Final project

In this final project, I am going to create an interactive children story book that is based on myth of the traditional Chinese Mid-Autumn festival. Animations and characters will be designed based on the traditional style but will not totally follow its genre. The game structure is quite linear; user will have to find hidden movieclips in order to proceed to the next scene of the story. The game will consist of 4-5 scenes with two basic point/click or point/shoot mingames.

Final Project Ideas

1. Storybook
I want to develop an environment, a storytelling interactive similar to the Alice project I have introduced in my previous blog. By adding music, characters movements and background designs to build a believable environment of the story. Users will be able to make choices in the story and they will control the storyline by using hidden mouse events to control movie clips.

The first idea of the story will be a classic Cinderella story with a twist. The second idea would be a story pick from a children storybook in an environment like you would read a book in real life except you'll see animated movie clips along with the pages when you "flip" the book electronically.

2. Theme Park
Basically mini games within a bigger game. User will be able to choose a boy or girl character, and be able to walk around this theme park to choose what kind of "attractions" they want to play. Mini attractions including rollcoaster, merry-go-around, shooting balloon game, etc.

3. Video, Music jukebox
This last idea is to build a video and music jukebox interface by using Flash. Users will be able to choose what videos they want to see and also what music to listen to. I'd like this project to be able to post online with preloaders build in, etc.

-----

I personally am most excited with idea #1 and #3 because I have already built a game project for Multimedia 1. #3 is much more practically in real life while #1 seems to be a really fun project...

John William Waterhouse

JW Waterhouse is one of my favorite artist/painter whose on the traditional side. He was born in Rome in 1849. His work are very classical; they are paintings mostly surrounding the theme of poetry, myth particularly female mythical characters . They are all very romantic and "dreamy"..telling the story. The female in his paintings look very gentle, creating a sense of softness. The way he paints the drapery, water, implies shadowing and textures all suggests movement, weight and dimensions.

It is quite ironic to me that I like JW Waterhouse as well as Kathe Kollwitz as his work delivers the good, the dream world, while Kathe's brings the evil side and reality.

http://www.jwwaterhouse.com/

2nd artist

The 2nd artist that I have always very interested in is Kathe Kollwitz. She's married to a doctor and they both lived in Berlin to help with the sick and ill. Her life span brought her to suffer from WWI and WWII. She lost her son during WWI and lost her grandson during WWII. It is hard for me to imagine the pain she -in a personal level - has to go through, and to see others go through. She lived in the country whom was one of the "axis of evil" during WWII...The artworks that she created brought the story from the flip side of the same coin, I guess the innocents suffer doesn't matter where you live as long as you are involved with the war.

Most of her artworks show pain and suffering war has brought to the innocents... death, sick, poor, despair. Life is cruel; human beings are evil. What I am most impressed with is that only from looking at shapes, line contours, BW Kathe's printmaking work, I can sense the greatest sadness she wanted us to know and understand and feel.

Kathe's art make us aware; her art records history and also bring us pain.

http://www.dhm.de/museen/kollwitz/english/works.htm

Artist/company 1 - FGA studio

I came across this studio by surfing through the web. Feel Good Anyway studio is based in Portland, OR. Reason why I choose this company is because of this "Alice project they've worked on. http://www.feelgoodanyway.com/interactive/alice.html

I think they have done a great job to attract my attention in this project... particularly in the part where I have to roll over the mouth to review the story...I like also like their drawing style.

I feel that this inspires me for a possible final project idea as I am very interested in vector graphics, fairy tales stories and using Flash for storytelling.

Listening

I found the "Listening to myself listen" article quite interesting. In fact, it refreshes my memory of a Music Appreication class that I took a few years back. My teacher in that class thought that there's no other universal art other than music because almost every single human being started to listen to music or beat back when we were in the womb. I found that statement to be very true. Music delivers feeling and mood like any other art form. I feel that music can create much more influence to audiences perhaps even more than visual art alone. The same piece of visual art if played with different background music will definately have different impact to audience.

