Category: Leon Eckert

                                            IMA Comm Lab Final Project Proposal

            Since the 90’s, the internet has exploded with an unprecedented amount of user created content. For years after the creation of the net, the driving factor that enables users to come back online day after day is the content created by millions of the hosts on the web. Therefore, the importance of user created content cannot be undermined. In fact, the content created by the users ties us together, creating this internet culture that makes the world a smaller place. The web is also a place for expression, a continuing medium that enables everyone to share their idea or thoughts. Without it, society will become closed minded, only having the perspective of the local area in which they live. Therefore, continuing the tradition of providing a place for people to express themselves is one of the themes of our project.

            A good artist should make their audience uncomfortable. In a general sense for any creator, the creation itself should make the audience react. This reaction can come in different forms of disgust, awe, or even uncomfortable. The piece of work in question should invoke a sense that something is not right. For example, the visceral carnage of aerial bombing of civilians depicted by Picasso’s Guernica provided this raw uneasy feeling to the viewers. The concept of journalism follows this theme to the core. Journalists should report on the topics that we don’t want to hear, the topics that make us feel uneasy. Thus, we want to invoke the same slightly less nuanced feeling in our project. With that direction, one of our themes is to invoke an uncomfortable feeling in our users as they interact with our project.

Our idea is to provide a service that enables people to upload a template of their story, poem or any work of literature, and have other users use those templates to create outrageous stories of their own.

             The concept of our idea will be divided into two parts. One part is creating story/poem templates. The second part is other users taking the story templates and slightly altering it that may give it a personal flavor. For those who are familiar with madlibs, the concept works relatively the same. In the first part when the user is creating a story, he or she will input blanks into the story. These blanks are the what the other users will fill in to complete the story. However, the users will not simply get to fill in whatever they want. The users who are using the template will have a deck of words that they must use to fill in the story.

            Examples:

Template Story	Possible User Input
Today, I went to the ____ . The weather is ____, I was ____ However, I feel ______.	Words given: home, banana, please, hot Today, I went to the home. The weather is banana, I was hot. However, I feel hot.

            The user will obtain the words they will use randomly and must strategically use them to finish the story. Due to the randomness of the card words, some stories will turn out disastrously. However, that is fine as this is point of the project. Some stories will not make sense and that is the charm of the interactivity. We want the user to try to use the best method to make a comprehensible story with the choices given to them. We want them to solve an issue where given an uncomfortable situation we want to see how they overcome a problem.

            Currently, no artists were referenced to come up with this idea. Instead, this concept is an offshoot of different concepts. One is of these concepts is derived from madlibs. Originally a children’s method of enabling them to learn their parts of speech, the concepts of filling in blanks to create outrageous stories is the impetus behind our project.

            The website will be entirely text based. No audio, or video will be used. The stack technology to implement this idea will use the following frameworks and runtime environments: express, mongodb, and nodejs. The mentioned technologies will be used to assist in serving the users with the environment to upload their template stories or create their own stories from existing templates.

            For example, when a user wants to create a story, he or she may upload their templet to the server. The server will store the template. When users want to create a story with the stored templates, the server will provide the user with these templates. If the user decides to upload it online, he or she can do so and everyone can view the ridiculous story they have created.

            Overall, we hope to provide a medium for expression but place obstacles to solve. We find that people are more creative when they are given an obstacle to overcome. This feeling of uneasiness is what enables people to rise up to solve a problem.

Communications Lab Final Project Proposal

Jannie Z

As the digital age approaches with exponential amount of information based on the Internet, everyone is now able to create their own content and deliver their thoughts to the world. Just as the Internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us, it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world. So, for our final project for Communications Lab, me and Justin decided to make a platform where everyone could create and share their own content.

Our final project will reflect the different aesthetics within our users. We want our project to be self-explaining, interactive and have limitless possibilities. The users could create their own poems using our project by filling in the blanks of our default template or create their own template. They will have different themes to choose at the beginning, each theme contains a deck of words that you could use to finish their own poems. After filling up the poems, they could choose to save it and share it to the Internet or not. And they can look at others’ works as well.

 Personally, I always want to create a project that has multiple possibilities, and the poem or lyrics have always been my inspiration. Poem or lyrics are relatively short and abstract, so it is open for interpretation. Everyone could have their own understanding of a poem or a song based on their inner aesthetics and personal experiences, it does not need to be uniform. So, we decided to let the poem be the carrier of our project.

During the discussion period, we came to a lot of different projects. Mad Libs is our major source of inspiration. It is a phrasal template word game where one player prompts others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story. Our project borrows the idea from Mad Libs, but we have slightly different goals. While Mad Libs is usually played for fun or enhancing language ability, our project aims at reflecting the different aesthetics of users. After completing the template, you can save and share your work, and read the ones that have been shared before. It will be really fascinating to see how others interpret and finish the poem. Another project we draw inspiration from is “Blacknegative”. It is a web-art project that involves a lot of animation, pictures, soothing music and great design. This project serves as the UI design inspiration. We want to make the process of our project soothing, almost like a meditation. And Blacknegative sparks a lot of design ideas for us.

Our project is going to be a website-based project. We will mainly use HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to accomplish this. JavaScript will cover most of the interaction part, from choosing themes at the very beginning and the “save&share” function in the end. The “save&share” function will be the hardest part of this project. For animation, we will mainly use Processing/P5. In order to make the website dynamic, we need to work on the transitions from pages to pages and also, the interfaces. There will engage audios to give users a soothing experience. We will also use CSS to design the interface. It requires a lot of work both on JavaScript and CSS.

