This is my website for IML300 class.
This is a music visualizer made by Xinghan Zhuang. It contains 7 musical keys from C4 to B4 made by the oscillators in p5js. Each musical key is paired to a special visual effect. Users are allowed to determine if they want to play the key and show the visual by using buttons. Meanwhile, users are allowed to change the pace and loudness of the musical keys and visuals by using the sliders provided. The visuals are inspired by the Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda.
This webpage contains 5 poems that I wrote before when I got emotional. Surprisingly, I found that all these poems connect to each other. I realize that using webpages to showcase poems allows the audience to get better immersed in my emotions and narratives since I can add audio and interactive elements to them. Also, I love poems because they link people and people's emotions together. Even if people do not know each other, they can still feel each other just by reading each other's poems. Therefore, my last page allows people to share their poetic sentences with me and every other audiences of my website, so that we can all feel the strongest emotions of strangers we won't be able to know in real life.
This project exposes some common discriminatory remarks and stereotypes within Chinese communities. The inspiration for the project comes from the author's personal experiences and observations of various forms of discrimination both in real life and on Chinese social media. Since China does not implement knowledge about discrimination in its education system, the intention for this website is to not only showcase the existing discriminations and stereotypes but also to introduce basic education to the Chinese audiences.
I am so glad that I chose this topic to read and reflect on. I want to go to grad school for a MFA degree right after graduation (UCLA is my dream grad school), and recently I've been rethinking my art making process and my social pattern. Therefore, Man's works and her talk offers a perfect perspective to help me review all the problems I've met in my life. Just like Maya Man, I'm always afraid of being not authentic online. I'm afraid that what I post does not represent the real me. I'm also worried that the art I'm making are not mature enough to represent my real thoughts and skills. Therefore, although I have accounts of nearly all social media, I hardly post. After making many meaningful projects and researching, Man finally recognized that sometimes even performing can be meaningful. And my own take on this video is that I realized that everything, including things that I doubt, things that I dislike, things that I fear, all makes sense. I really should stop overthinking and start posting my life and my work confidently.
Discussion Questions:
How do you define "authenticity"? How do you know if any representation
is "authentic" or not?
Is being "authentic" important to you? What is the relationship between
you in real life and you on social media? How does this relationship
influence your art making?
What do you think are the differences between coding/generative art and
other forms of art? Do you think the results of codes would be more
"authentic" compared to artworks solely made by humans?
American Artist views technology in the scope of race and identity, and views race and identity in the scope of technology. They argues that the transition from a black backgrounded, code-based computer to a white backgrounded, gooey based computer reflects the ideology of anti-blackness. I buy their narratives, but I don't believe in their results. In other words, using white interface instead of a black interface is a fact, all screens were naturally black is a fact, in Silicon Valley black developers are far less than white developers is a fact, and the anti-blackness ideology is a fact, but the connection between switching interfaces and anti-blackness is not a fact. A phenomenon is understood through behaviors but judged by intentions. Killing a person won't necessarily make the killer a murderer or a criminal. Judgement is based on intention. The killer may be a responsible driver who drives normally but accidentally hits a person who crosses the road when the light for the person is red. The person being killed may be the actual killer and the person who kills the killer may just be a brave person who tries to stop the killer. It is only when a man kills a person with the intention of killing the same person can we say that this man is a murderer. The same logic applies to the relationship of anti-blackness in the technology realm and anti-blackness in the race realm. What on earth is the reason for early stage developers to change the background from black to white? Is wiping out black population and eliminate the importance of black population the reason? American Artist does not tell us in their article. Therefore, their conclusion does not make sense to me. However, I found the artist's exhibition, which has the same name as their article, after reading the article. I would argue that the article and the exhibition together as a personal manifesto makes a lot of sense. For me, anti-blackness in the tech realm is not an indication of anti-blackness in the race realm but a symbolic representation of the latter. These works offer us an oppotunity to review social issues in another perspective.
Discussion Questions:
How do you define the relationship between anti-blackness in the tech
realm and in the race realm?
In spite of American Artist's arguments and my arguments, the statistics
are real. That the black population working in the technology industry
is far lower than other populations is a fact. If you are the artist
working under this topic, how would you use your works to showcase or
address the issue?
Think of some websites and games that use "black gooey." What are their
pros and cons compared with the white gooey?
