FACED v.3

http://7below.net/faced/theFACED.html
FACED v.3 @ MegaSWF

So after researching code execution to take the picture, I realized that to capture the image, it wouldn't keep the filter or the mask, it would just place the webcam image on top of the black and white image. So I decided to get rid of that, with the lack of a better way to fix it.

As for the print function, there's even worse problems that I don't feel like going into.

SOOO.....as a result, I decided to add into the HTML page, where I expect this to be viewed, that to print, your right click. That will freeze the frame, webcam, and still print the drawing and the image and the webcam all properly.

I'm not happy that I couldn't get those two things to work, but the overall execution of the project and final output makes me happy.

FACED v.2

FULL SIZE

Overall, the aesthetics and look and feel are the way I want them. How everything works and operates from start to finish is how I want it as well.

But there are still a couple things I need to address. I still haven't been able to get the webcam image to capture. The X and Y coordinates change for each image and I needed to make sure each of the video placements were correct before I could go in and get the right coordinates.

Also, the print function still does not print the video with the drawing, it only prints the drawing.

But these are two problems that can be easily fixed at the point I am now in this piece.

FACED v.1

PROPOSAL EDITS

I plan to establish the relationship of visual communications with one’s self through a sort of self-induced narcissism by superimposing the user’s face with previously selected images of other people. These selected images will be that of the shameful — what people consider “ugly” and inappropriately lower than themselves while also providing a ground for which the user can find interaction with by choosing the face they wish to work with. However, this concept is more of a personal experiment realized through this project. The user does not and intentionally shouldn't know that is the reasoning behind it. Being unaware allows them to freely and more intuitively navigate the project. The navigation of the piece will be easily established without a problem of distraction or uncertainty through an interface depicting a clean and sort of “sterile” environment by means of a white background and simplified forms and correlated color schemes with the images. There will be no confusion between how to select images, how to advance, what to do with the image, and how to proceed to keep your experience in a tactile form. The possibilities within the interface will involve the ability to capture your face, and proceed to debase it with drawing tools, and print it out. I hope for the initial impact of the interaction between the user and the image to be a humorous and playful experience, inviting them to stay and possibly do multiple versions, and hopefully inviting others and spreading the word about it. But in exception to the humor, I want this to be a note about the overwhelming connection between one’s prideful vanity and the desire to degrade one’s self for an immediate egocentric relief. This also coincides with those who already feel shameful and find relief in forcing themselves into a far greater form of humiliation.

PROJECT PROPOSAL Critique

I received feedback that I should include more drawing options (opacity & more colors) and an Input Text box so you could possibly type in a message on your image before sent to print.

Also there was a comment about making the images be both male and females (which was already considered) but having all races included. But I'm afraid that might turn my experiment into a statement about race and gender, which isn't the direction, but could possibly strengthen it's output.

FINAL PROJECT PROPOSAL

I plan to establish the relationship of visual communications with one’s self through a sort of self-induced narcissism by superimposing the user’s face with previously selected images of other people. These selected images will be that of the shameful — what people consider “ugly” and inappropriately lower than themselves while also providing a ground for which the user can find interaction with by choosing the face they wish to work with. The navigation of the piece will be easily established without a problem of distraction or uncertainty through an interface depicting a clean and sort of “sterile” environment by means of a white background and simplified forms and correlated color schemes with the images. There will be no confusion between how to select images, how to advance, what to do with the image, and how to proceed to keep your experience in a tactile form. The possibilities within the interface will involve the ability to capture your face, and proceed to debase it with drawing tools, and print it out. I hope for the initial impact of the interaction between the user and the image to be a humorous and playful experience, inviting them to stay and possibly do multiple versions, and hopefully inviting others and spreading the word about it. But in exception to the humor, I want this to be a note about the overwhelming connection between one’s prideful vanity and the desire to degrade one’s self for an immediate egocentric relief. This also coincides with those who already feel shameful and find relief in forcing themselves into a far greater form of humiliation.

Sound Project: DRUM KIT

There is supposed to be red hits that pop up with each key command, but it's not working. I can fix it for sure, but this is what I got for right now.

Group Project Review

I really enjoyed this project. I thought having such a broad range of things to do would be problematic at first, but once we combined in our group we were all kind of situated on a reasonably similar idea. I liked being in groups because the work load was split up between 4 people instead of just on myself and everyone got a certain part to handle and it went very well. Everyone had what they needed when we needed it. Being able to choose where we presented it was great as well. Pretty much everything about the project I really had fun doing and would love to do it again (as long as the project is as cool as this one). Oh, I didn't like that we didn't get to eat lunch, but that's besides the point.

