Questions

i have been scouring the internet in search of better questions
interview questions
journalism questions

i also have been interrogating my psychology student friends

'a history of scotland' intro, exciting use of typography

links for presentation

The man with beautiful eyes
The child

Important Links

Project Proposal with Annotated Bibliography
Prototype Reflection and Production Plan


Prototypes
In chronological order
dream countryside
dream bench
dream bench interactive

as3 typewriter
exploding text

interactive narrative text

dark places

www.feelings.net

PrototypeV1
PrototypeV2
PrototypeV3

places

I've tested the places idea by asking myself the question and making some mockups..
places
dark places - great stencil effect!

whilst i think it would make a good question to ask of people, i don't think the idea is strong enough to base the whole project on.

feelings

i have created a site which asks the user a question and encourages them to leave a response.

An interactive animation would then be made out of these responses.
I have accumulated many ideas about how to represent this by looking at various artworks that use typography.
i have analysed their techniques in detail and through experimentation i understand what works and what doesn't. These previous works are important in helping me develop ideas but i want to make sure the style and form of the animation is a reflection of the data i get and not just a poor copy of something i've seen before.

www.feelings.net

perhaps business cards with one of four questions and colours (with the web address on other side)
could be a good way to entice people to the site. easily distributed, hidden, smuggled in, stuck to walls etc..

What makes you happy?
What's your biggest regret?
Describe a place that's important to you?
What's your biggest fear in life?

these are potential question and will be refined after early testing. An introducion would also help guide the user to give more exciting responses.

'A website that encourages its users to air their feelings on a number of subjects, all in the name of art'

genius idea? - a dark place

instead of asking people directly about their hopes and fears i think it would be more interesting to ask them about a place that makes them happy, sad or scared. and then perhaps i would discover their true feelings, reveal more about their personality and get a more interesting and exciting response with a better narrative.

i would ask them about the place and get them to describe it, and then go there to make a soundscape and take photos... maybe! cliche and been done before in sophie calle's work 'the bronx', i like the idea but would definitely present it different to her. for example, close up poetic photography which doesn't reveal too much about the location could be interesting combined with text and audio... short bursts of imagery perhaps.

would be exciting if the descriptions, stories and sounds brought the area to life in the viewers mind without actually showing a picture of it.


of course this idea could be done in a different way, simply as 1 question sent out in text format..

Describe a place that makes you happy, scared or sad and explain why it makes you feel this way?

mockups

i've been experimenting with text and photography..

dream countryside this looks good
but works better with documentary photography and animated words..
dream bench
dream bench interactive

having a photograph seems a little cliche and makes me think of either advertising or silent movies. the next step was to experiment with just text..
as3 typewriter if i had a large ammount of data this could be very useful and i've only just scratched the surface. i'm sure there is a lot more that can be done with text and as3.
as3 exploding text

i like the way the text has been manipulated in this one interactive narrative text ..the angle of the words seems to bring them to life, and being able to interact adds a whole new layer of meaning.

something completely different

what's left out on the chinese version of the net? possible data source but perhaps more useful for another project.

the experiment

few ideas i've come up with so far..

one advantage of just using text or something abstract is that the source of the material could be hidden until the end. so for example, the meaning of the work would change when the viewer discovers who was providing the information.

feedback from presentation

what makes sophie calle's work so accessible? is it the way she draws us into her world?

she focuses on the oblique aspects of life and in her work there is always some kind of experiment or method.. something to definitely consider in my own work.

not documentary - translating, interpreting the thoughts.. its meaning changes when its on a screen.

instead of continually looking at other works of art, i need to start looking at my own ideas, strip away the copying and find my usp. what are the best bits of my idea?

we have 20% preparation time for 80% production, the production will come together if the plan is sound.

Bill seaman (interactive text) 'passage set..' (Rush, 1999:203)

some animations that use text..

alex gopher - the child
the man with the beautiful eyes

I have been thinking about my audience and the works' social political context...

social political context
philosophical insight into the human mind. looking in on other people to make sense of ourselves. looking in rather than out.

Audience
i want to make conceptually sound work which will be accessible and appeal to a broad audience. much of my work in the past has been difficult to show without some kind of explanation of media theory.

some notes/highlights from sophie calle's amazing exhibtion

'take care of yourself'
proofreader
diplomat
psychiatrist
headhunter
schoolgirl
romance writer












i started to think about what made this exhibition special..

• a close examination of the human mind/condition, we are drawn into her world and made to feel at home
  
• the artwork was easy to relate to and perhaps because of this it grabbed me emotionally

some of her other projects which either appeal to me or relate to my research..
























'cash machine'


























'couldn't capture death'

east germany project

the lift by marc isaacs. great documentary which inspired us to make 360

review of sophie calle's exhibition.. 'This exhibition leads you into the profundities of other lives, other hearts.'

