burial.website is a burial ground and archive for online personas that have been deactivated or are no longer in active use.

Overview:

Users explore the burial ground from a first-person perspective, moving around with arrow keys. The setting of the burial ground is a large, grassy field. The time of day is early afternoon, around 2:00pm. Users can download the remains of other personas by clicking on gravestones, and they can also submit their own personas.

Submission details:

A persona is a constructed identity that is distinct from the creator’s irl identity. Visitors with a retired persona are eligible to submit its remains through a drag and drop interface. Chat logs, screenshots, videos and sounds are examples of remains. Following submission, a gravestone will be raised somewhere in the burial site.

Gravestones show basic information about the persona (screen name or name, as well as years or months active), and are direct links to the remains. Clicking the gravestone of a publically accessible persona downloads the remains of that persona as a .zip file.

Technical notes:

• the site will be hosted on a server that is buried underground
• the site will be implemented in JavaScript using the three.js library

td’dr: This project is essentially a full-body version of the Augmented Hand Series project.

The “Augmented Hand Series” (by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald) is a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands. It consists of a box into which the visitor inserts their hand, and a screen which displays their ‘reimagined’ hand—for example, with an extra finger, or with fingers that move autonomously. Critically, the project’s transformations operate within the logical space of the hand itself, which is to say: the artwork performs “hand-aware” visualizations that alter the deep structure of how the hand appears.

I’ve been working on the Augmented Hand Series this semester with Golan so I’ve become pretty familiar with the code and how the project works. Basically, for the full-body version, instead of using a camera and a Leap Motion Controller to track hands, skeleton data from a Kinect can be used to track the entire body.

The setup:

Some ideas for scenes:

This seems like the next logical step for the Augmented Hand Series. Looking forward to putting this thing together!!

Summary
A visual programming interface for javascript(D3) data visualizations.
This would serve as a way to visually manipulate/generate d3 code and better understand the structure of the program. D3 is often described as having a “steep learning curve”; I think visually seeing the structure of the code and how different objects change could reduce this barrier. I think that combining some concepts from existing visual programming environments like Max MSP would be helpful, while also recognizing that the concise format d3 is written in is also beneficial. Balancing these two features would be a challenge in this project.

I’m really interested in visual programming and diagramming and would like my project to somehow relate to this, so that is the motivation for some of the research. I started out by looking into a lot of resources related diagramming, and visual proof but I wanted the project to be less abstract and more useful so this lead eventually to visual programming.

Visual Programming
A lot of my research focused on data flow programming where the program structure is represented as a graph and the user edits the logic by modifying the nodes and the graph structure. I was really impressed by how smooth interacting with Max msp’s interface was (although I haven’t used it extensively) and thought that some in browser equivalent for visual media would be nice, specifically data driven visualizations in d3.

Then I found an existing flow based javascript programming environment, and different examples of programs on their website. It seems like they’ve done most of the work of creating all the underlying structure. So, I’m not sure that I would want to just create a sketch using their product and apply it to d3, since I wanted to actually learn more about how to create that interface.

Dataflow Programming: 
So next I looked for some sources on just data flow to better understand what this means. I found a book called Data Flow and Reactive Programming which went over a lot of points about the benefits of this paradigm (parallelization, responsiveness to changing data, and the lack of constraints on the internal content of nodes). Lastly, they note that the graph structure lends itself to visual representation fairly well. The book outlines data types and a conceptual over view (very high level) of how this might be implemented.

140: “Enjoy a modern day mutoscope; Animation brought to life by the scroll wheel.”

For my IACD capstone, I want to create a browser based mutoscope. A mutoscope is a viewer driven animation machine which used a hand crank to advance frames.  Similarly, I want to use the user input of a viewer’s scroll in order to control the rate and direction of an in-browser animation.

In my Looking Outwards assignments, I’ve been exploring browser experiences. The browser is usually reduced to documentation but I am interested in using it as a mode of art making. Because viewers are so familiar with the interface, browser based works encourage interaction. Here are some links to my relevant LO blog posts:
Looking Outwards 9
Looking Outwards 8

I’m excited to combine my love of animation with my interest in user experience within the browser.

For this project, the scroll will be used only to advance the frames of my animation. The content will stay fixed in the DOM. This is not an infinite scroller; it is a single webpage which reinterprets the scroll bar.

The work will be visually complex with a lot of animated components. The animation will be designed to travel backwards and forwards and different components will be best shown at different rates. This will allow interesting things to happen at any speed in any direction.

At the proposal feedback session, I was encouraged to look into the history of net art and its social and cultural implications. After doing so, I realized that this project is not about net art. Instead of tailoring the content to situate the work within a net art context, I will create content that reflects the original purpose of a mutoscope: entertainment.

My animation will be called ‘Critters’ and will feature hand drawn animated animals, all layered and coexisting within the browser.

For the installation, I will need a mouse with a a scroll wheel. This mechanical input will reference the mutoscope’s crank. The position of the screen will be important, the mutoscope was unique because only one person could view the animation at any time. I can build a house for a screen if need be.

I will be working with web technologies including JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3.