SCARE - Group Project

REACT-TIME

Video

I added the print function which will print your image and how awesome you look.

Edited Video

http://megaswf.com/view/755e6f4ff4eff0ac361d63cd7cafcad5.html

VIDEO

http://megaswf.com/view/7be15979b4fecc7fa1532020cedf06d9.html

10/14

I really have a drive to make this project pretty cool, but have run across multiple problems I'm not sure I can address until I figure out a new way of creating my line drawings. This is just the updated one with the variable line widths. But because of the LineStyle function requirements needing a (size, color, alpha), I don't know how to keep the color settings to apply to the changed line widths. I also included an eraser tool, but also came into problems with that because of an initial problem — not being able to keep the pencil on top. I have it on the top most layer in the timeline and I even went through so every codeblock includes a getNextHighestDepth and it still wouldn't register.

So expect more once I figure out problems with my code.

Midterm

For my midterm I really wanted to create something that I always enjoy that other people can spend and endless amount of time doing. So I decided to investigate the construction of a drawing application. It was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. The only problem I encountered was when I created my initial movieclip, it wouldn't let me draw in it. So I decided to use the "createEmptyMovieClip" property and assign that an instance name. It worked out great.

Coding each of the individual colors what quite a task. Each one needed a RollOver, RollOut, and onRelease, all using hex color codes and instance names.

The Printer function took a little bit of research to figure out how to print ONLY my created movie clip and not the entire stage (with the color boxes, print icon, and clear icon). But it works great and came out exactly like I wanted it to.

After a while of drawing I realized it probably needed some way to clear the stage, or the created movie clip, instead of starting the program over again. So I included the Clear function which just resets the initial movie clip to it's beginning settings.

I'm definitely pretty happy with how this came out, especially since I did about 550 lines of code to do it all within the main timeline. I would like to explore being able to control the stroke weight, opacity, and saving it as a jpg. But all of which were cumbersome in the way I set up the drawing stage. I would have to investigate other options in which the area you draw in is selective and when out of that area you are able to use the mouse freely.

9/30

I have extended my project into being a type of minesweeper game. I intend on making a scoring system or some sort with If and Else statements and a Dynamic Text box with updatable text. I'm definitely still not happy with it yet without the adequate time to work on it. But making it a scoring game will be very easy.

9/25

My program had everything we discussed in class (a movie clip controlling another movie clip and a movie clip controlling the main time line) but I didn't have a dynamic text box. So I changed the page numbers to updatable text boxes. I really would like to expand this into a kind of Minesweeper type of thing but with more interaction due to the various pages, which could become stages possibly?

9/23 Quiz

An event handler is a function code block that controls a movie clip where as a frame event is specific to the selected frame.

9/23

I had a hard time coming up with any kind of subject matter to deal with for my action script testing. I opted for an output aesthetic of old computer games, still in the mindset of digiscapes. I just set it up as a simply animated, but code driven program that accentuates all of the requirements.

9/16 Updated

I added more pixels to the RGB and CMYK sections.

9/16

From looking at my project from last week, I felt I needed to consider a different composition for the initial stage. It was bland and didn't indicate any kind of action for the user. The original image is a screen shot from my desktop, so I decided to take a picture of my actual computer and include that as well. I animated the computer as well so it looks more like you're zooming into the computer instead of the desktop zooming into you. I worked more with the code and enhanced some of the actions.

I still need to enhance the pixel view in both RGB and CMYK, that is the only let down for me right now.

How to Embed your SWF in your Blog

Above the title for your upload SWF on www.zippyvideos.com, you can Right Click and choose "View Source".

In the source code, scroll until you see "!--begin left column--" which is the column for which your embedded video is kept.

Below the "--begin left column--" you will find "div id=clip". This is the beginning of your embedded SWF code.

Copy from the "div id=clip" until the corresponding "/div" code.

Paste this in your Edit Html section of your blog, and TADA, you have your embedded SWF file.

Assignment Write-up for 9/11

My concept for my "digiscape" was to be able to investigate the components that make up everything you see within a computer screen. Since the computer is comprised of everything digital, it inherently is a "digiscape" within itself. The components that make up a screen are developed by the RGB colorspace — RED, GREEN, BLUE. In contrast, I'm including the ability to choose the CMYK colorspace — CYAN, MAGENTA, YELLOW, BLACK — which conflicts with web viewing and is typically used for print.

