This week, we were asked ‘What is a computer?’. Here were my responses to the group worksheet.
It’s a group many many of transistors that can hold numbers and do calculations. It can manipulate and store data.
Computers used to be used for a group of kids to crowd around and experience things like YouTube and Club Penguin for the first time. It used to be used for accidentally downloading trojan viruses on Limewire(the file you got was also completely mislabeled), used for playing internet checkers and purble place and chess titans and updating your myspace status to N-Dubz lyrics and getting superpoked by your grandma on Facebook. Computers will become something we can’t fathom right now, because how did we know that we’d ever experience something like this 15 years ago? 30 years ago? 5 years ago?
We had to create a manifesto on a topic or a stance of our choice. It’s the end of the module, and because of how turbulent things were for me, I’m fresh out of creative steam.
RESEARCH
This is quite inspired by the source Jazmin gave us, Red Alan’s manifesto. I liked the black and white graphic style and the silly, lighthearted nature of it. I also liked the slightly subliminal question prodding hidden within it – and I latched onto the idea of a manifesto written with mutiple messages in mind. I sought out to do something like this, rather than follow the traditional, real world political sense of what a manifesto should be.
Recently, I’ve started to wave at tube drivers when they pull into the tube station. More often than not, they wave back. Sometimes I’ve stayed in a tube station after my own train has left just to do this. I think it’s silly, and it makes me laugh. Sometimes, i’ll wave at someone on the opposite side of the escalator if i see them looking at me. They’ll usually purse their lips and look away in embarrassment. In any case, I decided to base my manifesto off this premise. My chosen argument point was ‘Why you should wave at the tube driver when they pull in.’
PROCESS
Initially, I wanted to make a print, but I didn’t have time and also I’ve never actually made a print in my life – I’ve only ever seen a demonstration. Despite this, I wanted my manifesto to have a creepy black and white printed style. I toyed a lot with the creepy-cute aesthetic within my concept.
Instead, I made a few paper sketches of my text and concepts for graphics I could make.
As for the smiley face, I decided I specifically wanted to use the unicode default smiley face, ☺. I think it’s creepy and cute and goes along the lines of the aesthetic I am looking for from a graphic design point of view.
I completed the work in Adobe Illustrator, which I had experience in. I also decided this should be a business card in terms of document setup.
OUTCOME
The meaning of this card is up to interpretation.
I’m no CSM graphic communication design student however, and have no actual experience in graphic design at all, simply vector artwork. Through my use of pictograms I attempted to recreate and was heavily inspired by was the slightly futuristic style of graphic design that I have seen floating around for the past few years – an example I can think of off the top of my head is Impact’s infographics. I’m not sure I achieved this look 100% but i’m not upset about it.
Contextually, I like the idea of this work being an actual business card that could somehow make its way into the pockets of an average tube-goer, but that’s creepy.
TW: implied mentions of self h/// in the context of Borderline Personality Disorder.
Telling a story
Our prompt was to ‘Tell a story in a medium of our choice.’
RESEARCH
I chose to make a looping p5.js sketch about the intersection between BPD, ADHD, C-PTSD and autism. It relates to experiences of me and my friends as this intersection is something you can almost get trapped inside. It’s a blind spot between all 4 disorders where no one can figure out exactly what you have, so you can easily be ignored by medical professionals when faced with the stigma of 4 disorders at once, all of which overlap but you don’t fit perfectly into any one in particular, rather all of them at once at once – creating this constant loop of being ignored and denied help and constantly living and dying searching for some kind of answer.
Lots of the inspiration for this piece comes from the book ‘Talking About BPD’ by Rosie Cappuccino which dwells a lot on the muddy nature of feelings surrounding navigating diagnostic pathways.
I also wanted to tell this story using objects before words. Therefore, in my final piece, there is a png overlay of items related to each stage of acceptance, based on the 5 stages of grief.
PROCESS
Since I wanted to tell all of this story through objects first and foremost, I made a mindmap of objects in each ‘stage’.
