Category: Ann Chen

Concept

The topic we choose to address is based on the book 1984 written by George Orwell. The book describes a dystopia where the government closely monitors their people and controls both their actions and minds. Our project will present three of the main scenes in the book: the living space, the working space, and the torture chamber – Room 101. In each scene, the players would be like the character Winston Smith in 1984 and play the game in the first person. They can explore the living space and working space. Their choices may lead them to Room 101 and go through unpleasant scenes of punishment. They can be obedient to the Big Brother or they can revolt with their not-cooperating actions, but there is actually no way out in that awful society. We would like to evoke emotions and cause people to think about their freedom and independence, the relation between society and individuals, or other creative thoughts through our dark project. Also, the project will be easily accessible to the audience who have never read the book.

Sources

There are three sources which we chose as inspirations to our project. As stated as our subject for the project, we clearly took our scenes and settings from the book 1984 by George Orwell. The other two inspirations are from two artists. The first one is Angela Washko’s net art “The Game: The Game”, in which she created an interactive game to show the hook-up and dating culture we have become familiar. In our project, we will make an interactive game similar to the process of Washko’s work. The second artist we took inspirations from is Olia Lialina who created one of the masterpieces of net art in the late 1990s. Her work “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War” inspired us from the way it separated different thinkings as if the boyfriend suffered from PTSD. In our project, we will also create an option for the players to select which will be called “doublethink” as written in 1984, which the player will be allowed to think differently than how he or she acts.

Production

In this project, we will incorporate animations, audio, and interactive choices. The rooms will be in animated formats. Before each choice, there will be audio alerts playing, like in “The Game: The Game” designed by Angela Washko, to command the player. In the living space, there will be a big screen for the audience to interact with. The players will be asked to stare at the screen all the time, which means they need to keep putting their mouse on the screen. If they failed, they will be sent to Room 101 to be punished. In the workplace, there will be brainwashing audio playing constantly. The players will be required to ask questions like “Do you believe the Big Brother?”. If they choose the wrong answer, they will end up in Room 101 again. Another setting in the working place is that there will be colleagues there. The player is not alone but in a group of people who are acting obediently to the authority. We want to use the conformity to add pressure on our audience – to stay thinking independently and keep one’s own personality is more difficult when you are in the group. In Room 101, there will be punishment scenes. The game is an endless loop. It will never end because it is life in 1984. After being punished, the players will be sent back to their living/working place and continue their experience. We will set an ending button that always displays on the screen. The players can click on that button and leave the game whenever they want, in case they feel uncomfortable in the game. Although these settings are dark, we are trying to create the best simulation net art for the players. Also, at the beginning of our project, there will be a warning site to suggest that this website is dark and might evoke feelings of uncomfortable.

In this project, I’ll be working with Vivian.  We decided to focus on exploring the effects of social media on people’s lives in our project. For our work division, Vivian will focus more on the works related to photoshop and picture editing while I do more on the coding part. We will also gather the elements together and explore.

1. Concept

Is social media a sincere outlet to express oneself and link among friends, or a veritable battleground boasting and gloating to get appreciation from others?  While the answer could be subtle, it is undeniable that people are increasingly fascinated by the idea of “a perfect life” portrayed by Kim-Kardashian-like KOLs through social media posts. At the same time, people also indulge in hopping onto social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, in order to read posts, check notifications, share interesting stuff, etc. A report by GWI reports internet users are now spending an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social networking and messaging platforms. We cannot live without them.

Therefore, a critical examination among relationships of social media, branding and the definition of a “good life” is a timely topic. What constitutes a perfect life at present? When you’re choosing brands online, what you are actually choosing?… And, what if all the good things are distorted? By adopting a critical, sarcastic perspective, we hope our project not just reflects a layer of the phenomena happening in the virtual world, but also leads the audience to have a deeper reflection upon how humans get interconnected and impacted via online engagement with the public.