Sources: Mad Libs:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Libs

       Blacknegative:  http://blacknegative.com/#!/loader/

Group: Thomas & Kat

Confusing Email Generator

Have you ever gotten a spam email that was just so confusing and backwards that it was interesting and hilarious? The objective of this project is to generate and send the most obscure and confusing emails the internet has ever seen. Complete with random quotes, random names, Kanye West quotes, the option to translate the email into non-existent languages, and shitty 2000’s era gifs, it will be a breeze for the user to send strange emails to everyone they know — all completely anonymously. There will also be formatting options where users can make their emails absolutely gorgeous with only the most aesthetic fonts, colors, and text sizes. If possible, an option to send many, many emails at once will also be implemented. Users can use an image url to attach any image to the email. Users can also add their own personal text at the bottom as a clue to the recipient as to who sent them this amazing email. @nyu.edu will never be the same again.

One inspiration for this project is Nigerian Prince email scams. We have received many of these and think they are hilarious.

Another inspiration for this project is a subreddit called /r/Ooer (www.reddit.com/r/Ooer). This subreddit was made by my friend many years ago and I have always loved it. It is a self-branded “experimental tech support forum” which has been the birthplace for many memes, and was an early pioneer of the “Deep-Fried” meme format. The screenshot below doesn’t do it justice — just go to the website.

Production:

There will be no video or audio for this project — it is less about the user experience and more about the product. The main page will feature a variety of options to custom-build the email using the below APIs. This will mainly be a coding project and will hopefully give users the opportunity to send very confusing and interesting emails to their friends, family, and loved ones.

Resources:

API Title:	URL:	Description:
Throwaway Email	https://www.programmableweb.com/api/throwawaymail-getalias	The “Throwaway Mail Get Alias” API is an API which allows a user to send an anonymous email to anyone by giving a fake username which is used as the sender’s email and the the recipient’s email address. This will be the bread and butter of the project as the other APIs will help generate the content of the email.
Kanye Quotes	https://www.programmableweb.com/api/kanyerest	The “Kanye.rest” API is an API that pulls random Kanye West quotes from the internet. This will also be an option as opposed to the “Notable and Quotable Random Quote” API.
Random Quotes	https://www.programmableweb.com/api/notable-and-quotable-random-quote	The “Notable and Quotable Random Quote” API is an API which pulls famous quotes from a database of over 30,000 Quotes. This will be in the body of the email.
Fun Translations	https://funtranslations.com/api	The “Fun Translations” API will be another API which will be implemented in this project. The user will have the option to translate the entire email into many fake languages.
Random User	https://randomuser.me/	The “Random User” API generates random names and identities to determine from who the email will be sent. However, users will also have an option to put their own text.

The inspiration of our project comes from “The Seven Deadly Sins”. Pride, greed, lust, wrath, envy, gluttony, and sloth are seven vices that were mentioned in the Christian teachings. They were seen as an abuse or excessive perspectives of human nature. Works showing the seven sins in the mass media tend to be in a dark and gloomy tone. In this project we try to explore a different approach to depict the seven sins–we would like to show how these sins exist in our everyday life in a light and entertaining way. The reason why we want to use a less serious manner is that as is mentioned above, seven sins are actually something rooted in the human nature and we would like to show how these sins are represented in modern times, especially in our daily life. Also, in an age where people are encouraged to embrace and celebrate their nature and imperfection, these “sins” are no longer seen as evil. We are actually committing these “sins” unconsciously everyday in order to make life easier and somehow happier.

Our idea of seven deadly sins comes from the movie “Seven” directed by David Fincher. The movie tells the story of a serial killer who shows his criticism of the seven deadly sins in human nature in an extreme way–killing those who are seen as a symbol for these sins. However, in the end of the movie, the killer himself also becomes a symbol for one of the sins–envy. He envies the perfect family that the detective in the movie has, and kills the detective’s wife, which suggests that the seven sins are actually rooted in everyone’s nature. No one can say that they are innocent, not even those who claim to be a hater and rebel of the sins within human nature. Therefore, we try to show the universality of the seven sins from a daily-life perspective by making this project. The style of our project is inspired by an official account in WeChat called “GQ Lab”. this account uses interactive comics to illustrate social phenomena in an entertaining as well as sarcastic tone which help readers reflect on their everyday life while being entertained.

We will have a start page where all seven sins will be displayed. There will be one page for each sin and there will not be a storyline, it doesn’t matter where to start or where to end. The user can start with whichever sin he/she wants. Users can interact with our webpage by clicking, dragging, hovering and so on. For example, for the “sloth” part, the user can trigger the alarm by clicking on the page and thus, waking up the main character; and for the “envy” part, the user can trigger the audio by hovering the cursor on a specific part of the webpage. We will hand draw all the scenes and use animation as well as audio in our project. We will create our animation using p5. The reason why we decide to hand draw our elements in the page is that we would like to have a better control of the overall style of our project and hand drawing is a great way to create a casual, less serious style. We choose the Internet as the medium for our project, because it is a place where various interesting ways of interaction can take place. More people can see and interact with our project via internet, especially young people who can relate to the theme of this project.