arialy – 60-423: INTERACTIVE ART

arialy – FinalProject

Our Tab creates a way to reintegrate your closest relationships into our modern daily life through messages and drawings shared on a collaborative new tab screen.

As we spend an increasing amount of time online, we need to find new ways to connect in our digital spaces. This new tab screen can sync with two or more people, creating a shared space for close friends, lovers, or family to leave messages and drawings. You can choose just one person or group of people to share with; even without notifications, you’ll always see the messages the special person or people in your life leave for you.

As time goes on, the drawings will slowly move down the page. They are completely out of view after 24 hours, leaving a new blank canvas for new creations. The old drawings are still just a scroll down memory lane, and those more than one week old are archived.

It’s common knowledge that our society is both the most connected and loneliest it’s ever been. For example, half of Facebook users have at least 200 Facebook friends, and yet there’s typically only a handful or less friends a person feels comfortable reaching out to in dire times. While social media invests in sharing with large groups of people, I believe there’s great opportunity for connection in the space of direct communication. Video calling my family, emailing an alumni, messaging my friends while abroad, watching shows with my sister… these are all experiences I’m grateful for. How can we create one on one communication tools to foster our closest relationships?

I started to think about places online we look at on the daily, and specifically a screen that actually reinforces our habits. I quickly thought about our browser new tab screen, which often shows our most frequently viewed websites. There’s plenty of chrome extensions for customizing this page, typically to change it into a task manager, clock, and/or aesthetic image. But what if this space was changed into a communication tool?

I created Our Tab to make a digital intersection where we can reintegrate our closest relationships into our daily life. People can use it for whatever purpose they see fit– stay accountable with friends through a bulleted list of tasks, create dots at the top of the screen whenever you’re online to monitor your use of technology, send gushy messages to your significant other, remind roommates to take out the trash… The time component of this space– the scrolling of the drawings– encourages daily interaction your special person/people through it, and uniquely reminds you of those that are thinking of you every day, with every new tab.

I definitely want to make this into a chrome extension that’s user ready + a legit video over the summer, so will let y’all know when this launching!

arialy – FinalProposal

For the final, I plan on continuing my work on the new tab screen.

Though most of its functionality was working for Project 4, the projects are not actually scrolling and dynamically updating the navigation. I definitely want to make the time aspect of the project actually work. Additionally, it would be great if I could add an archive for navigating through old drawings.

I also want to network this project so people can create a new room, connect with other people, and actually use this new tab screen. Ideally this will project will live on as a chrome extension.

arialy – Project4Feedback

From the feedback I received, I think it’s a good idea to

make this an actual chrome extension! I was glad to hear people would want to use it.
have the drawings continuously scroll rather than scroll down all at once. This allows a more scroll like flow, as well as better negotiates time differences between people.
leave the drawing tools as is. I was originally planning on adding a text tool to add typed text, but the group’s discussion on how the screen feels more intimate when hand written makes me want to leave out the text tool.
add an archive for old drawings. I hadn’t really thought through what would happen once you have an over abundance of navigation dots, so adding an archive beyond the last week or drawings sounds like a good move.

Thanks everyone who was in my group for the critique :~)

arialy – telematic

I created a shared new tab space where multiple people can draw and leave messages. There’s a toolbar in the top right corner. You can draw with the pencil or pen (for straight lines), erase, and change the color. As the day goes by, your drawing will scroll down out of view, leaving a clean slate for a new day. Old drawings can be viewed by scrolling down, or clicking on the left hand navigation of dates.

When thinking about telematic art, my mind goes to how we can make more intimate communication two, or a small group, of people. The new tab screen is a place we go to hundreds of times per day, and yet usually serves little purpose (aside from luring us back into our frequented sites). What if we could leave messages for each other on these screens?

Messages on a new tab don’t send you notifications, yet you can count on someone viewing it within the hour. For people apart, it’s an intersection to intentionally yet also coincidentally meet.

Arialy & Dorsek – BarcodeProject

Ever thought hangman is too easy? The strategy of calling out common letters first– a vowel, s, or t, is predictable. But what if you couldn’t guess any letter? What if you could only guess… letters you scanned with a bar code reader?

Our project is barcode hangman– you can only guess the letters that you scan! Play against the computer or friend and see whether or not luck is in your favor, or if you can find enough barcodes to scan to get to your desired letters. For additional incentive, the words will form a barcode pun after ever round.

