Web Art and Design

This images are just random Creative Commons Content from flickr that I’ll just in the introduction of my site, my idea is that a crowd is similar to how we get lost in the internet. How are you able to create something unique and individual if you’re part of something that’s sometimes bigger than you regardless of activity, time of race. In my way of thinking it’s not bad to be a part of a crowd, sometimes people try to emphasize their unique personality but in the end we belong somewhere else.

Oh yes…  I also associate crowds with chaos.

The final idea for my site dealing with identity would be the following:

To try to deal with this the structure of the site will be the following:

The first screen is only an introduction, as in the drawing, it’s a big question mark witha tagline which will relate with the main idea for the site the question    mark will be made up by internet content, like facebook or flickr photos that will change (so it will be flash based).

After clicking on the introductory screen, the viewer will be taken to the main menu which is basically a black page with 4 neon buttons, each of this buttons leads him to a different subjects, this subjects are things that are usually said to define people, e.g.:

• Music
• Opinions
• Interests
• Photos (Facebook, flickr, etc…)

The following 4 subsites is where most of the content is located, and it will deal with the subjects mentioned above, at the moment I’m still working on it. To give a little idea of what I’m thinking in the case of music, I’m thinking of asking the viewer their favorite groups and comparing this to the number of people that listen to that group on http://last.fm and thus getting an idea of many thousands of people have an opinion that is equal to ours (or how we are just the result of previous opinions -Intertextuality), the visual style of this section would be a mashup of different artist, although I’m still looking for an example.

Also, if there’s a visual style to be developed it will be in this 4 subsites as the 2 first introductory pages are pretty straightforward and are only meant for navigation.

I think this site is really similar to what I intend to do. And the website varies a lot depending on the user input

http://www.yourlifeourmovie.org/net/

As I was missing a visual example of what I intend to make here are the following screens:

The first is a very basic example of my main page, but I intend the buttons to be that  way and keep the page as simple as possible.

The music section of my page will be vary between the artist the viewer writes (done by css and php) but there will be a template, and only the background pictures will change, the example I found is the following one.

There are two very important elements that I planned to keep:

The guitar pick and the concert tickets, apart from the background pictures changing I intend to use this elements as the way to present the text.

Jamie Livingston’s Photo of the Day is a normal photography gallery when you see it for the first time, even the tag line for the site “Some photographs of that day” might make you think that the content is regular stuff. But it is when you take more time to browse through the content that you get a glimpse of what a series of photographies can mean.

The website consists of a series of polaroids taken between 1979 and 1997, there’s no description of the photos or why were they taken. It is only thru a little research that I found out that the photographer’s name was Jamie Livingston. The oldest dated picture is the following:

As you browse thru the different years you can see that the photographer was actually a person that had a lot of friends, and was very social as a lot of the pictures are of persons smiling just hanging out and this makes you think that they were his friends, you can also see what I think are some of his hobbies:

But it is in the later years that the photos take a darker tone, as we can see photos of scars, hospitals or pills  it just shows you why sometimes we associate things with a certain feeling and how something as simple as a polaroid can let us know what is going on. As the year of 1997 progresses the polaroids show even more of this images and the mood starts to change, there’s still meetings with friends but with a hospital picture between days. The final picture is the following:

After seeing this polaroid my thoughts about the site changed drastically, and it’s at this point that I realized how much did this photographies mean. Obviously this photography was taken by someone else, but you can see the dedication from Jamie Livingston and how much this photographies reflected.

In terms of the questions proposed in the assignment I would catalogue the website as art because I think the most important part of the content is what it conveys rather than how it looks, actually as I mentioned before the layout of the page is quite normal and the content are just every day photos. Even the way you navigate the page is really bad as in order to go from one year to another you have to make to many clicks, in conclussion it is only by taking more time to browse that the photos start to gather some meaning.

Does it relate to other art forms in the web?

In a way it’s similar to other art forms on the internet because as the internet is such a new medium for expressing ourselves, the art expressions we can find differ vastly from websites we commonly browse. But seeing it in another way, this site is more similar to a common flickr gallery than it is to an art gallery. The main reason for this is that probably the creator planned to showcase this great deal of work rather than planning to create an artwork.

I think what sparked my interest about this site is the fact what a series of photos can mean, and how an identity can be built thru a series of objects owned by a person in this case the objects and relationships are  reflected on photographies. It’s in this part that I find a relation between the content and my final project, initially the things we do are just ordinary and they get lost in a sea of content (the internet) but by spending some time and analyzing them, they actually can have a very strong meaning.

You might say that Jamie Livingston was a fairly regular person that one day decided to take a polaroid (a vey interesting medium by itself) each day of his life

Expanding on the first idea mentioned for the project: Post 2 I found out about to concepts that sum up what I have in mind:

Intertextuality: The internet is just a constant repetition of ideas (retweets, memes, etc…)

Collective Unconscious:

I’m looking for other concepts to establish what I’m looking for

One of the ideas which came to my mind while thinking about identity, is that we spend a big part of our life building a unique identity, while at the same time this “unique identities” are just repetitions of common patterns that can be seen in different generations, and in reality these identities form part of a bigger thing thus leading to a loss of the concept of individual identity be it in a metaphysical way:

Or social way: