everybody's web projects

Nate: http://www.smcm.edu/users/nastraus/netneutrality/
Ade: http://www.smcm.edu/users/aoadeyokunnu/space/index.htm
Tom: http://www.smcm.edu/users/tmconkwright/network_art/netneut/index.html
Nastia: http://www.smcm.edu/users/adkrylova/Al%20Love/index/open.htm
Lance: http://www.smcm.edu/users/lwkallon/nnwebpage/Homepage.html

examples of simple image mapping

The sites below have a hand-made feel because the creators created images in an editor like Photoshop, saved as 72 dpi JPG, and then used Dreamweaver to designate areas they wanted to serve as links. NOTE: This does not work well for long blocks of text, but it is good for making small things with fancy fonts.

http://www.larahoke.com/
http://www.busboysandpoets.com/

end of the semester schedule

I'VE MOVED THE SCHEDULE TO THE TOP SO IT'S EASIER TO FIND.

Mon 21 November:
final SOUNDSCAPE sites uploaded
-group assessment form
-intro to final project

Th 23 November: give thanks

Fr 24 November: BUY NOTHING DAY

Mon 27 November: creative brief due
-What is the site about? Include background information and references to other works and contextual information.
-What are the goals & objectives of the site?
-How will you measure success for your site?
-Profile the target audience. Who are they? What do they care about? What are their expectations for a website?
-How do you want your audience to use your site?

Wed 29 Nov: creative brainstorming due
post a collection of images (collage them in photoshop) & a word association of at least 30 terms about your site's subject to the class blog
in-class work day: FHT at U. of Delaware for artist lecture

Mon 4 Dec: drawn site map due
These should be legible enough that you could hand them off to someone else and they would be able to make the site template (without content) for you. These sketches should show that you have taken into consideration the visual DESIGN of your site with the concepts we have been discussing in class. Bring to class:
1- final project site map + hand-drawn sketches of each page of the site in COLOR
2- a typed list that shows how you've addressed or not addressed the following elements:
point, line, form, texture, color, type, pattern, movement
balance, rhythm, proportion, dominance, unity
Check out these sites for more info:
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/principles_of_design/
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/elements_of_design/
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/principles_and_elements_of_design/
3- Indicate how your site will use techniques besides regular HTML. This could be Javascript, Flash, or other coding to make your site more dynamic through the use of movement, content management or user input.

Wed 6 Dec prototype of site due
rough draft of project due for feedback. This means at least 3 pages should be ready for viewing. Individual meetings with Fereshteh

Wed 13 Dec: 7 PM
FINAL project uploaded and ready for critique

Collage(Lance)

1. unjust
2. justice
3. greed
4. free
5. cultural integration
6. less network traffic
7. protest
8. verizon
9. AT&T
10. corporation
11. prioritization
12. win
13. lose
14. hope
15. inexpensive
16. expensive
17. control
18. filters
19. FBI surveillance
20. Carnivore
21. programmers
22. lack of open source
23. less resources
24.another reason to drop out of school
25. communication
26. lack of communication
27. facebook
28. myspace
29. blogger
30. youtube

nast'a's collage

st albert
worship
love
peace
faith
good
light
robes
shine
motion
pronounce
declare
save
help
explain
coerce
bottles
trash
pollution
earth
environment
bright
dark
smog
steam
paper
waste
death
endangered
fun
exciting
listen
speak

collage (Tom)

Internet
Freedom
Corporations
Revolution
Politics
Fighting Back
Restriction
Censorship
Control
Greed
Techno-War
Advertisement
Capitalistic
Government
Apathy
Action
Media
Uncontrollable
Outrage
Hacking
Damaging
Backlash
Education
Un-American
Commercial
Sad
Limitless
Limitations
Tyranny
Invasive

collage(nate)