Arialy-Checkin

I’m currently working on a synced new-tab screen for two people. Telematic art for me is most exciting in the way it can uniquely connect people and create different modes of communication. For this project I was specifically interested in how to use digital spaces we interact with daily into something more interesting.

I thought about what has been used in connecting two people in art/design projects. I’ve seen several (more generic ones) that use someone’s heartbeat, but for me personally, a person’s heartbeat is conceptual poetic, but doesn’t really feel unique. I’ve seen watches designed to have two times on it, one for the time zone of another person.

As for new tab screen, they generally are aesthetically pleasing and/or focus on productivity. For my project, I’d like to combine the “new tab” functionality with communication between two people.

In the new tab screen I designed, people can collaboratively draw on the top white area. As days pass, the drawings fade into the background, encouraging new drawings while also letting old ones stick around. On the bottom section, there’s a customizable avatar, the weather and time for each person, and an area to leave longer form notes. I’ll now be spending my time coding this design! My focus will definitely first be the collaboratively drawing space on top with the drawings fading over time, and then with time allowing the supplementary long notes that appear beneath it.

Arialy-LookingOutwards-3

LokLok is an Android phone app/widget for people to draw on each other’s phone lock screens. It’s similar sending people snapchats, but is much sweeter in that it doesn’t require opening an app to receive the messages. Instead, it’s a surprise that appears on your lock screen. It’s also possible to use it as a couple or in a larger group of people.

The best thing about the internet is its ability to connect people regardless of their location. With email, FaceTime, Skype, text messages, the many forms of group chats, and the ability to share locations, there’s a ton of ways to actively communicate. In contrast, the draw of Telematic Art for me is the opportunity for a more poetic form of passive communication. I came across LokLok because I’m was interested in communicating through text and drawings through screens we see on a daily basis (our new tab screen, desktop, home screen, etc). Though LokLok is advertised as a sort of commercial product, it’s successful in ways that I find lacking in other attempts of networked art. It’s actually functional in its ability to send messages, isn’t a physical product, and seamlessly integrates into daily life.

arialy-mask

This project uses p5.js and ClmTracker, and builds off of Kyle McDonalds p5.js + ClmTracker starter code (thank you!). The colors of the masks are generated with color-scheme.js.

The instability is part of what comes along with much of today’s open source face tracking software. What is that was a key feature, rather than a fundamental error? I made a mask that changes every time it loses track of the face.

My original inspiration for this project came from the Chinese Opera mask changers.

The mask changing here is playful and very entertaining! Though the magic partially comes from the performance taking place in the physical world, I wanted to bring this sort of energy into the digital space with my mask.

I first set to generating masks. I used the color-scheme.js library to get triadic color palettes, and then made a base mask with accent shapes on top.

Somewhat similar to the Chinese Opera mask changers, I can hide my face and reappear with a new mask (while trying to channel at least a fraction of the energy of those professionals!). Unique to this digital space is the more peculiar methods of intentionally changing masks and the manipulation of them in the process.

arialy-lookingoutwards2

Light Kinetics – Espadaysantacruz Studio

Light Kinetics is an installation of tungsten light bulbs that give light weight– the force of a tap on the first lightbulb will send a light down the wooden rail of light bulbs. An piezo electric sensor on the first bulb captures the force, and the physics is simulating in Unity.

Giving light weight and force is an unusual and beautiful sight. While light’s movement is too fast to see, here its movement has been slowed down across the many bulbs. That being said, while the floating wood is a lovely form, it feels a bit like a smaller prototype to a larger piece. This might be due partially to the mess of cables on the side and the hints of some sort of fishing wire to suspend the structure. On one hand, making the piece too long might cause people to punch the first bulb to try to get their light ball as far as possible, somewhat breaking the subtlety of the piece. But I do think there could be some polishing bits to making the piece feel more complete.

arialy-2DPhysics

The sketch is live here!

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My goal for this project was to create a visualization of period cramps. I’ve first hand experienced many cramps so intense that I’ve broken into a cold sweat, vomited, and tried to chase the extreme pain with liquid-gel Advils.

In this visualization, clicking will spawn blue pills. The blood particles will disappear when they make contact with the capsules, but the pills themselves will too disappear over time.

This project turned out differently than I initialized imagined. I’d hoped to create more “blood clots” by linking together the red polygons, but had issues with the frame rate dropping too low. Though this sketch is missing many nuances of the experience its based off of, I’m relatively happy with how it turned out.