The sonic environment" is also very interesting theory to me. I never paid attention to this before I read this article that human has the ability to "unfocus" certain sounds in an environment. Like our brain can decide whether to focus our attention to our conversation in the coffee shop or to the sound of dishes and plates sound. And yet, there is always certain sound that breaks our attention such as a loud beeping sound or a warning signal.

http://www.geocities.com/duul_drv/listening.htm

Netart is art. It is an artform that requires skill, concept and creativity just like any other "traditional art". Netart is usually created with the electronic media as medium and its end purpose is to publish it on the internet as showcase/exhibition. It has a much larger outreach range than any other traditional arts.

Just like any artform, a piece of netart should involve a strong concept/content, craftmanship skills and aesthetics. When creating netart, we also need to keep the file size and the level of interactivity in mind.

I believe I created netart this past week and so as most of my classmates.

Net Art

Here is my experiment on netart for this week. I creatd this animation in flash to experiment the interaction between positive and negative space of different flowers shapes. The interactions create some kind of patterns through motions and colors.


Click Here to View my Animation

Aaron Siegel's Two-Dimensional Audio Mixer

Two-Dimensional Audio Mixer is a flash based experimental audio mixer piece where user can control and compose techno music by dragging different elements within the project. Simple circle are placed on the stage for users to interact and select the amount of bass, lead, kick, snare and hihat within the piece. For instance, when a user drag the bass circle closer to the large volume circle, the sound gets louder or vice versa.

User has full control over how loud each of the elements to fit their taste. Imageries of this piece are simplistic: simple circle shapes with basic colors. When you drag one of the circle icon closer to the main target-board-like-volume-control, the icon becomes bigger and more color intense, the sound will correspondingly gets louder. Once a user create a techo composition, he also creates a piece of visual art accordingly to how his music represents.

I am very impressed with the idea that visual art ties tightly with audio art. I wish there is a way in this project that I could choose the speed of the beat and I'd also like to see the imagery to be animation based on the tempo of the music.

Here is the project link http://www.datadreamer.com/2daudio/projecttwo.html

My questions regarding the readings

1) How important is it for net artist to exhibit their work in gallery? Is it still necessary? Since internet has a much higher possibility of reaching a huge range of audiences, will it be more effective to showcase their work through the internet instead?

2) What is traditional art? if the defination will be art work on canvas by using different materials then should net.art be also considered traditional art in a similiar sense? (i.e. use desktop as canvas and we are making some sort of collages to create artwork whether it is a still or animation)

As We May Think

"As We May Think" is an essay, to me at least, to thank Science and appreciate the intellect of man-kind. Written in 1945 By Vannevar Bush, long before computer or internet was invented, this essay was written to purpose an machine named Mimex to help human store and retrieve data in rapid speed.

As Bush stated humans memory and knowledge are vulnerable as our memories are not permanent and if we cannot find a way to store our knowledge, we would not be able to grow from expanding our knowledge only based on our memory. So, there was a need to create Mimex, to not only store a large amount of data into tiny space, also select and read these data in high speed and use them to our advantage.

Without Bush's Mimex idea, personal computers probably would not existed. Since a lot of our ideas were invented from expanding and building on an existing idea. The Mimex's influence on personal computers are the same way. Technologies and computers, if used wisely, are built and made to greatly assist human beings lives; we should not fear technologies. Thanks to the invention of the Internet, we are now able to not only store the data, retrieve and share these data on the fly with those who has internet access in the world. I cannot imagine the amount of impact Internet plays in the expansion of future human's knowledge.

Reading this essay that was written back in 1945, Bush was able to predict or foresee the technologies in the future. His essay amuses me and I cannot help myself to think all the new ideas and theories that we have today, such as living in Mars, traveling back in time - maybe, they might all come true. I have yet to hear a machine to operate and react based on total creativity or emotions. And perhaps, this day is not too far. I cannot help myself to fear this type inventions but I guess all things can be evil if used in the wrong way.

