Project Concept
Through this net art project, we want to share our critical reflection about the internet environment with our audience, including metaphors of issues like cyberbullying and the role of netizen in this digital era. When thinking of the project idea, we went through the readings of this semester and we found that many of them are related to the internet as a medium and our interaction with this medium. For example, Tim Berners Lee’s “Long Live the Web” provoked me to consider the internet as another form of society, and McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” inspired me to look at the uniqueness of the internet as a new form of medium, for example, in terms of how information is spread on this internet. And the biggest takeaway from this semester is many new dimensions to perceive the internet. Therefore, the general idea of our final project is to create an epitome of the internet and the role of us as the netizen. Specifically, we want to guide our audience through some big issues happened on the Internet (e.g. examples of serious cyberbullying happened in recent years) and provoke their thoughts when interacting with the webpage. The main task of the player is to “save” the character from being hurt by the barriers which stand for the dark side of the internet. To achieve this goal the user need to keep talking to the microphone when the barrier which indicates the cybercrime appear. This is a metaphor of the situation that we should speak out instead of keeping silence when seeing something bad happens on the internet. By making the main character floating we also want to imply the status of people on the internet – anonymous and more free. We’ll articulate more details of the interaction in the production part.
Inspiration
In terms of the method to express the content of our project which is cyberbullying, we got inspiration from two projects. In a serial project called The Bullying Project Mural, we found several artists including Giulia Gandini, Joseph Blank, Bailey Graham, Taniesha Parker, Cris Shamrock using different medium including photography and video to express how people react to different bullying phenomenon.
In another project called Antisocial, digital artist Mike Campau uses his artistic talents to cleverly comment on the dark side of social media. Set in eerily isolated locations, each photograph features a single illuminated sign. Though similar to those found outside of gas stations or Googie motels, these marquees ironically advertise a different kind of service: social media websites. Describing Facebook as “the place to go and make everyone think your life is great” and summing up Instagram as a series of attention-seeking exclamations, the revealing signs showcase the underlying antisocial nature of everyone’s favorite social media. This project inspired us in the way it captures a certain feature of the popular social media platform and summarizes it in short sentence. The neon style of the sign design also inspired us to consider to use a cyberpunk style for the website design as a way to depict the internet environment which gives us a sense of technical and mysterious.
As for the interaction, we are inspired by a game called Don’t stop! eighth note (休むな！８分音符ちゃん♪ ) by YASUHATI (also called Freedom-crow). This game takes players’ voice volume and pitch as the input values to control the eight note, who is the character in this game to make movements and get through the barriers. This just inspired us about the input of our project, which is discussing the message on the new media. Thus, we would also like to take the player’s voice as an input to interact with the process of receiving and contributing the messages.
Production
For this project, we would like to create a virtual trip rather than merely a game that invites the viewers quickly travel through the past few years internet culture flows. Therefore, pre-research is absolutely necessary; besides, we also plan to utilize both audio and video assets to enhance the interactivity and user experience. In this trip, some messages would be presented in an absurd, messed-up and twisting style on the way you passed while others may appear in the huge background screen as broken pieces as modern information is mostly in pieces and incomplete. This is probably similar to what things look like in the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. Besides we try to form up the sense of space and time. On the one hand, we play with the volume of audio assets to achieve the space feeling. For example, as the cyberbullying word approaching, the sound record of it would become louder and louder. And so do the other elements in this flow. On the other hand, the background, as well as the front elements, would change its content as long as the time changes to show the difference between years. In addition, as the players would use voice to control the balloon to “eat” messages around and fly higher to avoid being hurt by the bullying words/actions, the volume and time of voice would affect the number and speed the balloon takes in. And for the flow’s movements (such as waving), we will try to solve this technical issue mainly in javascript.