Author: conye

conye – FinalProject

Internet Postcards: Travels from the World Wide Web

Internet Postcards is a chrome extension that allows you to generate physical, mailable postcards from your internet adventures.

“We live on the internet, so why not share your travels?” – Lumar

More specifically, this chrome extension takes a screenshot of the webpage that you are currently browsing, and opens an overlay in which you can postcard-ify the postcard with some decorative text, leave a message on the back and send the postcard result to a real physical address using an online direct mailing service.

This project was inspired by my nostalgia for the physical artifacts that result from traveling. Although I love sending postcards home to my mom, I rarely travel away from the university campus and my room. This project is my solution to that predicament. If the only places that I visit are online, then why not send postcards from those locations instead?

Early prototypes / ideas:

This project began as an idea for a telecommunications system / manufactory. Below is an early prototype I made demonstrating how I imagined it might function.

I also hoped that I could keep a global homepage of all of the postcards that were made (only shown if the user opted in to show their work on the page)!

I developed this tool using some base code that I found for a screen capture chrome extension by Simeon Velichkov. I spent a good amount of the time working on making the generative decorative text that shows up on postcards. I made it using three.js, but plan to work on the url-hyphenation part, along with the overall shape of this text as well.

Although still incomplete, I’m really glad that I was able to show this at the exhibit and actually see people use my extension. Although the printing process wasn’t as streamlined as I was hoping for, the fact that they could sit down, use my extension, and walk away with a real, mailable postcard with a stamp on it excites me and makes me really happy!

I’m also so grateful for all of the feedback during the final crit-all of it was incredibly helpful, and it was exactly what I needed.

Future Directions:

I plan on continuing this project and releasing it as a real extension for public usage! Before that, I need to:

  • add in direct mailers
  • add in paypal so i don’t go b r o k e
  • email receipts of transaction
  • address book
  • address verification
  • post to twitter  / have a global homepage
  • impose NSFW filter
  • make a better documentation video

Exhibition Documentation

Below is a compilation of where people visited during my exhibit.

Special Thanks to:

  • Golan Levin for his advice during the creation of my project
  • the Studio for Creative Inquiry and Tom Hughes for their support and the funding through the Frank Ratchye Fund for Arts @ the Frontier
  • everyone who stopped by to try the project during the exhibit
  • Simeon Velichkov for making a screenshot capture extension under the MIT license (https://github.com/simov/screenshot-capture)

conye – FinalProposal

The Concept: Travels from the World Wide Web

I plan on completing my manufactory project, which is a chrome extension that allows you to generate physical, mailable postcards from your internet adventures. “We live on the internet, so why not share your travels?”

Early prototypes / ideas:

To do:

  • add in direct mailers
  • add in paypal so i don’t go b r o k e
  • email receipts of transaction
  • address book
  • address verification
  • post to twitter  / have a global homepage
  • impose NSFW filter
  • make a better documentation video

barcode – conye, joshua kerry, takos

Scan your id to get your alternate identity!

This project was made using p5.js, the randomuser API and a barcode scanner. We envision this project as a way for people to treat their state issued ids as a portal to an alternate, digital self!

We also imagined that, because each id is mapped to one and only one other alternate self, the user might have to take care of this alternate self by scanning other items, and if they fail to take care of it properly, the alternate self will die. Furthermore, this self cannot be brought back to life because most people only have one state-issued id.

telematics – crit response conye

From reading the responses, a lot of people mentioned “nostalgia” and the blending/bridging of digital and physical, and the concept of the internet as a physical space. A lot of people mentioned that it “retrieves” postcards and “obsolesces” sending digital messages. I really liked receiving feedback in this manner, because it allowed me to get a good feel of if I was communicating my idea effectively and how they interpreted my concept. I think that based on the responses, they understood my idea well enough. However, the next time I present my idea, I would like to focus more on my personal motivations for making this project (feeling disconnected from my mother, who I like sending postcards to but rarely have the chance to) because only one person picked up on that part during the feedback. I’m really grateful to everyone for taking the time to write down so much feedback!

Here are a subset of the responses that I thought were interesting:

“It’s nostalgic and tangible — it both embraces the internet and brings back a more personal mode of communication” -airaly

“a wonderful idea and successfully mocked up! The UI will be very important and will determine if people use this in reality.” -arialy

“We gather at night around a campfire and tell stories of our digital trends” -ulbrik

“nostalgia for physical interaction” -ulbrik

“to connect digital people with physical tokens.” – ulbrik

“intended audience: the digital native (likely old enough to appreciate the nostalgia of postcards)” – lumar

“goal: share the joy of an internet location… there’s something so innately wonderful about giving something special, that they very act of giving is a gift” – lumar

“We live on [the internet], so why not share your travels?” – lumar

this project shifts the collective towards thinking more of how the digital and physical might blend.” – lumar

“it retrieves a more personal way of sharing. Retrieving postcards, where the message has to be far more considered.” – lumar

“To connect people, show people that you’re thinking of them in a day and age where we spend so much of our time indoors and online.” – dechoes

“This makes ‘journeying’ and exploring the web feel like traveling the world. You can send postcards from your web ‘destinations.’ Very joyful.” -jaquar

“kind of an exercise in obsolescence but charming” – takos

 

conye looking outwards -03

Note: I HAVE CHANGED MY IDEA, but here is the looking outwards I made with an old idea.