Since I'm in a program called Media Arts and Practice, and I want to be an artist in the future, I tend to view everything in the scope of art. Is coding a form of art? Yes, coding can be art. Generative art is of course a form of art. But is web a form of art? It is so hard to convince myself that a website, even if it is made by an artists, would be classified as an artwork. However, it is even harder for me to confirm that websites cannot be artworks. My definition for art is that art should at least be tangible. However websites are not tangible. But after reading the article, I cannot stop asking myself, are websites really intangible? They can be homes; they can be shelves; they can be plants which can grow; they can even be gardens where plants can grow. Yes, websites may still be intangible, but they are probably the best platform to exchange information and thoughts. This is enough. A website is not a weak medium compared to a drawing, a sculpture, an installation, or a film clip. In turn, a website has the potential to be more powerful than all of these media. This is what I learned from the reading.
Discussion Questions:
Do you consider websites as a form of art? If yes, which website(s) can
be classified as art? If no, what is your reason?
A room, a shelf, a plant, a garden, a puddle, a rock falling into an
ocean, Laurel Schwulst made a lot of metaphors to indicate what an
website can be. Which of the words best describes your ideal website?
What kind of website do you want to make?
As a media artist and web developer, what would you do to make sure the
works or webs you make are not biased?
I'm so moved and inspired by this project. Winnie Soon in this project used code to accomplish a mission that humans without code cannot do. He incorporated data parsing, information processing, and visual representation in this project, and the effect is astonishing. Seeing Unerasable Characters I, II, and III, I feel like I'm also seeing people desperately posting their emotions and situations on the internet. They need help and justice. But what came after the posts were just censorship, and even punishment. I'm also seeing the white paper protest, in which people blamed the government and the government regulation that forced everyone to self-censor in a nearly sacrificial manner. I see a huge punctum. This work deeply impressed me also because it tracked nearly all censored samples on Weibo. An artist working on traditional media my perfectly depict one fragment of an event. Yet a new media artist using technology in his or her artwork is able to depict the whole picture. I'm not saying the latter is the better, but being able to include and represent everything and everybody is just one of the essences of media art. I should do this in my future works.
Discussion Questions:
Have you ever experienced censorship? If so, how did you react to the
censorship?
What is your opinion to the protest happened in our campus last
semester? As a media artist, what kind of work would you do to reflect
on this event?
Do you believe that artists all have their own missions? If your answer
is YES, think of more "advantages" of media art compared to other
traditional forms of art. Are there anything that no other artists could
do but only media artists could do? Are there anything that no other
media artists could do but only you can do? These questions may help you
to accomplish your mission.
Onuoha's works and her talk really inspired me a lot. She is very interested in the process of data collection rather than data analysis. Therefore, a lot of her works are archives, either physical or digital. This brought up the same question that I always ask myself, what is media art? I took IB visual arts in my highschool and did architecture in my first two years of college. Then I switched to media arts. To me, media art can be visual art, conceptual art, and both. However, I tend to focus more on the visual value of media art than the conceptual value. This is because I feel like media artists tend to deal with more topics and more complex topics than artists working on traditional media. With the technology and internet database, media artists sees more, knows more, thinks more, and reflects more. All media artists have great concepts and narratives, yet how to translate their ideas and thoughts into intriguing visuals appears to be a huge problem. The vast majority are not capable of comprehending all the complex concepts behind a work if its visual presentation does not help demonstrate the concepts. Yes, the data collection process is as important as the data analysis. Yes, we, both as audiences and artists, should look more into this process. Yes, the right to give meanings to a work is given to the audiences instead of only the artist. Yes, letting the audiences themselves to do the data analysis and the analysis of data collection is smart and meaningful, but it's not powerful to me. Who are you? What is your role besides a media artists in all these social issues? Are you an observer, or are you a participant? I want to be the latter. For me, the ideal way to do media art is not to show people this is my research, and the research is my work but to show people this is my research, and this is my work driven by my research.
Discussion Questions:
How do you define "authenticity"? How do you know if any representation
is "authentic" or not?
Is being "authentic" important to you? What is the relationship between
you in real life and you on social media? How does this relationship
influence your art making?
What do you think are the differences between coding/generative art and
other forms of art? Do you think the results of codes would be more
"authentic" compared to artworks solely made by humans?
