How Do We Fall in Love with a City?
Concept:
As somewhat cosmopolitan city dwellers, Evan and Kai wanted to address their adoration for cities through an artistic approach. Having lived in American cities like Richmond (Kai) and New York (Evan) while also being introduced to Shanghai, they chose these three cities to explore and detail how these cities captivated them overall.
The concept behind the code is that you arrive on the homepage, which looks like a desktop, and you’ll be able to navigate a few specific folders for example: Richmond, New York, and Shanghai. The audio part of the homepage will simply be an on-off switch for the background music. The folder icons of will be specialized, and when they are clicked, you’ll be linked to a new tab that focuses on that city.
Sources:
Kai-
Miriam Singer: http://www.miriamsinger.net/
Singer has worked in Philadelphia and her cityscapes are clustered, cluttered, and colorful. Her work can be murals or drawings, but they all have this childlike impossible-to-actualize fantasy that highlights the artist’s love for her city. Kai chose her as a source simply because she had been inspired by Singer for some time after browsing a zine library in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Evan-
Derek McCrea: http://watercolorpaintingart.blogspot.com/2013/08/new-york-city-skyline.html
McCrea encapsulates the beauty of Manhattan through a very simplistic style of watercolor art. By focusing on a very imprecise and almost unclear style of blending colors and objects together, McCrea creates a distinct representation of different cities that are incredibly breathtaking.
Production:
Evan intends to create a city-inspired soundtrack that includes different elements of sound (not only music) that represent the noises and overall feeling of each of their chosen cities. He will include various sounds that are specific to each city and portray them to try and capture the feeling of physically being in that city. The project will also have some voice over storytelling of what Evan and Kai love about their respective cities. The voice overs will be somewhat casual in rhetoric, yet scripted with professional audio quality.
Many graphic design aspects from personal scans will be incorporated as opposed to digital art. The thought-process behind using real hand-drawings is to dedicate a more sentimental touch to the overall online platform. The execution of this project first involves us to draw new art and curiate some previous art, which will be their graphic design assets. Later, these will be process made into minimalistic .pngs using photoshop.
Finally, user-interaction will lead users to have a clearer understanding of the three cities Evan and Kai chose. The aim is to illustrate an artistic approach to city life through their own examples that can be expanded upon by others’ interpretations.
In creating this interactive scope of their 3 cities, Evan and Kai want the user to feel and experience what it is like to be present in these areas and what specific cultural aspects make these cities special/unique.
