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.