Sleeping Speech Idea

Telematic Artwork! If you’re having a good conversation, why let sleep stop the fun? 

sleep talking! 🙂

Potential tools:

# 1: Dreaming like Mad

Dion McGregor was a prolific sleep talker whose nighttime musings were so complex and bizarre that his friend made it his lifelong project to record his sleep talking. Decades later, the tapes resurfaced in the form of a mixtape!

“Dion never actually intended the world to hear his sleep mumbles, instead they were recorded by his songwriting partner Michael Barr, who was fascinated by them. And now the album has now been re-released, 50 years on, by Torpor Vigil Records, along with more recordings of Dion’s sleep stories.” – Dan Wilkinson @ vice

“When Milt Gabler of Decca was interviewed, he called the album ‘one of the biggest flops I ever put out!'” – Dan Wilkinson @ vice

The idea of remixing sleep talking is related to how I want to take sleep movements / noises and remix them into a conversation. I’m inspired by the idea of finding meaning from meaningless speech. However, I understand why every song/album created from this sleep talk was a flop… it’s only compelling to a point.

More on this!

#2 Typatone: “Digital Typewriter that composes songs out of your writing”

“The act of writing has always been an art. Now, it can also be an act of music. Each letter you type corresponds to a specific musical note putting a new spin on your composition. Personalize your writing by choosing between six unique moods. Each mood changes speed, filter and color to each letter’s musical note. Easily import text written in other writing applications with a copy and paste interface. When you’ve finished writing, share it and download an audio version with a click of a button! Whether it’s a message, essay, story, or poem explore a new way of writing. Make music while you write.”

Not super related, but it takes text and turns it into music. I’d like to do a little bit of the opposite! Sound to text! I’m inspired by this simple interface and the clean and natural integration of the concept into this interface, although the amount of time one spends interacting with this project would be minimal in any situation because the interaction is rather one-dimensional and quick (I tried the demo in the article).

It was really hard to find good art that was related to my idea.. does anyone have any suggestions?

Looking Outwards 02 – conye

Atlas – Guided, generative and conversational music experience for iOS

above: documentation video

Atlas is an ‘anti game environment’ that creates music and includes ‘automatically generated tasks that are solved by machine intelligence.’ This app aims to question presence, cognition, and ‘corporate driven automatisms and advanced listening practices.’ The user generates music through their interaction with the app, which asks the user questions from John Cage. These questions are ‘focusing on communication between humans’ and ‘concentrates on the marginalized aspects of presence…’ This game looks visually stunning, and I appreciate how it attempts to be a different type of game (‘anti game’). I can’t judge how successful it is in being ‘anti-game’ without playing the game, but I like the addition of the questions into the gameplay mechanic and am a big fan of how clean the visual shapes are.

gif for game

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was created with javascript, p5.js in Swift iOS, and Pure Data. It has an example template using libPd and is available in the App Store for $1.99.

 

 

 

conye – 2D Physics

Dinfinite Dog

A dog hanging from a chain of hands, where the gravity in game is affected by the gyroscope data of the mobile device. On impact with the wall, small creatures will pop out!

Although I had originally wanted to build a dog-builder game (depicted below), I ended up with something rather different. I’m still happy with how it turned out, because I learned a lot about Unity’s physics engine and still made something that I find novel to interact with. At first, I wasn’t fond of how the body parts of the dog could move out of the place with each other and distort the dog body, but now I’m happy that it adds an element of surprise and makes the dog more dynamic.

My rough final draft of the project didn’t include the fluffy, springy walls and instead had rigid, unmoving walls. This iteration of the app looked very violent because it was essentially just a dog smashing against the walls.  However, I received a lot of a good feedback (such as fluffy walls + springs on the wall colliders + dog face blinking animation) during crit that made the game a lot dog-friendlier.

Thank you to Lukas for help with the dog’s torso shader, to Tat for her help on the visual look, and to Grey and Aman for their advice on the swinging dog!

Documentation pictures

I had originally hoped to make a dog builder application, as depicted below. Because it was physics based, I thought the idea of using real mobile to influence gravity would be a neat interaction, so I built most of my program around the idea of a blob of flesh swinging around on a rope. Users would then be able to add dog parts to the blob of flesh, making many permutations of a dog.

Early prototype of the app; I built the dog’s body from colliders in Unity.

Some assets I drew for this app.