1. net
2. neutrality
3. web
4. world
5. wide
6. internet
7. source
8. open
9. free
10. individual
11. company
12. corporation
13. business
14. exchange
15. money
16. information
17. download
18. upload
19. create
20. post
21. build
22. navigate
23. design
24. purpose
25. cause
26. opportunity
27. closed
28. bandwidth
29. line
30. end-to-end

collage(Ade)

list of words:

1. space
2. rocket
3. stars
4. outerspace
5. astronauts
6. nigerian flag
7. telescope
8. coat of arms
9. planets
10. nasa
11. big dipper
12. gravity
13. moon
14. jupiter
15. far
16.poor
17. girl
18. darkness
19. black hole
20. satelite
21. ozone
22. camp
23. children
24. activities
25. money
26. kennedy space center
27. constellation
28. galaxy
29. wormhole
30. sci-fi

favicons

http://www.degraeve.com/favicon/ : favicon generator
http://www.256pixels.com/ : daily favicon contest
http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/ : favicon from pics and animated favicons

MON in-class screening

Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund
CAE on MSNBC (.mov file)

creative brainstorming tips

For Wednesday, make a collage of images showing visual research about your topic and post it to the class blog by 4pm, along with a list of at least 30 words. This can be a free association, which means you should write down whatever comes to mind even if it seems like it's unrelated. I will give you feedback on these entries as you work on your site maps for next week.

Click here for an example of what your collage might look like, that I made about the subject of "video".


This research collage is from a designer who created Actively Mobile. Check out the link to learn more about her process.

good use of rollovers + movement

BORDER film project - rollover with words of the title also serves as site navigation

This portfolio site for Matthew Voscovo makes use of Flash rollovers and movement.

This site for custom-made glasses frames was created in Dreamweaver with simple image maps and coloring with line drawings.

This site about mountain caribou in Canada features a simple animation that emphasizes that this animal is an endangered species.

Free Range Grain is a tactical media project with a graphically compelling web presence.

The Yes Men movie

The entire movie is available for viewing on Google Video. LINK.
The Yes Men website
See also their most recent presentation about slavery at Wharton Business School in Philadelphia

St. Mary's Construction IN SOUND

Heres a link to Tom and Lance's site.

nate, ade & nastia's site

the vint mint anthology

network neutrality

Here is the link for the open-source documentary video we watched in class:
Humanity Lobotomy

See also: http://www.savetheinternet.com/

Here is a RESOURCE LIST from Mark Cooley, an artist who will be visiting campus for a lecture next semester:

WHO OWNS THE MEDIA?
Media concentration, also known as media convergence or media consolidation, basically comes down to the fact that fewer and fewer companies own the media. Mediachannel.org has created a comprehensive chart of exactly who owns what. http://www.mediachannel.org/ownership/chart.shtml

Colombia Journalism Review provides a clickable list of the major media companies and their holdings. This web guide demonstrates the exceedingly far reach of these companies.
http://www.cjr.org/owners/

This is a clickable chart of the ten largest media companies in the world, current as of Dec. 20, 2001 (it is important to note that media concentration is not only an American problem). It includes US companies such as the Walt Disney Company and AOL Time Warner, as well as international giants Bertelsmann and Vivendi Universal.
http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html

A graph of media ownership shows the number of corporations in control of US media plunging from 50 in 1983 to only six now. It is followed by a really useful list of links, which includes the major media reform advocacy groups.
http://www.corporations.org/media/

As FAIR explains, "Almost all media that reach a large audience in the United States are owned by for-profit corporations--institutions that by law are obligated to put the profits of their investors ahead of all other considerations. The goal of maximizing profits is often in conflict with the practice of responsible journalism."
This brief introduction to corporate ownership of the media is followed by a number of links to resources on the topic, including Normon Solomon's columns.
http://www.fair.org/media-woes/corporate.html

