#webarts

I’ve always loved art because it allows people to express themself and to communicate with others involving feelings and perceptions that would be, otherwise, really difficult to achieve. I think that art is one of the most powerful form of communication and “with great power comes great responsibility”. What differ from a standard form of communication is that, the information, is completely personal and reflects the artist’s view of the world. I think that’s mandatory to bear that final thought in mind when we analyze any artwork. Clearly express what we think about important or thorny news it’s both necessary and risky. It’s necessary because talk about our ideas and compare it with others it’s the only way we have to expand our vision of the world and understand different point of view but, on the other hand, it’s risky because, more than once, I’ve talked to people who, no matter what, would’ve never change their ideas or even try to see a fact from another point of view and that could bring to different kind of problems.

With my final project I’ve tried to raise awareness on the topic of security and the fleeting boundary between it and mere mass control. This topic is really felt here in the UK (more than once I’ve heard that “London is the city with most CCTV in the world”) but it’s not in my home country (Italy). That doesn’t mean that we are not “under surveillance” but just that we don’t realize it. Thinking about what to do, I’ve set two main aims: the first one that this project should’ve been easily accessible by as much people as possible and, second, I wanted it to be as interactive as I could’ve make it. Joining those two aims I’ve thought about making a 360°/Google Cardboard video for YouTube in order to have an easily accessible and interactive experience. I really like gloomy and disturbing feels and so I’ve recreated a round concrete room with some TVs and some hard to see CCTV cameras with Blender. On those screens I’ve put some videos from different CCTVs (one from Abbey Road, one from a bar in Malaysia and other one that represented violence, everyday life and so on) with After Effects and I used it also to export the video. There are two different screens (that doesn’t show CCTV footage) and those are the ones where the camera is at the beginning and the opposite one. The first one represents the crowd, the population, us and leads the viewer to identify himself with the people in the screens and the opposite one that is, in fact, the opposite, the “big brother” that “sees all, knows all”. Even if that last screen is maybe too much explanatory I really liked the feel of this big eye watching you and especially using Google Cardboard it feels pretty weird. It’s worth noticing that all the tv, apart the eye, shuts down at the same moment at 30 seconds from the end forcing the viewer to watch that eye until the end.

When I started to do some researches about what Glitch is and how it works, I found a blog. While I was scrolling down, one of the first thing I read was: “The best part about glitch art is, you don’t have to be a technology expert”. This sentence impressed me quite favourably. This means that anyone can make this kind of art and I would love to think it’s so simple be an artist. All we need to create some glitch images is a text editor and lots of luck, but what makes our picture a post-digital artistic image, is make the machine do what we want it to do. However, this kind of art works differently: what I read in “ Sabotage! Glitch Politix Man[ual/ifesto]” with Nick Briz, is that “a glitch is less effective when it’s expected”. According to what Lori Emerson says in his website, a glitch is “the other side of intention”, is the celebration of the error. This is deeply true and I verified it during my artwork’s preparation where I destroyed pictures just because I deleted a single “wrong” letter or number. But what is kind of funny is that, today, we consider art what people tried to avoid in every way 60 years ago. Today, we are trying to unveil what a simply image hides, distorting it, we are trying to show the deeper meaning. It’s a real data manipulation, not to change the sense of the image, but to bring out what he has always kept within. And how we tried to hide the truths and our biggest fears nowadays? Just making a selfie. A happy selfie is the best way to sweep things under the carpet. The paradox of keeping the world out of our problems, sharing pictures of our life with him. I just tried to bring to the surface what, most of times, a happy picture could hide. I looked for the hashtag #selfie on Instagram, took some picture I found, I modified them and then, I repost them on a new Instagram account that I created just for this occasion. I chose to call it “itstimetoselfie”. I also glitched some videos, found on Youtube, which talk about how make a good selfie and where we can have some precious tips to reach the best version of ourselves. The pictures and videos descriptions are three simple hashtag: #selfie, #itstimetoselfie and #shallwe. The first one is obviously what allowed me to find the pictures I needed, the second one is my account’s name and the #shallwe is an ironic invitation to make a selfie, but this time, something real. No filter or fake smiles, just something true. The picture’s location like “Somewhere on this earth” or “In the middle of Nowhere” are also a provocation to think about how much a London location, for instance, affects the picture itself rather than a pictures taken in Hatfield. For what concerns the work methods: I used the Pixel Sorting process on Processing, playing with the brightness, black and white values and HxD is the text editor I used for change their structure. I also tried out different image formats (JPG, png, pdf) to reach different outcomes. For instance, the pdf allowed me to control RGB settings, the Jpeg gave me the effect of slip part of the image to the left or right and I noticed that the png is the perfect mix of the two. To conclude, what I tried to do with this artwork is just let people think about how the image of ourselves on Instagram, the most of times, is a sad happy version of us. Here’s the link to Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itstimetoselfie/?hl=it

