Final Project Proposal (Cecilia Cai)

In this project, I’ll be working with Vivian.  We decided to focus on exploring the effects of social media on people’s lives in our project. For our work division, Vivian will focus more on the works related to photoshop and picture editing while I do more on the coding part. We will also gather the elements together and explore.

  1. Concept

Is social media a sincere outlet to express oneself and link among friends, or a veritable battleground boasting and gloating to get appreciation from others?  While the answer could be subtle, it is undeniable that people are increasingly fascinated by the idea of “a perfect life” portrayed by Kim-Kardashian-like KOLs through social media posts. At the same time, people also indulge in hopping onto social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, in order to read posts, check notifications, share interesting stuff, etc. A report by GWI reports internet users are now spending an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social networking and messaging platforms. We cannot live without them.

Therefore, a critical examination among relationships of social media, branding and the definition of a “good life” is a timely topic. What constitutes a perfect life at present? When you’re choosing brands online, what you are actually choosing?… And, what if all the good things are distorted? By adopting a critical, sarcastic perspective, we hope our project not just reflects a layer of the phenomena happening in the virtual world, but also leads the audience to have a deeper reflection upon how humans get interconnected and impacted via online engagement with the public.

2. Sources 

Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections 2014-2015

Amalia used her social media profiles to stage a five-month scripted performance inspired by extreme makeover culture. She established herself to be an encouraging role through Instagram, profiling herself as what social media seemingly demands her to be. After repeating a lie for three months, she created a truth that she was unable to dismantle. We found this artist inspires us as she “boycotts” her online persona and criticizes the impact of social media. Our project is also about criticizing. However, instead of constructing a perfect figure, we take a sarcastic perspective by making everything imperfect and ugly on social media, reflecting the topic from another extreme angle.

Victoria Siemer “Human Error,”2014

Victoria is a graphic designer who imagines a world where everyday actions and scenes get a computer error message. She updates the photos of this series on her blog Witchoria every week. The photos look like Polaroid pictures, ranging from flowers to people to abstract nature scenes. On top of the scene is a modified error message. We get inspired in terms of the art of error conveying via her work. We had a difficult time thinking about how to express the theme of our project, and we found exaggerations and sarcasm would be effective ways, and error art helps our project stand out.

3. Production

We will construct a “fake” social media webpage, mimicking the style of Weibo. When the users open the page, all the posts appear to be normal, with beautifully edited contents (such as pictures, texts, and videos). However, when users interact with the page, the contents will gradually break and become disordered. For example, when clicking on the pictures to enlarge them, a window will pop up showing the pictures, which, instead of applied with pretty filters, are intentionally made uglier. As for the videos, they would appear as a pretty frame, but on playing, their contents are actually messed up. As more interactions are generated, the webpage itself becomes disordered, with texts displaying randomly and contents not showing orderly. If the user tries to exit the page, an alert will be generated and the users would be unable to quit.

The production of our project will make use of pictures, videos, and audios. The coding part will mainly be based on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and we will also use P5 for some part of the web page.

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