EXAMPLES OF A DECLINE IN MEDIA QUALITY
Print and broadcast media in the US have severely cut back foreign news coverage, leading to a poorly educated American public. This may be one of the reasons that Americans were so shocked by the events of Sept. 11--they have little to no knowledge of politics, ideology, and religion in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, coverage of crime, violence, sex and scandals has greatly increased. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0927-03.htm

FAIR answers the question "What's Wrong With the News?" with a clickable list of very short introductions to the following issues:
- corporate ownership
- advertiser influence
- official agendas
- telecommunications policy
- the narrow range of debate
- the PR industry
- pressure groups
- censorship
- sensationalism
http://www.fair.org/media-woes/media-woes.html

DEREGULATION SPEEDS CONCENTRATION
This is an excellent and brief summary of the new push for deregulation of the media industry by the FCC. Generally, a source like this might be expected to take a sympathetic view toward any efforts to deregulate, but this article is surprisingly skeptical. It is particularly useful in briefly critiquing the almost utopian hopes of web advocates. Websites may be relatively cheap, but good (or at least flashy) content costs money, and the big media companies have used this fact to insert themselves as the dominant presence on the web.
http://www.moveon.org/r?11

This article discusses the FCC's move towards deregulation in more detail. Deregulation is based on the perspective that the media is a product only, a "toaster with pictures." There seems to be little or no recognition of any need for policies that maintain a diversity of opinion, thus serving the interests of the public as citizens; rather, the public is regarded only as a group of consumers. The results of this deregulation will most likely be an even more acute concentration of the media into the hands of a few big corporations. However, there is still time to fight it, and the article includes information on writing to the FCC. http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/mediaownership

FCC Chairman Michael Powell is currently the driving force behind the continuing trend of media concentration. Nor does he seem very concerned about the creation of media monopolies. According to Powell, "Monopoly is not illegal by itself in the United States. People tend to forget this. There is something healthy about letting innovators try to capture markets." And what about diversity? Well, Powell believes that "[d]iversity and all that stuff is very important, but it's hard to get a consensus on what it is, other than that the goals are worthy."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.03/mergers.html

Other resources:

http://www.mediastudies.com
http://www.prwatch.org
http://www.fair.org
http://www.mediachannel.org
http://www.znet.org
http://www.disinfo.com

promoting your site : 22 November

You must complete ALL of the following for the launch of your SOUNDSCAPE site.
We don't have class that day, but please e-mail me the links and info about your promotions by 22 November (Wednesday). You may wait until after the Thanksgiving break to post the fliers for the site on campus.

-place key search terms in your META tag on every page of the site

tips from wikihow.com:
Regarding on-page scripting, the search engines are really looking for 2 things: keywords in the Meta and Title fields and keywords in the body of your website. Regarding Meta Tags, there are 2 very important fields:

• Title Tag - arguably the most important SEO(search engine optimization) tag for any website. Google supports approx. 60 characters in the title, while Yahoo allows for up to 110 characters in the title. It is important to target the most critical keywords in the Title. Every page should have a unique Title.
• META Description Tag - also very important for every page on the site. Some engines do display the description defined, while others do not. All search engines do read the description tag, and do utilize the content found within in the ranking process. A good rule of thumb is to create descriptions that do not exceed 200-250 characters. The META keyword Tag is essentially useless in today's SEO market, but is often times good to utilize as a placeholder for the keywords targeted.

-Get a Creative Commons license for your site

-Make at least 50 fliers and post them around campus.

-Submit a press release to at least one campus publication and one county publication (newspaper, radio, tv)

- Submit your site URL to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and directories (DMOZ).

- Seek out a forum at http://www.somd.com/ on a subject related to your site and join in on the conversation. Set up a signature linking to your site, and add it to your post. This will act as a mini advertisement for your site. Be sure to make relevant contributions, rather than posts that are obvious self-promotion.

AND at least 2 of the following:

-Purchase a unique domain name for your site.
It costs less than $10 per year but the return on investment is huge.

-Include your site link in your email signature.

