Medium Specificity

Instructions to see webpage - IMPORTANT OR ELSE IT WON"T WORK!
Follow this link to my google drive:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B75koEPcA2_oRTRzLVl5SkJPQlE

Upon finding the drive, you will encounter a zip file, right click (or click on the file and then click on the download arrow above) on the file and select "download."

Once you have the zip file, click on it and a box will appear with multiple options... click the button that says "Extract." This will separate the files so that the code can work. Then click on the "index.html" file. Select the google web browser and you will have access to the webpage!

Artist Statement - The Virtual Reality

The world is dynamically shifting in the way it communicates due to the development of the computer. The computer, which actually was conceptualized as early as the nineteenth century, help streamline many tasks and increase personal productivity. With the advent of the Internet, however; the computer’s potential was truly unlocked. Now people across the world can have look into a window that transcends borders and learn about others in a manner of seconds. It allows people to share ideas and artistic mediums with one another instantly. However, we often fail to see how computer technology can be an art in itself. Through programming a number of ones and zeroes, a skillful person can augment the pixels of any screen in order to create dynamic masterpieces that are not possible with other artistic mediums. As such, I wanted to dig into HTML/CSS coding in order to highlight what the medium truly means in an artistic sense.

In our reading, Scott McCloud sought to find the essence of what a “comic” is as an artistic medium. He began with a broad categorization (a sequence of pictures in a deliberate order), and slowly added additional features to his definition in order to make it more specific, as his original definition began to include what other people might see as separate mediums (cave paintings, sequence art, etc.). I tried to follow the same process by thinking about what goes into an internet website. Here are the features that I uncovered:

·      Websites possess

o   Connection to Internet so that they are universally accessible

o   Seen through a screen that is connected to a processor and can augment pixels through a series of code

o   Has an element of user-machine interaction—in order words, the computer responds to certain prompts and usually the website is dynamic

With this definition, I choose to highlight the importance of coding in the medium. I do not have a lot of skill in HTML as you might see in my website. However, I thought about how webpages are merely lines of code that are able to augment screen pixels in an organized fashion. I also thought about the importance of user interaction with the medium to provide a unique experience. The power of webpages comes from the give and take between man and machine, making the machine almost human-like in appearance. Taking those two aspects, I decided I wanted to have the webpage be dynamic in a way that exposed the coding that went into the site itself.

I originally just put in a link that displayed the code, but I also wanted the user to have the ability to just hover over pictures and have those pictures change upon the mouse touching them. In this aspect, I drew inspiration from a website called codeology, which is a crowdsourced project where the website’s code is able create 3-D designs entirely out of other codes. The artistic thesis behind this is that the coders wanted to show how coding itself can be an art form just as much as what the code does to manipulate screen pixels. In order to gain a similar effect, I used a tool that coded the pixels in my photos into matrix form. As such, I was able to achieve an effect of visually displaying the coding much like in the link below.

http://codeology.braintreepayments.com/featured/spacex/kernel-centos7

In addition to exposing the importance and art of coding in my piece, I also wanted the webpage to have a deeper meaning in regards to its content. We often take what we see online as reality instead of realizing that such interactions are presented through simple lines of code. Often, we tend to believe far too much that what we are seeing on the screen is reality rather than an illusion of reality. In order to clarify that point, I decided to codify several images from my Facebook page (if I was skilled enough to recreate a Facebook page I would have), as I feel that social media is the pinnacle of augmented reality in many regards. We often see each other at their best due to each individual’s ability to augment what content goes into the page and how it is presented digitally. Although websites and cyber interactions help lower barriers and are convenient, we must remember that what we are looking at is merely code and a shadow of reality.