2. Sources 

Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections 2014-2015

Amalia used her social media profiles to stage a five-month scripted performance inspired by extreme makeover culture. She established herself to be an encouraging role through Instagram, profiling herself as what social media seemingly demands her to be. After repeating a lie for three months, she created a truth that she was unable to dismantle. We found this artist inspires us as she “boycotts” her online persona and criticizes the impact of social media. Our project is also about criticizing. However, instead of constructing a perfect figure, we take a sarcastic perspective by making everything imperfect and ugly on social media, reflecting the topic from another extreme angle.

Victoria Siemer “Human Error,”2014

Victoria is a graphic designer who imagines a world where everyday actions and scenes get a computer error message. She updates the photos of this series on her blog Witchoria every week. The photos look like Polaroid pictures, ranging from flowers to people to abstract nature scenes. On top of the scene is a modified error message. We get inspired in terms of the art of error conveying via her work. We had a difficult time thinking about how to express the theme of our project, and we found exaggerations and sarcasm would be effective ways, and error art helps our project stand out.

3. Production

We will construct a “fake” social media webpage, mimicking the style of Weibo. When the users open the page, all the posts appear to be normal, with beautifully edited contents (such as pictures, texts, and videos). However, when users interact with the page, the contents will gradually break and become disordered. For example, when clicking on the pictures to enlarge them, a window will pop up showing the pictures, which, instead of applied with pretty filters, are intentionally made uglier. As for the videos, they would appear as a pretty frame, but on playing, their contents are actually messed up. As more interactions are generated, the webpage itself becomes disordered, with texts displaying randomly and contents not showing orderly. If the user tries to exit the page, an alert will be generated and the users would be unable to quit.

The production of our project will make use of pictures, videos, and audios. The coding part will mainly be based on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and we will also use P5 for some part of the web page.

It is vert interesting to see Rachel Greene talks about how internet offers a space of freedom to a certain degree: “…the Internet allowed net.artists to work and talk independently of any bureaucracy or art-world institution without being marginalized or deprived of community” (163). I’m going to Prague for study away next semester and they offered a class on “post-Communist media” (but not for next semester so sad..) which interests me a lot. I think it is very meaningful to connect the Internet, as well as artists for the net to a social view. The Internet offers a new world beyond the old world mechanism with its advantages of immediacy and mobility. From here, the advantage of “creating vacuum” is also something we should pay more attention and make good use of. 

Link: http://archive.rhizome.org/starrynight/index.php

StarryNight is a net based art project, that works with the texts posted on internet all over the world. It collects data on how many times a text has been read, assigning a star to it on the project’s “sky”. Based on how many hits the text receives, the star becomes brighter and brighter, signifying the importance or perhaps the confirmation of its existence on the internet. Another feature this website offers is selecting between the keywords linked to a specific star (text), linking it with the other texts having the same keyword in common. This feature is represented by a visual “linking” of stars, that create beautiful constellations the same way real constellations have been represented since ancient times.

I really like the way this project captures the manner in which, in the same way as the brighter stars are easier to get noticed by a mere human eye, the specific texts rise from the depths of the internet towards the imaginary sky, becoming brighter and brighter, easier to catch the eye of the other internet users as well. This project is symbolical, which gives it the spark I believe every art piece should have and that sets it apart from other items meant simply for amusement.

As a form of art based solely on internet as its platform, net art seems be able to open new doors for contemporary artists. As Greene mentions in her article, one of the net arts’s greatest advantages is its immediacy, that complies with the modern world’s cry for immediate action and reaction, in the highest speed possible. Another of the net art’s advantages is, I believe, the depth of the source this art can build on. Internet is a space that gets every minute, very second richer and bigger, allowing the artist an immense library of sources for his projects, by doing so tearing down the limitations the material projects would pose. Despite the net art|s nature being nature non-material, with modern technologies that allow us to bring the electronic image to perfection even in third dimension, the net art still seems to have a lot to offer to the art community.