All the art in this piece is hand drawn on paper then scanned in. I made a room in Minecraft, took screenshots, and painted it.
Here’s the room. Sketches based on the room and the mindmap are as follows.
Here’s the undersketch of the painting.
The painting itself is acrylic, aided by some watercolour pigments. Scanned.
After this, I took some tracing paper and drew several objects all around the room from my mind map. Anything that didn’t come out clear, I redrew on separate paper and used. Here are the scans.
I also wrote 5 story text cards to display after the user views the room, scanned them in, and added them to all my assets. Lastly, I put it all in p5.js. Here’s the outcome.
I had to exhibit my work in a digital space this time. I chose to make a minecraft resource pack.
RESEARCH
I had to learn through youtube tutorials how to make minecraft texture packs.
In terms of inspiration, I realised that anything can be a canvas within Minecraft, including its’ life. I have found the use of real animals and animal parts in physical artwork interesting although I don’t think I could ever do that myself with real animals. Some of my concepts originate from this piece of art I saw on the Tate website when I was 16.
‘Although obviously dead and pickled in formaldehyde, the sheep in Hirst’s work looks oblivious to its fate and seems to be prancing with life.’
Quote taken from online display caption.
How can something so dead seem so alive? Likewise, digital animals are not living, but perhaps I can use their coded movements to make my own work seem more alive than it actually is.
PROCESS
In the .minecraft directory, I copied the .jar file for this version and copied and pasted it to /resourcepacks, where I then edited the PNG assets within them. I used Krita to layer my artwork on top of the texures. I chose to edit a few paintings and change them to be my work, and exhibit those in a traditional gallery sense, putting my art on some pre-built walls. However, unlike in a traditional gallery, I decided to fit multiple paintings on each wall in a slightly random composition as I believe it complements the messy nature of my artwork, as well as making colourful and dark pieces contrast with eachother, complimenting both of them.
Then, I chose some more colourful pieces and placed them over various mobs, including docile (cows, pigs, goats) and hostile (zombies and skeletons). For the docile mobs, I picked two mobs that had a larger surface area and that could breed together, to create interesting interactions with my own pieces. Cows and goats can be shown wheat in order to follow the player, and can be fed it in order to activate ‘love mode.’
Zombies and skeletons too are interesting because in certain situations they can start to attack eachother.
Because the texture sizes in minecraft are so small, lots of my art became heavily pixelated, especially the mobs.
OUTCOME
0.5 zoom (set my FOV to quake pro)A cow with half of sonic’s face on it’s ass.
It’s my art interacting with itself, and with you.
The ENA web series is a massive source of inspiration for my work as is. It likes to play on liminal spaces and location as a whole a lot and is as disorienting as much as it somehow makes sense. It’s a web-series designed to look and feel like a game, but as of right now is strictly animation. They are working on the next installment being a game, however.
The new trailer dropped this week and it’s been on my mind a lot, as I support the series on Patreon and I have spoken to the creator a handful of times. He’s surprisingly normal for how insane this webseries is. I think a significant part of his creative approach comes from pure randomness and designing characters and locations out of completely random concepts on a whim.
Toro is an older hyperfixation of mine. In Toro on Holiday, you explore pictures of Miura in the Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan with Toro the cat, as you’re on holiday with him. It’s a point-and-click adventure style game. You have to teach him about the space. The inn you stay at in the game is a real place that still exists.
LSD dream emulator is one of my favourite games ever. It’s by visual artist Osamu Sato, a first-person exploration game on the PS1. It’s based on his ex-coworker’s dream diary and the manifestation of her sexual assault trauma in her dreams.
