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.

Historical Story

ttps://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byac-xQoW-s1ZzdNZE9KWlFleVk/view?usp=sharing

Artist Statement

The aftermath of the Civil War, referred to by historians as the Reconstruction era, is an often misunderstood part of American history. Our screenplay is a psychological narrative where two flawed individuals, a fictional protagonist named William Cromwell and the infamous John Wilkes Booth, reflect some of the darker ideals of both the North and South respectively as Reconstruction occurred. William Cromwell reflects extreme self-interest of the industrialized North while John Wilkes Booth reflects Southern romantic idealism. Due to shrewdness, Cromwell wins in the end and profits for himself while Booth meets his demise much like the Southern ideals he espouses. Much like Citizen Kane, we wanted the plot to center on complicated characters with whom we could sympathize with, but also criticize. Our story is not only critical of some of the North’s treatment of the South at the end of the Civil War, but it also (like Citizen Kane) stands as a caution to current society of the damaging effects of extreme self-interest on American society. Additionally, we wanted our story to be a bit unrealistic in its presentation by incorporating a bit of humor and improbability much like what was portrayed in our class reading of The Veil, which slightly exaggerates reality and suggests a personal viewpoint of events through its animation style. We too did not try to fully present reality, but rather exaggerate the ideals of the two main characters in order to further establish our theme and caution. We wanted it to be obvious that our story was based heavily on personal opinions and attitudes, yet informed by objective historical events.

The attitudes and beliefs of our protagonist were based off an often forgotten group from the Civil War era--carpetbaggers. We forget that there was more going on than simply North vs South. According to our research, “...most carpetbaggers probably combine the desire for personal gain with a commitment to taking part in an effort “to substitute the civilization of freedom for that of slavery.”” (Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877, (1988) p. 296) William Cromwell was based off of this group. Although he did not agree with the John Booth, he worked with the pro-southern man in order to make money. After he acquired such money, he quickly sold out John Booth to the Union soldiers, fighting for freedom in a dark and betraying way. Based on this context, the story stands as a criticism of the North’s treatment of the South post-Civil War, where many “carpetbaggers” took advantage of the South in order to gain personal profit. Cromwell became a microcosm for some Northern attitudes after the war, which were based on self-interest and moral justification.

The second part of our historical research went deeper into the events surrounding the Lincoln assassination and the motives (as history suggests) of John Wilkes Booth. We knew the Lincoln was killed at Ford’s Theater by a gunshot wound, but were surprised to find that Booth’s plan included conspiring with multiple individuals in order to cripple the U.S government beyond President Lincoln. A noted Civil War reporter, George Alfred Townsend, stated in regards to the co-conspirators, “Booth informed Powell, Herold, and Atzerodt of his intention to kill Lincoln. He assigned Powell to assassinate Secretary of State William H. Seward and Atzerodt to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson. Herold would assist in their escape into Virginia.” We also learned that another target was going to be Ulysses S. Grant, but he decided not to show up to the theater at the last moment. Given these facts, we were inspired to place our protagonist in the assassination scheme and have his target be Grant, as this would set up the opportunity for the protagonist to separate from and betray Booth in the aftermath of the assassination. Since our protagonist was fictional, it presented a nice “what if” scenario we could play with in order to further establish the theme of self-interest over ideals.

On this topic, we also looked into reports regarding Booth’s personal motives for assassinating Lincoln.  In his 2005 analysis of Lincoln's assassination, Thomas Goodrich wrote, "All the elements in Booth's nature came together at once – his hatred of tyranny, his love of liberty, his passion for the stage, his sense of drama, and his lifelong quest to become immortal." We thought that Booth should be a complicated character much like the protagonist. By making him a character with somewhat plausible reasoning behind his actions, and being betrayed by his ally, Cromwell, we wanted to portray Booth simply as a man with a strong credo. He believed in freedom and standing up for personal truth, which are both inherently American ideals. In the end, Booth and our protagonist both wanted to assert their individuality and achieve some personal end by their actions, but went about it in very different ways. The characters remind us to be careful with our own ambitions, as we too can be caught up with outside circumstances as we make our own history.

Process Piece - Building the Snowman

Artist Statement

In our increasingly materialistic society, we often overlook the benefits of processes and often focus our attention on the end product. As we discussed the importance of process in class and in our project partnership, we came to the realization that, as opposed to childhood when our ideology was to do something for the sake of having fun, adult life has caused us to shift focus to results as opposed to experiences. Due to these observations, we wanted to find a process that we could not only document, but participate in and engage with in order to rekindle an untarnished, child-like outlook on process. For inspiration, we looked towards art mediums in which the final product is temporary similar to the monk-drawn sand designs we observed in class.

In our research, we found an account of one of the earliest exhibits of process art, a 1969 presentation called “When Attitudes Become Form,” curated by Harald Szeemann at the Berne Kunsthalle. The exhibit featured artists who, rather than produce aesthetically pleasing, “commercialized” works, sought to visually create “seeds of ideas” in the form of works that were stacked on the floor or hung on the wall. By rejecting conventional aesthetics (tacking felt to the wall, creating steel structures that could be walked through, substituting clay for uncommon materials) the exhibit’s pieces emphasized the tactile, human quality of such work and encouraged the audience to reflect upon process instead of the art itself. One aspect of the exhibit that caught our eye was of ice sculptures that melted as the audience observed. These sculptures reminded us of another form of temporary art: the snowmen we used to make as children. When we built snowmen in our youth, we did so because it was fun to be with friends and engage in the process. Much like the melting ice sculptures, we knew the snowman would not last; but the end product was not the priority. As such, we decided to document our experience with building a snowman and emphasize our candid, personal experiences with the process.

In terms of artistic execution, we drew inspiration from the short film by Smith Journal called Smokehouse, which documents a simple hunter who decide to build by hand his own smoke house in order to live a more organic lifestyle. What differentiated this film from the other homework viewings was the use of careful editing of process insightful commentary, which helped the audience understand the impact of Rohan’s experience (which probably lasted for months) in context. We wanted to mirror that execution in our audio piece, leading us to integrate the commentary of our experiences along with just enough process sounds that the audience could follow the snowman’s progress. By cutting the process sound against our commentary, we hoped that the audience would not only gain respect for the process itself, but understand that we too grew from it. We included sounds of the process within our commentary in order to further strengthen the correlation between our experience and the building taking place; much like Smokehouse juxtaposed Rohan’s commentary with images of him constructing. In a way, we were not just building a snowman, but building our own appreciation for organic process just like Rohen. Ultimately, it did not matter that our snowman lasted (we checked, it was kicked over the next day), what mattered was that we did it, had fun, and reconnected with our inner child.