During the Workshop with Mark, I learnt how to relate with the 3D. Here some experiment with 3js Editor. In the first one I played with the box shape and I understood how to use the shadows. In the second one I wanted to create something with the several shapes (I made something for Christmas). In the last one I used colours and shape to create shadows and prospectives.

Working on the differences between Youtube, the greatest American video-sharing website and Youku, its counterpart in China, I immediately noticed different features about their homepage. While the first one has the menu bar on the left side of the page (it seems more arranged), the second one has his menu under the header. The first visual impact brought me to think Youtube as more clean and professional in his design. It seems that the top banner of Youku, in my opinion, fills the homepage too much and the menu, in that position, is not intuitive. Finding a way to understand the website’s text wasn’t so easy for me since, even with Google Translate, everything was very hardly accessible.

For what concerns the videos I found in these platforms, I should analyze different aspects: if you are looking for high quality videos, you’ll be able to find them in each website, but I noticed that there are many more low quality video recorded by no professional people on Youtube than on Youku where, on the other hand, I found everything very designed and well built, and I couldn’t find anything amateur. This could be related to the amount of advertise on Youku, more than Youtube. It seems like if not everyone can afford (or deserves) to upload contents. Both of them has a large number of views and subscribers.

Here’s the link of the videosI watched: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX11yw6YL1w Youku: https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTkyMzY5OTA0OA==.html?spm=a2h0k.11417342.soresults.dtitlebut

For the second task, I made a video related to the Art of Cinema doing a montage of films I love. I found out the colour of these movie and how they are used to excite people.

Here are my three experiments in 3js.

For the first one I’ve experimented with lights and shadows. I’ve put two lights behind a sphere and tried to create something like a light setup for an interview avoiding the key light to see the lights behind.

For the second one I’ve used the same sphere but I’ve added a texture map. I’ve also imported a couple of 3D objects to see how that works (and to add a touch of christmas).

Last but not least I’ve merged that techniques and imported the 3D benchy and put an animated light over it to see shadows with a moving light. 

Here’s a link to download the three projects. The only way I’ve found to see them (especially the last one that include an animation) is to open the 3js editor (https://threejs.org/editor/) and import the “app.json” file.

Talking about social media seems natural to start talking about Facebook. Among all the artworks that are available about this platform, one stand out the most for me: Rachel by Rachel Perry Welty. The artist constrained herself to the Facebook status dictum, answering every minute of the day the status bar of Facebook (at the time) “What are you doing ?”. That’s genius, I think, because even if the site itself asks for this information, I don’t think that even Zuckerberg thought someone to follow that advise so literally. The result is great, in my opinion, and shows how destructive a “vow” to a social media could be (even for only few hours). The artist herself said that this experience was excruciating because she could not achieve anything that day.

Continuing to watch to the big players, artist Benjamin Grosser, made few browser plugins which changes drastically how you see social media websites like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or Gmail. The most interesting I think is Go Rando. This plugin picks a random emotion for your Facebook reactions. This is done because “Facebook uses your “Like” activity to target ads, to decide which posts appear on your News Feed, and to manipulate your emotions as part of its own studies of human behavior.”. To avoid this kind of manipulation, this plugin fills your reactions with random one making the algorithm useless and unable of tracking your emotions.

The last one is the most ironic: “Tender”. This project is at the same time really simple but also interesting. It works so much because there’s a common believe that guys always swipe right (common enough to have some memes) and also because the object that swipe is a piece of meat. I loved that decision because it focus the attention on how girls are seen just as a piece of meat by a lot of guys and in a sexist society like ours I think that’s a nice touch.

For my experiment, inspired by Benjamin Grosser, would be nice to create a plugin that converts (analyzing the text) Facebook or Twitter statuses with emojis. That would make the web a better place I think.

Task 1: Youku vs YouTube

I’m a big Youtube watcher and looking to his chinese “competitor” sounded interesting.

Looking at their homepages we can see a lot of similarities but also some specific trait.