-Link the project URL to your blog, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, etc

-Get Clustrmaps for your site.

Blithe Riley's lecture (Nast'a)

As an art student, I would first like to say that I am often humbled by the work of established artists and feel unqualified to critisize their methods or final pieces. Critiquing an artist without seeing myself as a lowly college student (tear..:) in the role of the critic is difficult, but I feel that it needs to be done in order to be honest in my response.
I find Riley's work to be interesting and confusing at the same time. (I must add that today's presentation did not do justice to the work because of the technological difficulties with the sound.) The work is interesting to me because Riley is looking to engage the audience. In "Shaker, Crawler, Wall" she invites the audience to browse the spaces that she has created, mostly by greeting the audience with a massive cylindrical structure in the middle of the room and more directly with the Wall component, that asks the viewer to physically penetrate the object on display. The "Belief Objects" project is the most direct- at this point in her process her and her artist-collaborator buddy are collecting interviews on the topic of the interviewees' belief systems. Riley flat-out said that she wants to learn from her audience. I also picked up that she was interested in observing people as they moved through the spaces of the "S,C,W" project and even evesdropping on their conversations (when she acted as the person hidden within the wall space.)

I found myself confused when I realized that I don't really understand the connections between the three elements of the "S,C, W" project. She spoke about the projects' seed as the election of 2004 and the misinformation of the time. The wall part makes sense when under the umbrella of the term "misinformation"- a person approaches a hard, cold looking object, inserts their hands into gloves patterned in brick and can see a prerecorded image of their hands interacting with another set of hands. In her desription of the Shaker part on the web, she discusses the dualism in the shaker as a celibate person who uses extremely violent looking gestures to reach a higher spiritual state. Even though I can kind of understand the logic of this fact being seen as dualistic- I can't really commit myself to believing that it is. To me it makes perfect sense that an ascetic would exhaust a certain type of physical and mental faculty but leave the sexual one untouched. There is also no indication in the video that the Shakers were celibate.

I liked the strange quality of the videos Riley presented. They have this early 90's feel to them, which says to me that the artist is interested in questioning the way that media presents information. The sound effects in the "defunct" tower project, however, seemed maybe a bit too outdated for the futuristic looking content. The character's movement from the video projections into real time was to me the most clear indication of her interest in reality vs. fiction and the media's ability to morph reality into fiction. This is about the only connection that I made to the mention of the election.

Looking forward to seeing where her "Belief Project" takes her!

Blithe Riley TODAY

Blithe will be joining us in class to critique your website before her lecture TODAY!

LIBRARY 321, 4:30 PM

Check out her recent project, shown here, at this link:
Shaker, Crawler, Wall 2005

WED 11-08

Today we will spend some time analyzing DESIGN.

Although many popular and well-designed sites use Flash or advanced scripting, there is a lot we can still learn from the VISUAL aspects of the design itself: the color scheme, font, the sense of space and the aesthetics are important above any movement. Think about the structure and concept for your sites. Imagine them without movement, focusing only on the visual elements. Make a list of how they fit the parameters listed in this article from Digital Web Magazine: Principles and Elements of Design
With your group, compile a list to verify how the site addresses these parameters:
-balance
-rhythm
-proportion
-dominance
-point
-line
-form
-color

NASTIA, ADE, NATE:
Remember Segregation

TOM, LANCE:
Style Wars

More info to think about as you refine your project:
web-designers "pre-flight checklist"

reading questions (nastia)

Software art is art that incorporates computer programs into the art-making process. Often this means that a piece built with software has a certain amount of autonomy, meaning that the artist steps away from the piece and lets the computer program direct its activity. The artist can still manipulate the piece by altering the source code of the program. Artists often create their own software in order to allow for more control of the project. Software art has been used as a tool of democratization, giving the artist control over areas predominantly powered by commercial and governmental monopolies and also by engaging the audience to participate in the piece.