OUTCOME
I had a few main ideas in repsponse to the word LOCATION, but this was the strongest:
I could make a Google Earth implementation of Queering the Map, and make it so that entries can be viewed in a 3D space instead of a strictly 2D space, for immersive purposes. This sort of thing can also be implemented in VR, so that an audience may have the experience of traversing real world locations and seeing the stories written about them. A futher development to this brief is that I could pick an area that is paticularly dense with entries, for example Montreal, and recreate 1 street in a different 3D art style. It can look like anything but cel-shading comes to mind. If I could, I’d like it to look slightly surreal and dreamy to highlight the heightened gravity of feeling within queer experiences, as my research details two games with heavily surrealist themes – and model the street around these entries. Potentially, a user could explore a masked building of interest where entries are written on the walls, furniture, or are left around as notes as opposed to them being a 2D speech bubble on a map. It could run in something like Dreams PS4 and use PSVR if it’s implemented in a 3D exploration way, but I believe this concept could also work in 2.5D as a point-and-click adventure game like Toro on Holiday, as my main aim is to add more context to the entries. I believe the streets and buildings should look different enough to real life as to preserve the privacy of the entries.
For this week, we were asked to introduce some risk to our creative practice, and one of the pathways of which was to create a new piece of work using a medium we have never worked in before.
Taking a risk
I’m coming in with a hot take. For this project I chose pixel art for my medium because I absolutely hate it with a burning passion.
Especially with the substanceless 8-bit retro gaming nostalgia movement I was subjected to being a child online in the 2010s. It’s the most boring aesthetic in the world – white boy 2d metroidvania style side scrolling platformer with the worn out chiptune music – the reason why the word ‘gamer’ used to make me recoil in fear. Ew!
Like, this is what my family would be thinking of when I tried to talk to them about video games.
I just didn’t grow up knowing video games as 8-bit, so all of this stuff would make me cringe so hard as a teeny little girl who grew up on the PS3. All the video essays I ever watched on video games as a kid had some older white dude with this exact aesthetic nitpicking a modern video game about something they don’t know anything about and always proclaiming ‘The classics were better because they did x thing 20 years ago!’ I was so sick of this kind of thing. I grew to hate the retro aesthetic!
I’m going to confront this hate and see if there’s anything that can be appreciated about pixel art.
RESEARCH
I got the idea to try making a piece of pixel art from when one of my twitter mutuals was talking about this game called Star Platinum released in 1996.
Firstly, it’s incredibly obscure and I never was able to find much information about it online and I think it was japan exclusive, but essentially it’s a hentai visual novel combined with a hanafuda card game.
The reason I found the art so intriguing for this game is that all of the images in the visual novel have a maximum of 16 colours. I found the art in this game to be incredibly beautiful despite its rewstrictions. I found the clever use of colour theory within each pallete super interesting. Let me show some examples.
From Mobygames – ‘I wonder how she felt after that.’
From Mobygames – ‘Rin is insecure, and needs help taking her swimsuit off.’
Like, look at this specific section where they used only 4 colours…
I decided to try and make a drawing in the style of this game, using these restrictions, to see if I can forgive pixel artists for what they were dealing with however many years ago.
PROCESS
I installed GraphicsGale, a pixel art software I had never used before. I couldnt figure out how to make a pallete, so I restricted myself using the colour count features.
I had to look into pixel art shading techniques, namely dithering. Here’s a definition from google.
From Springer. Click for source.
This is what the game used to create the illusion of more colours than there were. In my case, I chose to strategically choose my pallete to be as usable as possible in other locations in the piece.
As to what I actually drew, me, Cristina and a few others went to see Yeule in concert on that Tuesday so I wanted to draw her. She’s cool.
I think Cristina took this.
I colour picked a lot from pictures we took at the show, and due to the extreme lighting it was pretty easy to pick multiple values and average them out for a certain area, as they could be reused elsewere. I also tried referencing similar poses from the game itself, because I’ve also never worked in this specific 90s exaggerated anime style before!
Here are some developments:
OUTCOME
This is what I produced in the end. It took roughly 6-7 hours. I did not expect that it would take this much time and effort at all! Maybe I understand pixel art a little bit better now. I’ve come to appreciate working this specific medium with these restrictions.
This week, we’re revisiting our STEAM concepts from Week 2. We were asked to generate 10 solutions to our problem and create 1 prototype. My problem was about storing student pronouns in an easy and safe way.