2 way screen idea

perhaps as the user navigates through the thoughts and ideas other members of the audience could see through the screen from the other side. so the other person would see the text and an image of another person reading it.... side-on to get better effect, straight on passport photo style, not good!

interactive or not?

it has occured to me that the users interactions could add meaning to the work.

for example, the thoughts and ideas the user chooses to read would reveal something about their personality.

allows the user to become a voyeur, which is a definite winner in todays social networking society.

interactivity would also make each users experience unique.

v surreal argentine film called la antena which uses text and film to great effect

characters in the film interact with the text. great scene near the end in which words float up from all the sleeping people.

i've been experimenting with combining text and photography.. dream

Seems a little cliche... does there need to be an image?
young-hae chang heavy industries

letters are made up of 21 distinct parts

typography animation

I love the collage effect used in the yellow submarine, they use old images and illustrations. a great way of representing 'the people' ... 'all the lonely people'
Eleanor Rigby

Last year i had planned to present my work in this form
the black dog's progress
with different scenes opening up in a new mini screen, showing the whole narrative at once. perhaps this could be a good way to represent my ideas

lots of inspiration to be found here tate intermedia and worth looking at to get an idea of what gets exhibited.

after effects tutorials
tracking a 3d object
3d text
i've been looking at the idea of using after effects to make the text part of the environment

Calm before the storm

I have an idea of what i want to do but not sure how to develop it further. for the last two days i have been brainstorming around the subject and trying a few things out, hoping to find a solution.

Voicing our opinions through new media - Twitter shitta
I've been looking at Twitter (for the first time) to see whether it could be used to generate the data i need for my artwork. at first it seems pretty useless with ads everywhere and banal updates. however, by searching for the right keywords or a recent topical event (eg.iran) it does generate some ineresting responses. I realise now that if twitter was to be used for my project there would have to be some kind of manual filtering.

representing the data
I want to ask people personal questions like what makes them happy and find out about their hopes and dreams but perhaps it could be made more edgy by asking people about their fears, secrets, regrets and anxieties too.

one of my main issues is how to represent this idea. a fairly obvious way of representing such a personal human subject would be to make people the subject of the piece.
continuing with this idea I came up with a few related concepts..

documentary photography/film -poetic
close-ups
animated collage (3d or 2d side scrollling) - traditional consumerist images/drawings/illustrations (perhaps from old ads) of people passing by cartoony flash background (surreal world etc) animation slows or pauses to reveal innermost thoughts of the participants. with their thougths coming to life and forming part of the collage.

idea of world passing us by, forgetting about our hopes and dreams.. trains, commute, time lapse - pausing to ponder.

representing the text (if any)
typography, motion graphics
speech/thought bubbles
note book/hand written
mind map

collecting the data...
texts (with prizes)
poster
postcards
pockets (postcards in pockets)
twitter
interviews (audio recordings)

flash tutorials

been thinking about doing a 3d collage, here's a tutorial on the subject 3D Flash

another exciting flash tutorial which uses the tweenlite flash plugin
exploding pixels
not sure what to use it for yet

i like the navigation system on the site Iamalwayshungry. maybe this could be used to explore my map of stars.

illustrator tutorial about how to create space and stars

great collaborative music/spoken word project
uses youtube videos, the user can then mix and match different clips.

evolving 3d structures with a strong graphical quality.. Yugo Nakamura

i have an image in my head of these thoughts and ideas forming and coming together to create a huge cloud-like object or maybe neurons, which the user could then navigate through.

ben fry's tendrill is a good example of what i'm trying to explain here.
evolving 3d structures with a strong graphical quality.. Yugo Nakamura

dumpster

two very important works in the area of social data

Golan Levin - The Dumpster
Alex Dragulescu- Blog Bot

essay by lev manovich on social data browsing
art against information fibreculture essay

possible areas to explore/ questions to ask..

what makes you happy?
3 wishes
afterlife
what are your dreams, hopes and ambitions?
confessions, secrets
current affairs/ news based (eg. twitter feeds on iran)

philosophical ideas..? could be more interesting but harder to get responses and perhaps too high-brow (losing its commercial mass appeal)

mapping project by architecture student friend of mine, could be used to represent the data

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people
mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.

over the summer i've been looking at all sorts of weird and wonderful artwork to help generate ideas for my final project..

some aesthetically pleasing but fairly meaningless art
the dynamite show
a fucking rainbow

generative music project found on furtherfield
piano etudes
great work which grabs images from flickr and makes a collage based on the users keywords.
your life our movie

soundscape project made by former lsbu student
sonic map of battersea park

some other mapping/ data visualization projects that have caught my eye..
ben fry - all streets


I want to focus on something current so i've also been scouring various newspapers for interesting stories..
2016 blackouts
world record supernova
born to believe in god - this interesting article talks about how we have a religious centre in our brains which can give us spiritual feelings and visions of god