Using the Mac OSX operating system as a reference point, where the interaction between minimizing, maximizing, opening, and closing is shown by default as a "Genie Effect" or the "Scale Effect" within the Dock, a three-dimensional environment is created. With my "digiscape", I chose to include a screen shot of my actual desktop. To keep the visual aesthetics of the stage very simple I used a white background and the RGB and CMYK color bars underneath. With code, I enabled the RollOver function to change between viewing the RGB and CMYK desktops and enabled the onRlease function to create the animation into the "digiscape" where you can view the interactive particles of either colorspace.

Quiz

1. What is the difference between a symbol and an instance?
A symbol is a converted graphic that lives within the project's Library. An instance is a copy of that symbol. Each symbol is stored only once and if duplicated or copied, it thus becomes an instance of that symbol.


2. What is the difference between a frame that has an empty circle versus a frame that has a filled in black circle?
A frame with an empty circle is a keyframe that does not include any content. A frame with a filled in black circle is a keyframe that includes some form of content (rather it be text, graphics, symbols, or code).

3. What are two of the main reasons people use flash?
People use flash for it's ability to process and store information at small file sizes and it's ability to deal with vector graphics for scalability.

4. You can only motion tween a __________.
Symbol

5. If you select an object, how can you tell if it's a shape or a symbol?
A shape will appear in the properties panel as a Shape and with have a sort of "checkerboard" appearance. A symbol appears in the properties panel as the type of symbol it is (Movie Clip, Graphic, or Button) with an option for an instance name and it acquires a registration point, removing the "checkerboard" appearance.

9/02

A.
Landscape
"Physical Geography and subfields like Landscape ecology, and Environmental geography, the technical term landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including physical elements such as landforms, living elements of flora and fauna, abstract elements such as lighting and weather conditions, and human elements, for instance human activity or the built environment."
Wikipedia

I would like to view landscapes as environments created by someone, rather than the typical interpretation of landscape being Mother Nature's incredible ability to create compositions. The artist's ability to create composition comes naturally, quite possibly as natural as Mother Nature does. But what about people that have no artistic ability at all — someone who just wants things to look "better", when typically it really doesnt.

Landscaping
"Landscaping refers to any activity that modifies the visible features of an area of land. Landscaping is both science and art, and requires good observation and design skills. A good landscaper understands the elements of nature and construction, and blends them accordingly.

An early Greek philosopher known for his view that "all is water," spent a considerable time thinking about the nature and scope of landscaping. Some of his students believed that in order for human activity to be considered landscaping, it must be directed toward modifying the physical features of the land itself, including the cultivation and/or manipulation of plants or other flora. Thales rejected this notion, arguing that any aspect of the material world affecting our visual perception of the land was a proper subject for landscaping. Both Plato and Aristotle praised Thales' analysis as a model for philosophy. In the early 20th century, British philosopher G.E. Moore cited Thales' reasoning as one of the few historical examples of how philosophical inquiry has led to genuine human understanding and progress.

Philosophers in the 17th century debated whether visual beauty was a necessary goal of landscaping. With the advent of the positivists by the early 20th century, however, most western philosophers had rejected the notion of an objective esthetic standard for any form of art, including landscaping. Practitioners since the mid-20th century have experimented with jarring visual panoramas that are now generally accepted, at least in western societies, as falling within the scope of landscaping."
Wikipedia


http://www.landscapingideasonline.com/
http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/gl_landscaping_design/
http://www.the-landscape-design-site.com/

B.
Digiscape



- Pixels floating around creating things throughout
- Genie effect in OSX that animates three-dimensionally within the flat desktop space
- Random assortment of pixels in CMYK color scheme representing the color scape of computers and a digital landscape all of it's own

C.
Web Work: A HISTORY OF INTERNET ART - ArtForum, May, 2000, by Rachel Greene

"THE TERM "NET.ART" is less a coinage than an accident, the result of a software glitch that occurred in December 1995, when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened an anonymous e-mail only to find it had been mangled in transmission. Amid a morass of alphanumeric gibberish, Cosic could make out just one legible term--"net.art"--which he began using to talk about online art and communications. Spreading like a virus among certain interconnected Internet communities, the term was quickly enlisted to describe a variety of everyday activities. Net.art stood for communications and graphics, e-mail, texts and images, referring to and merging into one another; it was artists, enthusiasts, and technoculture critics trading ideas, sustaining one another's interest through ongoing dialogue. Net.art meant online detournements, discourse instead of singular texts or images, defined more by links, e-mails, and exchanges than by any "optical" aesthetic. Whatever images of net.art projects grace these pages, beware that, seen out of their native HTML, out of their networked, social habitats, they are the net.art equivalents of animals in zoos."

