I am disappointed in:
Chaos To Perfection certainly had the potential to be great but I left it feeling a sense of lacking. It is an online 3d tour (using webgl) of Versailles including interior rooms and adjacent gardens, which in itself is pretty remarkable. A glitch art style is applied to everything without any clear narrative or visual purpose. I believed from the title that some transition would occur that involved the cultural significance of Versailles and the visual style, however is seemed to stay at just a cool visual trick applied to really nice 3d models.
I am surprised by:
In Music Of the Spheres, Charlotte Jarvis encodes music into synthetic DNA. What surprised me here was not that it could be done but the level of involvement the audience has with the DNA. In one instance, a three part musical piece is composed and only part of it played for an audience. The final parts are encoded into DNA and given to the audience. I appreciate the connections drawn between the constructed beauty of human works and something which is equally created by humans and the creator of them.
I admire:
The Carpet and the Seagull is a webgl interactive short film about a fisherman. A wonderfully surreal environment is created with a clean minimalist polygon style and Japanese influences. The lines between interactive short film and game are certainly blurred as the visual feedback to the ‘player’ give it a strong game feel. I instantly fell in love with this as soon as I realized the scene was taking part in a cube in which the some dimension changes depending on the side it is viewed from. This immediately gave every scene two layers of content and allowed every event to be simultaneously viewed from two perspectives. While as polished and immersive as it is, I am most excited about some of the potential for narrative this proves a browser environment can have.