Category: JH Moon

Internet Art allows us to make our message visually engaging and interactive to hold your audience’s attention much more effectively than traditional media. As someone passionate about public health, Internet Art with elements of data visualization presents an exciting opportunity to make global health issues better understood by a casual audience. Our attention to a disease is often not proportional to the danger it actually poses. In response to this I want to represent the loss of life by specific illnesses by the appearance of differently colored polka dots. Each ailment will be represented as a different color, and the dots appear at the rate the disease claims lives. For example, approximately every two seconds a person dies of a heart attack, so a new dot will appear every two seconds. The dots accumulate to illustrate the scale of each illness’s impact.

“earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos” –Yayoi Kusama

My project is partially inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s use of polka dots in many of her works, as each dot is both aesthetically and symbolically significant. In the context of my project, each dot will represent a data point, which is also a human life. I hope that by visualizing the quantity of dots (lives) over time, the users will be influenced to think more deeply about the global health issues we face.

Functionally and aesthetically my project idea is also inspired by The Memory Project, which is comprised of countless dots that each represent a memory shared by a user. While my project’s dots will represent statistical data rather than user input, both represent the experience of a human being. My project will also allow the user to click on a dot to read about what it represents, in this case being a health condition and its prevalence or global burden.

The project itself will involve mostly CSS, JavaScript, P5, and some background audio. The user will initially be shown short series of messages introducing the project and its purpose. After the viewer clicks next, the screen is initially blank but begins being filled with polka dots at the rate of the ailment they represent. A counter of seconds is also displayed in the top corner as well as a simple legend at the bottom to specify which color represents which illness. Once the screen is entirely filled with dots, a closing message will appear. Programming this will require me to create different classes of polka dots that appear at a specific rate and correspond to a pop up with health information on the condition.

The visual effect will be illustrative of the pace at which illnesses claim lives and which are the biggest health challenges. The goal is for the user to come away with a more accurate understanding of the scale and impact of leading causes of death rather than presuming the most dangerous illnesses to be the ones most frequently talked about.

1.Project Concept

a) The subject and/or topic:

   Create your own flower with different elements, choose the color and background and send it to others.

b) Why important?

   We select flower as our main elements because we find many young people nowadays rarely express their love and feelings directly to others. They may be more willing to convey love through small gifts like flowers. For example, as the Mother’s Day is approaching, the users can create and customize their own flower and send it to mothers. The flowers will be based on the real flowers, but it will grow and bloom depending on the choices from the users. They can also send the flower not only to their Mom but also to anyone they care about. We want to make a net art that is more flexible and customized, which can encourage people to express their love and thankfulness to whom we love and those who love us.

1. Sources

http://wildflower.resn.co.nz/

https://colormandala.com/

   The first source we found is a website called wildflower, we were inspired by this because the flower it generates is so vivid and beautiful, it also contains a part to send this flower to someone we love, which is also a idea we want to express. However, many people are not familiar with the flower language and in this project, the flower type is limited and generates randomly without any intentions. Therefore, we want to add more emotions to the unique flower and give it some explanations so that the users can choose what type of flower they want and who would like to send.

   The second sources we refer to is mainly related to our technical issue of coloring the flower. This website is mainly a game of filling the blank pictures but we think the single and plain color may be too dull for a flower, so we decide to make our own templates and substitute them based on the color choices.

3.Production

   In our project, the user will first choose to add different emotions and elements to the flower, such as love, friendship, tears, grateful, happiness, etc. Then the flower will be generated depending on what the user chose and the meaning of the flower (flower language) will be shown beside the flower. After that, he can choose the color of the flower and we will switch the color template for each color choice. He can also change the background environment of the flower to better fit the meaning of the flower. At last, he can click the share button and send the flower to others.

   In the production process, we will first do the researches on what kind of emotions that can be added to the flower and how it related to different types of flower category. Then we decide to draw flower templates using p5 and based on the shape of real flowers. The user may select the elements they want for their flowers and click “grow” to generate the flower and the corresponding flower language. There will also be some sound effects when the flower is created. We will prepare the color templates for petals, pistils or leaves that could better merge with each other.

   After the flower has been made, we plan to use the scroll function to let the users change the background environment that best matches the flower language or their feelings. This also requires a lot of research on the flower and their meanings. We also want to play different background music according to the background so that the entire piece will be integrated with each other.

   For the last part, after the user selects all the alternatives, they can click the “finish and share” button, the screenshot will automatically be generated and the pop-up window will show the ways they can share, for example, email, facebook or other social media, or save it to the desktop.

1. Project Concept

a) The subject and/or topic:

   Create your own flower with different elements, choose the color and background and send it to others.

b) Why important?

