23 November 2020 – 13th December 2020
Coming back to working on studio
The deadline for the essay draft was Friday and since that is finally done and out of the way I am feeling much less stressed because I know that I can made the January deadline since I already have a very good start with a word count of almost 5,000. Now that I’m not pre occupied with the essay deadline I can hopefully fully focus on studio work and push forward with creating and making more experiments trying to portray my concept through work. I am hoping some of the research I did for the essay will come in handy and I’m considering experimenting with Machine Learning.
The last Show and Tell was on Tuesday the 24th and I felt it went really well as we had engaged conversations about everyones projects and ideas. I felt I hadn’t’t done much leading up to this Show and Tell but that could be because I had check in points of contact with Jen often and also because I have been finding it extremely hard to create or get motivated especially with the studios fully closing now but I am hoping to change that and push forward. During the Show and Tell we discussed moving forward into exploring non linear narratives and possibly machine learning, also considering the interaction with our phones further narrowing our field of information this made me think of how a website is navigated and the equivalent of what is happening with our recommendations and timelines being that the ‘back button’ on webpages would disappear or that menus which were previously in the menu would also disappear the more someone interacted with the webpage. Rebecca also mention TikTok algorithms and how the users timelines drastically differ for each user.
Someone also mentioned the term shadow-ban (term definition above) touching on the topic of censorship and moderation as well as control. Also relating back to machine learning the idea that it doesn’t have a grey zone you can literally teach it to see black or white and it won’t register anything else unless you allow it, this could possibly be portrayed through Google’s Teachable Machine tool as a starting point deceasing on how I want to go about using Machine Learning and then moving into Runway ML.
Could I design some sort of webpage that disintegrates the more someone interacts with it? Could this be portrayed through a less literal interpretation? The more things you click the more something becomes the same? A button orientated kind of processing sketch maybe starting with two designated spaces one side would be the interacting so clicking dragging etc while the left was some kind of graphic or maybe colour blocks that began to get more similar in colour tones the more they are clicked?
I made this interface layout plan to show what I am thinking of cresting the aim being that the more someone interacts on the left hand side of the screen the less diverse the results will be on the right like the colour will change to the same colour or the shapes will all become one and so on. When I went to create the interface I was inspired by very child like aesthetics and it made me think of how young minds are so easily affected by parents or guardians and how values in children are very often like their parents until they are exposed to others with opposing views. This kind of metaphor would be a great way to illustrate my heavy subject matter in a, literally, playful way.
How is your vision narrowed?
An interesting way to display this work could be a touchscreen tablet of some kind that the viewer can interact with drawing and pressing buttons etc with a second screen/ projector behind them with the interactive window affecting what is happening behind the viewer.
After my studio support with Paul I now know it’s going to be possible to make my idea and with Paul’s help I’ll be able to work on the part of my idea where a tablet or some sort of device affects the display. Paul also assured me it’ll be very simple to stage a ‘projection’ without a project or space so that even if I can’t physically set up some of this work I can definitely display and showcase it the way I want to using After Effects. I have booked a 1v1 tutorial slot with Paul next week so I can learn more about the logistics of creating this kind of work but until then I thought it would be good to do some small experiments I can manage without help so I can get more familiar with p5.js as well as hopefully beggining to make some decisions on what I want to be contained in the “interactive’ and ‘display’ part of the project.
The first thing I did was find a reference example of how to create a button and made this very basic sketch where when the button on the left is pressed a random colour is assigned to the rectangle displayed on the right.
I’m not very familiar with coding in p5.js so I know I will stumble a lot with basic things but I hope that if I spend a little bit of time making small sketches and constantly reviewing the referencing library I will get something out of it.
Reflection
“I will be looking to have a very experimental and hands on approach across a few different methods most likely starting with Processing sketches as a quick and simple way of portraying visual and interactive ideas, using physical prototyping methods then documented through short staged video, possibly looking at different illustrative techniques to portray ‘possible futures’ and Speculative design approaches such as comic strips, digital drawing maybe AR technology” – excerpt taken from my original proposal
I had written the above in my original proposal and looking back I have actually explored all the methods I had set out to try during Semester 1. I have created processing sketches and experiments, used AR through unity and recorded a short video and I have experimented with digital drawing. This portrays to me that even though I have been quite critical of myself this year I have been trying to experiment and create with the available tools I have at home.
Marta Zofia Palacz 