There is an old, famous Chinese saying stating that reading ten thousand books is not better than travelling for ten thousand miles. Reading a single story is a huge problem. Reading more stories could solve that. However, being able to travel to the exact place you've read about and get involved in a different social context might be more helpful. This, however, is a huge privilege. My father worked for a tourism company. This is why I had chance to travel abroad a lot even when I was a small kid. Therefore, I know from my early childhood that a single story is not a complete story. Although I have no idea what stereotype was at that time, I started to realize any concepts similar to stereotype are not acceptable. All these childhood experiences influenced me as an artist. I'm particularly interested in telepresence, public surveys, archive works, and framework systems. By telepresence, I mean the ability to get immersed in new environments, narratives, and even simulations created by the artist. By public surveys, I mean the artistic social experiment and survey similar to what Lauren has done in all of her works. I still remember the work I submitted to RISD as the image assignment. I was asking strangers that I met on streets in Shanghai to weave a Chinese knot with me and share their stories during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sadly I didn't get good documentation and I lost most of the footages. But I will definitely do more works in the future. By archive works, I mean exactly using multiple perspectives to tell multiple stories, so that I won't have a single work for a single concept but an archive or works themed at the same concept. By framework systems, I mean I would like to create a framework for visitors to generate their own works instead of making the work all by myself. I wish my works will be customizable, just like my Project 1 work. I really enjoyed the Ted talk made by Adichie. She is humorous but everything she talked about made me think of how my work should encourage multiple stories instead of a single story. Therefore, I formatted this manifesto-like reading response as a way to direct my future works.
Discussion Questions:
What's your way of receiving knowledge? What your way of discerning if
the knowledge is reliable?
From my perspective, if I'm making a spectrum for all artworks,
self-expression should be on one side, and the other side would be
social issues/histories/philosophy/research/etc. If you agree with me,
how would you balance between the two sides of this art spectrum? How
would you make sure your are not promoting a single story based on your
position on the spectrum?
Think of how coding can help encouraging multiple stories.
I don't really like Ari's presentation. She talked too fast and she did not use enough design precedents to support her arguments, leaving the audiences to process the complex terms and ideas related to design on their own. However, when I get into her website, I found most of her works are really interesting; plus, her works really support her argument in her presentation. Yet what's more interesting than her works are the tags she made for herself - Artist • Technologist • Researcher • Theorist. Where's the Designer tag? You are give a whole lecture about Omni-Specialized Design for Beautiful Futures but you don't identify yourself as a designer in the first place? What? Here I see the problem. Ari encouraged people to do interdisciplinary work, and I do agree to this. But the problem is that it's much more difficult to distinguish between artists and designers nowadays. From my perspective, artists and designers are completely different. Ari mentioned that we should design with people rather than design for people. This is a really nice statement for designers. For artists, no matter if you are doing art with people or for people, you will always have to do art for yourself. You should focus more on you than anything else. Rules for Omni-Specialized Designs are not rules for art. The most important thing artists should pay attention to is if their works are artistic enough.
Discussion Questions:
How do you identify yourself? An artist, a designer, or both?
What do you think should be the most important factor to consider as an
artist? Or as a designer?
Think of one way you can use your knowledge and works to help your
community and your identity group.
What an amazing project! The website is very well designed, and the contents are indeed accessible for different users. The two artists have their strong arguments and intentions, and they used their website, book and selfie projects to prove their arguments perfectly. I really love their caring for people with impaired visions, as their goal is to make alt text artistic yet functional, but not to purely explore the art possibilities of alt text. Also, this project makes me think of one of my own project. I planned to design an immersive space that simulates the experience of the blind. As the visitors get into the space, they would have to pass through four regions where they will experience color blind, impaired vision, blurred vision, and fully blind. It's still in the brainstorm phase, but after learning from this project, I wish to look for people who actually suffer from impaired vision and ask them if my representations of the experiences of the blind are correct and fair, and how can I do to help them.
Discussion Questions:
Did you pay attention to accessibility in your past projects?
What responsibilities do web developers and artists have in ensuring
accessibility through alt text and other elements?
Should descriptions for artworks be written by the artist or another
person? How might the perspective of the person writing the text impact
its effectiveness or authenticity?