My creative process for this week was quite simple as all I really needed to come up with was a way to store student details in general. This comes from my belief that pronouns can be stored as easily as names – and thus this lack of extemely simple implementation makes trans students invisible, for like no reason. Now, if you’re at a school where the cruelty isnt the point, SIMS (registration software used in a majority of UK primary and secondary schools) came out with a new update as of July 5th, 2022. You can read more here. https://faq.scomis.org/kb704626/
This system isn’t perfect, as all it stores is pronouns, has no supplementary details (as pronouns can be a whole story, not just a set of words!) so I seeked to improve upon this by atemping to intergrate a dedicated table for pronoun safety instead of a restricting dropdown box. That being said, SIMS suprised me with its use of neopronouns, however I believe selecting neopronouns from a dropdown box defeats the purpose of even having them there – neopronouns can be unpredictable. I believed that can be fixed by simply changing the data type for this column to plain text instead of drop-down. But first, we need to find a solution to store these details.
Microsoft access database
Paper-based database
Heap TXT files
Excel flat-file spreadsheet
Hash tables, for privacy ##### (javascript implementation)
Just say it! Use ur brain to remember! Have it known by word of mouth.
Binary tree methods (javascript implementation)
Look into possible apps- Microsoft SQL
MySQL
SIMS (what was used at my school)
To be sensible, I added a new table to the Microsoft access preset database for schools, titled Student Pronouns.
Now, apart from ID, all the fields in this table in long text form. This is due to the unpredictable nature of pronoun storage. This way we can accomodate both cisgender students using their birth pronouns and having no supplementary details, as well as any other student that may or may not be trans but uses alternate pronouns, or has a complex list of usable pronouns and a very specific list of people they are comfortable using them around.
This table also has a relationship to the main student table meaning this information is easily available.
I think my prototype needs to be refined further however as there are features I want to implement that prevent this from being perfect, namely pronoun privacy.
Above all else, people under this system need to be kept safe and be respected. I think data should be hidden or changed when viewed by certain accounts as specified by the user in order for them to have complete control and choice as to who sees what in regards to their gender identity.
My week 2 blog post
To reflect, I haven’t implemented a way to change certain records depending on the user that views them. After implementing this change, I think this system would be much closer to my original vision. Ways i could do this would maybe be creating another table just to store privacy related discrepancies and how they are supposed to display (and to whom), but I don’t know how to do that myself yet in Access. The most useful way these tables would be used are in SIMS, but I think it’s closed source and I have no access to it to make a modified prototype.
CONTENT WARNING!!! THIS MIGHT HAVE FLASHING IMAGES IN IT. CAREFUL!
Reflecting on an old piece…
I’m reflecting on Week 1’s No Ghost, Just a Shell piece with AnnLee.
Here’s the reflection I wrote all the way back in September when we started.
‘I like the idea of my work being a floating piece without context, but Jazmin mentioned that context outside of the format matters a little bit, so I’d probably have taken my piece further contextually by setting it up as a projection on a white or grey wall as an installation, as a homage to the original project. The piece itself could be developed if i changed the background to have a subtle glitch effect to make the meaning more obvious and to add some more movement & keep it eye catching.’
I’m going to use this as an opportunity to reflect on my own reflection, too. I like the piece a lot. It looks like something I drew. But I must admit that I feel like my art style has stagnated over the past year or so, compared to the excited freshness from when I first defaulted back to traditional art in lockdown 2020. My art style has significantly less expression and personality than when I started, and I have absolutely no idea – or time! – to rectify this. In my old reflection, I talked about Jazmin placing importance on contextualising my pieces. Having given it some time, I think I’m going to take this piece of art in a completely different direction and turn it into a p5.js sketch. I now realise development isn’t linear, and can take multiple turns, directions or pathways.
Instead of bringing her into the real world, let’s go chase her around her territory. Dwelling on the fact we as an audience can never connect to AnnLee, you can never touch her. Using two flipped AnnLees that show() and hide() themselves based on the function mouseOver(), AnnLee will avoid your mouse as soon as it comes near her. No matter how hard you try, you can’t connect with her. There is nothing to connect with.
