approaches.

From proposal to presentation, I think we have a more concrete and solid position. At first, we just think that it’s good to show people different beauty standards. As we are doing more and more research online and as we build up our website, we start to question: what is this website for? Who should it aim at? Finally, we realized that it should actually be an educational website for children. To make it feasible for children, we use simple interaction just as clicking and dragging for them to interact.

Future

What I think I would do if we have enough time, first based on the advices we received from class, we will do more research to back up our whole project. Instead of making the collages filled up the mirror, I would like to leave some where blank to indicate that that is not the only beauty standard of that culture. Last but not least, since we aim to make a educational website, I’m thinking whether all these functions can work on iPad as well, since it is the main means for children to touch on internet.

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Week 11: Response to “A History of Net Art”-Selina Chang

Before reading this article, I have never thought about net.art as anything other than drawings and stuff that appears through the format of web. This article literally alters my perception toward net.art. One quote that I really like from the article is that ” Building an equitable community in which art was conspicuously present in one’s everyday life was a collective goal.” I feel like through net art, net artists accomplish various things that we cannot simply achieve through daily life, or that is to say the life without the Internet. For instance, through internet art, one can challenge the domain name monopoly through net, just as the logic of Name.Space that is described in the article. And also the challenge toward feminism. They really fascinate me. I feel that net.art enables us to achieve a lot of things that we were not able to before. In addition, unlike drawing on canvas, net art provide a lot more possibility for artist to create and can interact with audience. I’m really appreciated for those devoted to doing and pursuing internet art since they provide me with insights that I would never had if not seeing them.

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Internet Art Review-Selina Chang

look,See-chris ashley

This page is a collection of Chris Ashley’s HTML drawings started from 2008. The mechanism under this is that The drawings are made using HTML tables in the WYSIWYG editor in Dreamweaver, a software application used to create websites. The WYSIWYG editor (What Your See Is What You Get) is a tool used for editing a web content that, unlike writing source code, allows for the direct manipulation of the colors and shapes that will appear online. The HTML table is a grid with a designated number of rows and columns. After making the selections for the table, Ashley assigns a hexadecimal value to each square in the grid, giving it its color and code. A new HTML drawing is made every day (from http://archive.rhizome.org). So basically he generates the drawing by assigning different colors and code to every grid/or pixels to make painting which I think is pretty cool. All these drawing are in the same size of 770X660px since they are generated from the same website that he designed.  Even it is just a change in color of the grid, it brings us different feelings.

This makes me feel like playing games from the 80s or 90s since it looks like pixelized game.

This piece is the one that I like the most because of its gradient and stuff.  

about the artist

Chris Ashley is an artist who creates his work through the use of coding with simple instruction to create shapes, add colors and texture to his paintings. Through the use of this new medium, he is able to create freedoms and use this freedom to diffuse and inject his artwork with new fresh meaning.

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Video Project Documentation-Selina( Hannah, Xavi, Grace, Selina)

Who Did It?-An Interactive Murder Mystery

Description

Our project is a comedian murder mystery that reveals a fact that actually happens on campus, which is that there are stuff everywhere that nobody can find place to study. To unveil the story,  we narrate from the end when the murder happened, and then let user choose from the two suspects to see their interviews and then decide which suspect do they think actually committed the crime. In addition, throughout the story line, we also add in some interactivity to let user have a sense of investigating by themselves.

Process

Basically how we divided the job is based on what we are good at. Xavi and Grace are the actors since they are good at acting (from my perspective). Hannah and I did the filming and manipulation. Since I used to use Premiere a lot, I played the role of adjusting the video, like arranging order, color correction and stuff. Hannah basically did all the coding with some of my help. Our initial plan is that me and Hannah take charge of the coding. Hannah has already done with most of it and she sent it to me so that I can make some justifications. I failed to do so because how we code are very different and I could not understand her way of coding. This lead to my not able to adjust the code. Since I still need time for editing video, I just left that.

At first we are having trouble in terms of the interactivity, since what we can do is to let user choose from two suspects, and then at the end, decide who they think is the murderer, which is actually lack of interactivity. Then while shooting, we came up with the idea that we can also user choose what to investigate.

One of them is the security video. We made it  a pop up.  We also encountered problem when doing that, since we could not find out the reason why we cannot adjust the size of the web page. After consulting, it turned out that it is just the problem of syntax. In addition, what we could not find ways to accomplish is to make the pop up jumps up automatically and disappear after it ends, while at the same time control the main video to pause while popping up, and play after it disappears. This is actually a pity for me for this project. I think it will be really cool if we could add in that.

post-morTem

Overall I think we did a great job on this project, even though that is still not what we initially planed to do. What I think we can improve is to build a more concrete story line, which we fail to due to the time restriction. I think if we have time to develop more on this, it will be a really cool interactive story!

What I learned after this project is that we should always pay attention to every single word that we type in while coding.  Sometimes different coding habit may lead to not able to put things together, which occurs to our team just as I said above. Also the syntax is really important for coding even if it is just an error of punctuation. And punctuation is actually the hardest thing to find for me when debugging. I feel like next time I’m coding, I should code a lot more carefully and check frequently that there is not syntax mistake.

I feel like this project actually teach me the essence of cooperation, which is to do things together with everyone doing things they are familiar with. It would probably decrease our efficiency if I was doing the acting. So I really appreciate them.  I don’t think it is rude to appoint job like this. How we can allocate jobs the best is to base on everyone’s “expertise”.

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Audio Project Documentation (Selina&Kyra) -Selina

HIdden disaster
Description 

Our project aims at raising people’s awareness toward environmental issues like global warming and air pollution. Basically we use the audio to depict our daily lives. While we kick our day off, we start to pollute the Earth. We have ripped sounds from our daily routine like driving to work our school, printing jobs, ordering food, and so on, aka things that we consider harmful to the Earth that we seldom beware of. Using the contrast between black and white comic clock and realistic and vivid background, we kind of portray the gap between ideal life and harsh reality.

PRocess

A really big problem for us during the process is actually the interactivity. Cause at first we keep focusing on the audio itself, we made the single story line that depicts the story, and people can kind of envision the scene by only listen to the audio collage. However, during the user test, it is when we started to realize that there  should be more interactivity, so we almost changed our initial plan radically. In most of our project, I think we are on the right track towards the moral that we are trying to convey. 

We basically divided the job equally, that Kyra and I both do some coding and some audio collage. in terms of  coding, the most, not difficult but complex part for me is the Java Script. In order to make the best interactivity while maintaining the story line, we should decide which kind of interaction we want to use. It is intriguing to use the key press but it will some how affect the way story is unfolded, that’s way we choose to simply clicking the clock to keep the story going.

Post-moRtem 

I think what I benefit the most from the audio project is that we should always focus on the interactivity while unfolding the story. There is always a way that is suitable for the project. The project is always gonna profit from adding interactive aspect to it. In addition, since there is a wide range of interactions that we can choose from, it is crucial that we consider the best way to unfold the story instead of simply choosing fancy effects. It’s not the fancy effect that is of great importance, but the overall effect of the project itself.