Project 4 Final Artist Statement

For the last project in this class, I wanted to stay true to what I’ve been doing all semester with my other projects and make the theme of my webventure something light-hearted and cute. The end of the semester has been hitting extra hard this year so I just wanted to do something goofy for myself to work on in the midst of all the chaos. I won’t lie, initially I was a little scared to base the theme of the project on my stuffed animals because I was a little nervous that I would get embarrassed when it came time to critique, but I had a really fun time working on it and loved animating them into little GIFs. I absolutely loved this class, the prompts for the projects were great and really allowed me to do stuff I got to have a lot of fun with. (: I’m very happy that I got to do silly things like animating my stuffed animals while still learning to be handy with a bunch of Adobe programs that I couldn’t figure out before.

Brainstorm Blog #4

For my Choose Your Own Webventure project I’m thinking of doing something with my childhood stuffed animals. I think it would be cute to animate them into GIFs and base each of their “paths” on the back stories I imagined that they had when I was a kid. It might be kind of a “Choose Your Character” at the very beginning, but beyond that, each character will have a range of choices that lead them down the path with their own backstory. I want to keep it silly, so maybe I’ll associate predictable decisions with outcomes that flip the script. It could be kind of like an interactive children’s book with a twist. The reason I want to go this route is because I think I could have a lot of fun not only animating the GIFs but also elaborating on what kind of life they have in their own little world.

Reading Blog #3

It seems like net.art paved the way for interactive web art. When I got my first iPod Touch, I think I was in middle school and I got a bunch of “Choose Your Own Adventure” apps. to play I remember when I was in elementary school and we had a computer class and everyone would share links to their favorite websites and write them down on sticky notes so they could remember exactly what to type in the search bar. Some of the most popular games we shared and played growing up were extremely simple “click to proceed” games. The idea of choice was so exciting, even though you could always just refresh the page to start again. The act of clicking links to take you from page to page was exciting. That’s why I think net.art spread the way it did. People enjoyed the uncertainty of what page would pop up. One part of the article I though was interesting was that one site would take you to a different website where you would get hacked. I wonder how the news of this website spread because if someone came to me and said “hey you should visit this really cool website, as soon as you type the URL in and click enter your computer gets hacked” I probably wouldn’t be eager to search up the website so I wonder if the visits to the site were all accidental. I also think it’s cool that today, interactive exhibits are parts of museums and that museums can also be in an online format.