   We select flower as our main elements because we find many young people nowadays rarely express their love and feelings directly to others. They may be more willing to convey love through small gifts like flowers. For example, as the Mother’s Day is approaching, the users can create and customize their own flower and send it to mothers. The flowers will be based on the real flowers, but it will grow and bloom depending on the choices from the users. They can also send the flower not only to their Mom but also to anyone they care about. We want to make a net art that is more flexible and customized, which can encourage people to express their love and thankfulness to whom we love and those who love us.

2. Inspiration and Sources

http://wildflower.resn.co.nz/

https://colormandala.com/

   The first source we found is a website called wildflower, we were inspired by this because the flower it generates is so vivid and beautiful, it also contains a part to send this flower to someone we love, which is also an idea we want to express. However, many people are not familiar with the flower language and in this project, the flower type is limited and generates randomly without any intentions. Therefore, we want to add more emotions to the unique flower and give it some explanations so that the users can choose what type of flower they want and who would like to send.

   The second sources we refer to is mainly related to our technical issue of coloring the flower. This website is mainly a game of filling the blank pictures but we think the single and plain color may be too dull for a flower, so we decide to make our own templates and substitute them based on the color choices.

3. Production

   In our project, the user will first choose to add different emotions and elements to the flower, such as love, friendship, tears, grateful, happiness, etc. Then the flower will be generated depending on what the user chose and the meaning of the flower (flower language) will be shown beside the flower. After that, he can choose the color of the flower and we will switch the color template for each color choice. He can also change the background environment of the flower to better fit the meaning of the flower. At last, he can click the share button and send the flower to others.

   In the production process, we will first do the researches on what kind of emotions that can be added to the flower and how it related to different types of flower category. Then we decide to draw flower templates using p5 and based on the shape of real flowers. The user may select the elements they want for their flowers and click “grow” to generate the flower and the corresponding flower language. There will also be some sound effects when the flower is created. We will prepare the color templates for petals, pistils or leaves that could better merge with each other.

   After the flower has been made, we plan to use the scroll function to let the users change the background environment that best matches the flower language or their feelings. This also requires a lot of research on the flower and their meanings. We also want to play different background music according to the background so that the entire piece will be integrated with each other.

   For the last part, after the user selects all the alternatives, they can click the “finish and share” button, the screenshot will automatically be generated and the pop-up window will show the ways they can share, for example, email, facebook or other social media, or save it to the desktop.

We had a lot of fun working together on our last audio project, but this time, we wanted to create something that was more meaningful while at the same time learn more about each other throughout the process. As we began discussing project ideas, we talked about our childhoods and that is when ideas started pouring out. We were both inspired by those “dress-up board games” that we often used as kids, where we had an outline of a person and could stick on different tops, bottoms, and shoes to make them wear unique outfits.

Our art project concept will be heavily influenced by our childhoods in this aspect. As an example, we intend to pick out different scenes/scenarios from our adolescence and allow the user to interact with them by moving elements from the scene around, changing background music, etc. One concept of a scene we already have in mind is our bedrooms as tweens. We intend to use a mixture of hand-drawn images along with ones found online to recreate furniture, posters, and other elements of our room. The user will be able to use elements from our own childhood and make it their own in a sense.

This also goes back to the idea that internet art, and art in general, is a creation of the artist. It is an impression of themselves, expressed through whatever medium they choose to use! Our project just takes this impression to the next level.

One artist that we both agree gives us some inspiration and has significance in our project is Ben Lewis Giles. He is known for making very interesting collages, which is what we wanted to do in our project! In some way, we want to gather different images (real or hand drawn) and have the user make their own collage in a space. Another more specific inspiration would have to be the games that inspired this project in the first place. The Melissa and Doug Dress Up Board Game is what started it all!

The project will mainly be utilizing collage. We will try to implement a click and drag element so the user can create their own piece using images we have given them. There are more details as well as changes we have to make, but we wanted the user to have an involvement with the work. The reason why we wanted this kind of level of involvement is to simulate the aforementioned games that we had growing up, in hopes that people who come across our art are able to use it and make it their own.

Some suggestions given to us during class feedback were to possibly have an option to allow the user to save their final creation as an image, but we will have to discuss about that. Once we solidify the intention of the project, then we can decide whether or not we want to implement this kind of idea. Before that, we will just keep planning to go forward with this idea, as well as making adjustments based on the time we have as well as the limit of our ability to make the outcome exactly as imagined. Another suggestion would be to have a pop up that appears when the user chooses an item to put in the setting, that explains the significance of that object to us in our childhood. This makes it more personal, but also gives some insight/ reasoning into why we included that particular object in the project.

I hope it goes well! 😀