We have the same basic structure (with search bar on top and a big banner just under it) but Youtube looks more professional in his design while Youku looks more poor. We can see the opposite happening for the videos. I’ve started a small “sidebar adventure” (the column of related videos on the right of the screen present on both site) and what I saw is pretty interesting. While on the american site there is a lot of low quality videos, it was really hard for me to find something like that on the chinese one. It looks to me like Youku hosts mostly high quality contents with some kind of medium to high production value (paid probably by the fact that there’s a lot of non skippable ad per video). On that side, if the quality is higher, it looks to me that Youku is not so accessible as Youtube that allows everybody to enter the streaming platform.

Searching videos on Youku was not a easy task. The website is chinese only and even if translating it with Google translate made it somehow understandable, searching with only latin alphabet gives pretty much no results because but translating in chinese was a different story. With that search term, the sites showed me a lot of conferences, movies, tutorials and documentaries (like Ted talks and even one from the BBC) about art from making painting to design things but I found the strangest thing scrolling a little bit more. Between other videos popped up the Netflix original documentary series “Abstract”. A little premise is needed because, even if Youtube is blocked in China, Netflix is not but that looked strange anyway to me because you don’t find Netflix movies on Youtube. I’ve clicked the link and the thing is more complex than it looked. I’ve been redirected to another site (https://www.imeiju.cc) that looked to me like one of that shady illegal streaming website and there, the whole documentary (an not only that) is available to watch for free. I found that even more strange when you think to all the censorship that there is on the chinese internet and one of the biggest streaming website of the nation have links to some kind of illegal (I’m even doubting that that’s illegal in China) streaming website.

What the two sites have in common are the huge numbers. We’re talking about one billion hours of content being watched on YouTube every day and 800 million daily video views for Youku. Both companies have been acquired by two internet colossus: Google (for youtube) and Alibaba (for Youku).

What I found more interesting is the fact that while Youtube is created to fit a worldwide audience (with a lot of localization all around the world) Youku is tailored for China making it really effective for that market but really hard to understand for an outsider.

Task 2

This is a video I’ve made based on the “Shooting star meme” starring a friend of mine.

For this reflections I’ve focused on three really different kind of screen. What’s in common with them is the fact that, screens nowadays, passively rule our word. With miniaturization and technological progress, we started to put screens everywhere and this is needed because of the digitalization of every item we use: audio equipment, for example, was only made of transistors, valves and needles, today, with DACs and audio processor everything is controlled with few buttons and a screen. Even fridges are morphing into computers more than mere house appliance.

The first artwork is more a technological achievement more than art itself but I found that pretty intriguing. The “Camera obscura” is the working principle of all video and photo cameras and is the phenomenon that occurs when a scene at the other side of a screen is projected through a small hole in that screen as a reversed and inverted image on a surface opposite to the opening. I found it fascinating because I’ve visited one in Edinburgh and it was a really cool experience. What is really impressive is the detail and the vividness of the image that is projected on the table (that became the screen) with only the use of mirrors and natural sunlight. That building was built with the goal to impress the public and it’s always been an attraction and it works like that. I can imagine impressing it visitors in 1835 (year when it opened to the public) because of the technological implication of it and it works now because it’s amazing to see it in relationship with the history of the photography or of technology in general. What’s weird about it is that the attraction is the screen itself, nothing more. The building is one of the tallest in the old town and is open on top with a breathtaking view of the whole city. You basically pay a ticket to see a reflection of what you’ve just saw with your naked eye and if you think about it in that way it suddenly changes your experience.

Second artwork is “Can you see me now” from the art collective Blast theory. This mashup of online game and art performance is really interesting and make me think about how your actions on the web have a feedback in the real world. Today, with smartphones, that is nothing to be impressed by (someone said Pokemon GO?) but even seventeen years after that artwork was made, the concept that either online or offline, you are the same person is not entirely understood. I think that a lot of hate speech or meanness that you can find online is because a lot us think that our online avatar is a different person from us.

Last one is something in between an artwork and a marketing campaign. Italian rock group Subsonica teamed up with Google+ to make fans able to interact with the band on the live stage. The band members weared special jackets with screens that looped ten gifs made by fan. I found that interesting because screen are usually used in live music either for make the audience empathize (with details of the band members) or to create a new experience with videos or animations. This experiment joined those two goals because even if those were just simple gifs, them were made by fans and, as added bonus, them were on the members and not on external monitors. In this case screens made a close connection between band members and his audience.