#digitalmediadesign

We were able to attend a workshop with Heath during the exhibition week which was an exciting prospect having already been drawn to his installation the previous day. We started by meeting in the gallery by his exhibition where he explained in more detail exactly what it was about and showed us exactly what the displayed identity had, including credit cards (which take the longest in creating a new identity), most attention grabbing, pledges to other peoples organs. He was explaining that you can create these identities and sell them which I found quite extraordinary. 

Throughout the day he was explaining how our identities and our online identities were collected and used saying that being on social media and having an online presence can be a huge threat to our privacy. He then got us all involved by making us introduce ourselves to everyone but with a fact nobody knew about identity or survival or something along those lines. Initially we panicked but it was quite surprising that as we went around the room there was many interesting facts coming out, some people had created identities using id numbers from China to play online games and of course the classic lying about our age to get access to things online. 

Heath then showed us how to ‘make money’ - a somewhat misleading title but a play on the societal construct as he took a fiver in exchange for a coupon for £5. He then explained how that coupon (which was no more than a piece of paper with his signature and a promise on it) was now worth £5. It was then he explained how he often used this with his friends and gave them coupons worth  some of his own art. I was surprised that actually he had managed to scale this up to work rather than just merely a small exercise in a class room.

As the day went on Heath taught us more about survival, and how he teaches people to go off the grid. keys to such are only using cash for monetary transactions and creating a new identity. He also talked about surviving in the woods in the case that you were on the run.

At the end of November, as a class we went to an exhibition in London. It was titled Strange days Memories of the future and displayed various video project installations. Being totally honest I usually don't enjoy exhibitions as I don't generally grasp the abstract ideas, and although most projects within this exhibition were largely of that nature, I thoroughly enjoyed it, particularly the presentation with large screens in dark rooms and loud speakers. My favourite presentation was titled ‘4th floor to Mildness’ and consisted of a room full of beds and videos from underwater were being projected onto the ceiling. The artist, ‘Pipilotti Rist’s’ work ‘fuses the natural world with the technoligical sublime.’ I also thoroughly enjoyed another installation titled, ‘Fly Paper’ by the artist Kahlil Joseph which intertwined footage of people dancing to some good music and clips from American football. Needless to say as a sports fan this grabbed my attention more than any others.

References

www.strangedays-memoriesofthefuture.com/artists.html (accessed on 20/12/2018)

I have to say that, so far, my least favourite part of this whole process was dealing with Wordpress. Other than installing Wordpress in fact. During the second hackathon and Mar’s triumphant return we were taught how to install a CMS backend for our website. We downloaded FileZilla as the FTP we would use, Wordpress as our CMS backend and we had to trawl through our emails to find our SQL information to login once installed.Once all this was installed we were able to upload our websites to the Hertfordshire server, the final step in creating our website!

This process was fairly manageable and well taught by Mar so that we all followed.

However later on, I encountered many problems with Wordpress, the echo function to retrieve pages on our website simply refused to work and when it came to creating a theme, I tried both the one we created in class and creating one from scratch, which took the better part of a day to work out. Neither worked and caused some real grief as they caused all my pages on the server to be blank white! I had to delete the theme through Filezilla causing it to revert back to the original them enabling me to actually access the pages.

I finally found a way to edit a pre existing theme with a plugin:

This allows you to change the CSS of the them currently being used on my website so I changed as much as I could to make my Wordpress portfolio pages fit in with the rest of my site.

In order to create my 3 final images, now I had a decent idea of what those images would include, I wanted to create the resources I would need so that I could then put them all together. Firstly, in illustrator I created the basic shapes that I knew were part of the design and decided on the colour scheme for these as I wanted the final images to be a full set, or at least adhere to the same style.

the bottom of these two was to be the background for my images as I liked the look of the digital terrain mapping and based on the Narcissus chapter which explains humans were made to map the world but we don’t, it represents the surroundings which we notice are there but we not take in the detail and the true sight of it. This therefore is a blank landscape which I created in illustrator rather than use on for google. I did this by drawing a line and then repeating it many times. Then using ‘envelope distort’ I created a grid of selection points that I could then manipulate to create the shapes above.

For the third image I wanted the same look however I was using a specific landscape and so I manually traced it out as a grid with white lines: 

I then needed to create the characters for my images with the idea being that from the cartographers point of view(they designed us) they did not care what we looked like and so I made the characters blank which then also showed how arbitrary we are and we focus so much on how we look when we are designed to be looking at what is around us. 

As I created my website I tried my best to keep up to date with every section being responsive so it could be seen on smaller screens. I did this by constantly scaling down the page to see how it resized itself as I added code. However when I got to a almost finished point, I uploaded it to the server and loaded the page on my phone and it was completely different. The links changed colour, the content didn't fit in divs. This meant I revised each section of code to make it more responsive. 

I added the scroll function to each div as shown in the top picture. This means as soon as content overflows along the y axis it is able to scroll to see content now hidden below.

Also using media tags, as shown in the second image, allowed me to set my pages so that at certain screen sizes font size decreases, enabling me to fit more writing on one screen, or also non-essential elements, such as the portrait in my about section, disappear when a certain size so there is more space for the text to fill. 

This was a preemptive measure recommended by a second year student as he had all his photos on his website on a hard drive which stopped working and he lost everything so if anything happened to his website and it couldn't find the image it could not be recovered. I created an imgur account to store all my images online and so that I could define the ‘src=“”’ in my HTML code as that address. This is just a far more reliable way of adding photos to a webpage as the website will always be able to follow the path to the file.