Would net.art still be dominant, through all of the emense changes between 1995 and 2000, if things such as "homepages flaunting hobbies and personal histories, advertising technology companies, or promoting online communities of all stripes" were still at the forefront of the internet? Would things such as this Blog I'm writing in now be something completely different through it's form of personal communication, as changing the E-mail, the number one form of communication for "anyone who was wired to communicate on equal ground, across international boundaries, instantaneously, every day."?

8/28

A.
Vuk Cosic Interview

Net.art in relationship to hackers interests me. I have never thought about that fact that a hacker — rather he/she be stealing information, planting information, or formatting information — is creating some form of "art" by their task at hand. Across the board hackers are seen as a menace in the internet world (among viruses and the dreaded spyware — though forever linked to Windows users, thus pushing them further in the past while Mac users flourish forward with the ever so popular OSX) although whenever hackers have been portrayed in film/video (the world's most popular source of information attainment), they are shown as extremely smart and borderline genius, almost to the point of envy. So, within that paradox of good vs. evil, could a mass investigation in the "art" of hacking introduce a new form on net.art? Art that is accessible to all users but not through want or necessity, but through an unwanted and undetermined circumstance, such as a virus or spyware. Would you be disappointed to come home one day to an artistic and creative infestation of net.art on your computer producing ASCII-video-portal desktops/screensavers that never end and clever unexpected pop-ups with distinguishable net.art features?

B.
The Dumpster - Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg

This specific piece of net.art I find to be absolute hilarious. It takes one of the most disgusting and deterring aspects of the internet — the endless combustion of simply unimportant personal information from countless bloggers, myspacers, facebookers, livejournalers, etc — and turns it into an interactive display. I find the composition, colors, feel, and flow of the piece to be very uneasy and difficult to navigate, which accurately corresponds with feelings I feel when stumbling upon a friend's idiotic post about how someone makes them mad or, in reference to Levin's piece directly, how they broke off or are having problems with their relationship. I find it be very sad on that person's behalf and sincerely inappropriate.

C.
1. The perception of art has definitely changed since the entrance of digital media. Not only in the aspect of importance due to everyone and their mom considering themselves an artist due to being at finger's reach, but in the aspect of instant availability. The act of viewing art in a gallery and the anticipation of an artist's release of a piece without a doubt makes the art more important. In contrast, digital art shows itself as available as a booger in your nose, thus reducing, in my opinion, one of the most important parts of an artist's work.

2. I think early digital art before the advancements of the internet can be compared to that of new-age net.art by means of quality and meaning. The criteria in which the art is created might have changed, even become easier to use, but the initial output is still the same – a pixel based system. How an artist manipulates the medium will always change as history progress as we all strive for something new and the individuality of one another.

3. I actually have never heard of the term "net.art" until this course, so my interpretation of what I think of it is highly weighted on the interpretation of new knowledge in retrospect to current times in it's place in history. I do believe that it is a definite form of artistic display, especially in it's early forms. It is an exploration of artistic qualities within a new medium. In comparison to today's world of "net.art", if you can even call it that, I feel less strongly about it. It seems like everything is Photoshoped and manipulated post output. Everyday there's an introduction of something new that removes the analog and manual aspects of art and information in general into a digitized and automatic process and output.

4. In order to stimulate the viewers perception of internet-based art, one would first have to investigate every hidden and unexplored corner of net.art and how the viewer not only interacts with it, but perceives it within a one-on-one view from person to PC. This gives the user time and space to enter your art and spend time with it, though the attention span of users greatly decreases yearly. But once you believe you have explored every aspect personally, you could expand into different territories — such as the gallery and public places.

5. An appropriate solution to getting net.art recognized as a world-wide art form would be to create a beginning boundary and preliminary conceptual standpoint of net.art. Establishing it's priorities and points of interest in execution and final product will inform the viewers of it's intention.

Tester McTesterton

shazam