An example of Tactical Media is the project “Barbie Liberation Organization.”
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, a group of artist activists, staged the “Barbie Liberation Organization,” a project in which they bought talking Barbie and GI Joe dolls from a store and switched the inside mechanisms that make the dolls talk. The toys were then returned to the store.

The original Carnivore is a program used by the FBI to access information that is being sent over the internet. The Radical Software Group learned about this software and became motivated to mimic it's activity. The technology used to do this "eaves-dropping" is called "packet-sniffing." The data that is collected by this technology is then converted into visual art when it is processed by artist created interfaces. The software has only been used in closed-in areas so far, but is supposedly going to be available to the average computer user.

Minerva Cuevas's site which features "Mejor Vida Corporation."
http://www.irational.org/minerva/projects.html

reading questions(lance)

Software art is the art of writing programs in software that is capable of generating artistic figures. Due to the availability of open source, several artists write and share programs that allow a user to enter in their input that will modify the art piece.

The tactical media group, The Yes Men generated a lot of attention with their campaign ‘The Management Leisure Suit’. The group successfully infiltrated a Fabrics of the future conference at the Tampere Technical University in Finland. Two men posed as World Trade Organization representatives and gave a presentation about a management leisure suit. The suit was an outfit built for monitoring employee activity, via a wireless communication unit. Towards the end of the presentation, the two men demonstrated their invention which revealed a bodysuit with a monitor mounted on top. This infiltration was made possible by one of the websites owned by The Yes Men, http://www.gatt.org, which looks nearly identical to the WTO’s actual website, http://www.wto.org.

As a result of the FBI’s dataveillance software DC1000, the Radical Software Group was inspired by this technology and made a parody named Carnivore. Carnivore acted as an internet traffic surveillance system that monitored emails, instant messages, and web surfing in a specific local network. The clients that this system would monitor would be other artist.

Link (Glyphiti 2001 by Andy Deck)

reading questions (tom)

Software art is a basically program that makes art. There are many variations on this concept, but usually it involves some kind of initial input which it then takes and modifies to create art.

A recent work by graffiti artist Banksy and Danger Mouse took Paris Hilton's new album and modified both tracks and insert booklet. They made 500 copies and placed them the stacks with originals. It walks a thin line of tactical media and culture jamming. There's some more on it here Link

Carnivore was an FBI program created to monitor a person's internet traffic. RGS took this and made an art piece out of it, designed to mimic Carnivore's gathering of information, while reinterpreting what it does with the information.

Link
Hardwood/Mongrel's Uncomfortable Proximity. Pretty much every link except for "home" takes you somewhere weird.

WED reading- Ade

Software art is art that is made on a computer by using a software to produce it, either by coding the software or manipulating open source code to make software art.

Example of tactical art is maphub.com, which is an online interactive map for pittsburgh created by people at carnegie mellon where people share local information about their neighborhoods.

Carnivore was a FBI program that was created to basically spy on people and invade their privacy by monitoring all thier internet activitives like email etc. RSG responded by making thier own sort of mockery version of carnivore, where they have a server, and other artists act like clients.

Carnivore - rsg

reading for WED (Nate)

Software art can be anything software generated on a computer without the input of the original artist/creator of the software beyond its initial programming. The software creates its art based on the programming rules it was given and external input (other users input if it is open software, algorithms to create procedurally generated output, and through routine based behavior in response to other users).

Fthevote.com: A work by the Carbon Defense League where they offered sex to anyone in exchange for them to sign agreement that they would vote for anyone but G.W. Bush.
(http://www.carbondefense.org/projects.html)

The original Carnivore was the nickname of an FBI created dataveillance software, DCS1000. RSG used the name to create a work inspired by the original program and in response to the increased surveillance/dataveillance laws passed after September 11. Its purpose is to comment on the collecting of information granted by these laws and with the original Carnivore.

Glyphiti- by Andy Deck