ResearchPost3

Lauren McCarthy-Follower

In her talk at the 2017 Gray Area Festival, Lauren McCarthy spoke about her project called Follower. Users could apply to be followed and if selected, they would receive a link to download the follower app. This service would allow the user to be followed by an anonymous person for one day. The follower would have the GPS location of the user and physically follows them while remaining hidden. At the end of the day, the user will be told through their app that they will no longer be followed. They will also be showed a picture of themselves that their follower took of them during that day. With this project, McCarthy brings up a lot of interesting points about the idea of being followed. With the growing presence of social media, users may get too focused on their follower count that it count affect their behavior both on and offline. In effort to show off having a “perfect” life, or the image of it, people may become selective to what they post online, and/or modify their behaviors in real life just to get a picture or video that they can post online. It also brings up the idea that with social media, users may feel like they have to showcase every moment of their life, whether big or small. While it seems reasonable to share momentous occasions with friends and family, we are also able to share these personal moments with complete strangers online. This also brings up the issues with privacy and security when sharing information online and the question of when does following become stalking. But I think personally, I would be interested in having Follower for a day, to see how it may make me more conscious of my actions, knowing that someone could be watching me. However on the other hand, I also think that I would feel a bit paranoid over the idea that there is someone out there that is constantly watching me.

 

by Angie
P2-VisualizingTime

Visualizing Time Project

Visualizing Time Through a Subway Cart

Displays 1:11-1:12am
Displays 4:17-4:18pm

In this program, I used the state of a subway cart to visualize time. The seconds are represented by how fast or slow the riders are moving. Starting at 0 seconds, where there are little to no movements, the riders are moving faster as the clock reaches 60 seconds. At every minute, the orange “tracker” on the black and white “route map” on the back left of the train cart moves up one “train stop.” Each stroke represents a minute and every 10th minute is marked. For every hour, the number of people in the train cart changes. If the actual time is between 7-9 am or 3-8 pm, which is approximately the times for rush hour in real life, the train cart will be more crowded than usual.

Link: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/609513

 

by Angie
Uncategorized

Angie-Visualizing Time Project Ideas

  1. Time is measured through how much water/coffee/tea a person consumes. The code will display cups or glasses filling up and emptying throughout a day and the empty glasses will pile up at the side of the screen. What the person drinks is also reflected on the time of day(ex. coffee in the morning). For each second, you may see the cups filling up or emptying. For each minute, you can see the cup moving towards the left side of the screen for the empty cups, and for each hour, a new drink is introduced.
  2. The clock is represented by the number of people entering and existing a bus/subway car. The visualization would also include details to represent certain types of riders(ex. students) and there would be an increased amount of people during rush hours. For each second, you see the people inside the train making small movements, for each minute, the train “stops” as people enter and exit the cart, and for each hour, you see new details on the riders, specific to the hour that those people would be on the train(ex. at the morning, you would see people going to work/school).
  3. Time is felt through the state of a person’s bed and/or desk. This uses a basic routine of a person, and as the day progresses, we watch a person sleeping in bed, on the computer on their desk, perhaps having lunch, do other tasks, etc. For each second, you would see the person doing small movements, such as the z’s moving if they were asleep or them tapping on their computer. For each minute, you would see the person making larger movements, such as moving around, leaving the room, etc. For each hour, the person moves onto another task.
by Angie
ResearchPost2

Angie-ResearchPosts02

Harvard Library Haystacks by Rachel Binx

The Harvard Library Haystacks shows the books in the Harvard Library by publication date, the subject of the book, and popularity. The user could also enter a search term to narrow down the books shown on the visualization. It also provides the names and authors of the books that showed up on the graph. The data was provided by the Harvard Library Lab, and it is not stated on how the visualization was made.

In this visualization, it was clear to see the patterns and trends of certain ideas and books at Harvard throughout time. The user could see that most of the popular books in the library were based in science and medicine, or that there was a drastic increase of publications about the internet in 2000s. This design prioritized the simple and clear representation of the books, by using colored circles to represent the different subjects.

This visualization is leaving out the demographic of the students and faculty in Harvard of where the data was taken from. The studies of the students would reflect the types of books that are checked out of the library. Thus the trends in the graphs could be reflective of the courses taken by the students.

by Angie
Uncategorized

Variable Face Project

For the variable face project, I took my portrait of a dog and simplified it in code (it used to have a body). When the mouse is pressed, the dog’s ears “move” and the dog itself is colored by the shades of a randomly selected color. The dog is also going to have a random mouth from 3 options: a closed mouth, an open mouth, or have it’s tongue sticking out. The sizes of its nose, mouth, and tongue is also random with each click. The placement of the dog’s eyes and nose will be random somewhere on the top part of the dog’s face. While working on the project, I had difficulty with showing off the different mouths the dog could have. When the mouse was clicked, the dog would show a mouth, but only for a fraction of a second before “erasing” it. This issue was solved when I moved the if statements relating to the mouths into draw() instead of mousePressed().

Link to project: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/590649

by Angie
ResearchPost1

Research Post 01

Algae is a generative art by Nervous System which was founded by Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, that has 2D and 3D models based on the natural growth of plants(such as algae) and their competitive growth. The outward branching of the art piece reminds me of the endless expansion of fractals. This endlessness could not be drawn by a human, which enhances the role that the computer plays in the art. While the computer has control over how the branches develop, where they branch out, and the pattern it creates in the end, the machine also has its limitations. It can only go as far the artist allows it, or as far as it can go within the restrains of its code. Does the computer know what it is doing is art? Is it just a sequence of numbers and letters to execute? Art I believe, is something that requires some human feeling or meaning behind it, and while there might be some algorithm for a computer to use in order to replicate some human aspects, in the end it is just an algorithm.

by Angie
Uncategorized

Computational Artwork

I chose meme.garden, which uses the word searches of its users to create “gardens” as shown in the picture above. As the user searches for words, they are “planting” a seed from their word. The tree grows based on the the user’s interactions with the words associated to their search and as well as other users’ trees. These word searches and interactions reflect what the user is interested in, and thus with time, these trees can represent the user’s changing interests. While this may not seem like a traditional form of art, the interactivity of the piece and what it says about the user, is to me in fact art.

by Angie