My thoughts on technology

Technology Fast is limiting ourselves from the use of modern technologies and use the basic ways to achieve our objectives. While I understand there are certain reasons for Technology Fast, such as the need of understanding basic ways of doing things or using basic tools to create art that is totally human. Besides the reasons I mentioned, I am not certain on the idea of technology fast.

Technology is human invention aims to make use of our time more efficient and make our lives easier. Cell phones, computer, light bulbs, even electricity itself are technologies, to me even a piece of charcoal is a product of technology. If I must define, perhaps the use of our hands without the help of any tools such as cooking a piece of meat on fire is not.

Friday Jan 19th

5:30am - Alarm Clock - 10 seconds
5:31am - Turn on Light - 2 hours
5:32am - flush toliet, use water sink/tab - 10 mins
5:42am - Flat Iron - 10 mins
5:43am - TV - 45 mins
5:45am - Microwave - 2 mins
6:45am - Car, travel - 46mins
7:30am - elevator - 3 mins
7:35am - Computer at work - 10 hours
7:35am - light at work - 11 hours
7:35am - refrigrator - 4 hours
8am - phone - 5 mins
11:25am - phone - 3 mins
11:10am- printer - 3 mins
11:55am - Microwave - 6 mins
12:35pm - phone - 2 mins
13:25pm - project - 1 hr 25 mins
13:05pm - phone 4 mins
14:30pm - phone - 10 mins
15:23pm - printer - 5 mins
14:56pm - phone - 2 mins
16:23pm - printer - 2 mins
16:34pm - phone - 3 mins
17:34pm - phone - 7 mins
18:05pm - car/travel - 1hr 25 mins
19:30pm - light - 3 hours
19:33pm - TV - 3 hours
19:45pm - strove, oven - 45 mins
19:45pm - ricecooker - 22 mins
20:45pm - sink - 20 mins
20:45pm - diswasher - 30 mins
21:45pm - bathroom - 30 mins
22:30pm - alarm clock set - 1 mins

I don't believe I can go Techology Fast for longer than 1 hour. My day-to-day life/survival from eating, traveling, getting warm, making money, are all heavily involved technologies. I think the only way I can prepare myself for a techology fast is to study history and learn how human used to live in a cave.

Response to Total Artwork

Richard Wagner's Total Artwork concepts has broaden my idea of multimedia beyond computer and user interaction. Wagner created the Festpielhaus Theater with creating great impact and experience on his audiences in mind. By integrating all art elements and paying equal attention all from lighting, sound, poetry to actors and stagecraft, he was able to utilize these arts and delivered full range of human experiences.

Computer graphics and multimedia applications such as Director, Photoshops are tools/components just like music instruments and script in a theater, but what matters the most are what we create with these tools and how we utilize them to achieve our objects.
From Wagner's idea, I have learned that in order to give my audience great impact from my ideas, I must put equal amount of considerations and designs into every single elements within my work.

In computer multimedia, all elements within the application should be considered. From my choice of music, background settings, tempo, to where the user interactions should happen and when they should happen, all these components will greatly effect the final delivery of realistic experience of my application to users.

Links Paragraph

RACE Color Culture
History Location People
NATIONALITY
Customs Language Location Standard
Political, Beauty CULTURE
Food Beauty Beliefs Religion Art Custom Ritual History
Heritage
PERSONALITY Food Personality Pessimistic Optimistic
Happy Sad Colorful SOUL
inner self invisible truth ultimate final SPIRIT truth
HAPPY soul life meaning BEAUTY standard color pink red superficial FREEDOM
expensive sacrifice war good evil EMOTION happy
sad personality
mind feelings ELECTRONICS japan germany mobile
cars computer
CONVENIENCE subway cellphone distance easy access
speed TIME EFFICIENCY
speed email computer time money
COLORFUL neon blink excitement youth growth
COMMUNICATIONS
meaning understanding
excitement language body gesture.