Additionally, this piece has two parts – Click and move your mouse and you’ll see what I mean. For every frame your mouse is moved, a new AnnLee is drawn. I initially discovered this imagery by accident working on another project in p5.js and decided it would feel at home in a broken, glitchy piece like this. I did it to show the existence of these infinite iterations of AnnLee that could have been created due to the existence of the No Ghost, Just a Shell project, where AnnLee contains multiudes – a side of the project I hadn’t seen explored yet within my own research. Anyone can make as many AnnLees as they like this way.
I did a lot of work for this week. That being said, this isn’t really finished.
What I WANTED to do was make a full video, and the song HAD to be 5Light by Prolaps. It’s 2 and a half minutes long and I wanted to make something that fit it perfectly. It was supposed to have a lot of crazy editing and use most of my art from the past 2 years (400 pieces give or take, and mildly inspired by the montages in Everything Everywhere All At Once) in some form as well as footage of my drawing application I did for my computing EPQ, and lastly a segment where I talk about them and how I envision my art (the technical process is less relevant)
So, I essentially did the weekly task twice so that I would have something to hand in in case I didn’t finish the video:
ARTIST STATEMENT
Simply put, I don’t know what my creative practice is. But as I’ve been working out, I may have come to the realisation that I mainly care that other people enjoy themselves, which comes from wherever you can imagine. My main example of creative computing in the past was a little drawing application, where all throughout the process I just thought to myself… ‘I can’t wait to see what other people make. I just want to pass it around to as many people as possible.’ It’s like I make stepping stones for others; Their feelings and ideas and enjoyment – I like to serve as a platform. I wonder if it’s because my entire childhood before age 10 revolved around Little Big Planet and I consider it part of my DNA. I want to give others so many tools that they feel spoiled for choice.
We got quite a broad prompt again this week. As such, I placed much less emphasis on research this time and more on the development of an end piece.
Disrupting a binary
RESEARCH
My thought process behind this wasn’t to look outwards and research what a problem like this could entail, but rather, inwards. I felt like I already found the answer in my experiences – i’m a non-binary person in an excessively binary space.
There’s nothing clear cut about my gender, and I still don’t know if I have it perfectly figured out. See, in the real world outside of binary, it’s okay to be a logic error like this. All I’m properly firm on is that I go by he/him pronouns at this time. I could be loosely described as transmasculine. My research really only pertained to tapping into my experiences as a transmasc of colour navigating a tech space of which I am extremely underrepresented – even within the queer and transgender community inside computer science. I have never seen anyone like myself in this field whatsoever.
To evaluate my more humanities focused research – If i was to revisit this very post, I would find other trans men or transmasculine creative practicioners and include them in this research. Also, Jazmin reccomended me the book Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell which was also a resource for this week’s task. I have just bought the book and am looking forward to investigating more resources written by queer POC about technology and tech spaces.
In terms of a chosen art style for this piece, I took a lot of inspiration from a little indie animation project called Brawler’s World, a 3D web series. It’s categorised by clunky, low poly lego – like models combined with a rough and grainy rendering style, borrowing its own stylistic choices from iconic late 90’s and early 2000’s video games like Jet Set Radio and Wipeout. Here are some examples.
PROCESS
In looking inwards, I’ll give a little contex into my life. Recently I’ve been socially transitioning more and more, and so recently I’ve finally been able to get a hold of some TransTape which is a safe binding system – something I’ve never had access to before. I filmed myself putting it on for the first time just for personal reasons, and so in the work I created I made use of the footage and cut it down and spliced it together.
I used a pose from the end of the video as the base for a 3D art piece for my outcome.
It’s me!
The video i recorded already had some interesting audio, specifically when i was listening to SOPHIE, so I kept some of it in.
After spending some time relearning Blender, I then made a 3D model based off of this image, copying the Brawlers World cartoony style, like when I drew the face and the tape textures super crudely to save time.
