MCA

Okay the biggest thing I gleaned from going to the biennale at the MCA is that modern art extends everywhere from the interesting and beautiful to the ugly and downright weird. I did find a black-and-white America-style flag where instead of the stars were the words "Liberty or Death" which seemed a little humorous, but not terribly new.

And then I found something that could be considered all four. A rather uninteresting man standing in a park or field, holding a children's balloon and singing in a strange voice. I watched for a bit and made out what sounded like some kind of a hymn or regular-type song like that. At school every friday we had a hymn in assembly and it just reminded me of my own childhood. I know it was profoundly weird, but it just... struck me as subtly powerful. I don't know. It just had an effect on me.

I managed to get a short audio recording while nobody was looking, I feel I can't properly describe it here. You can hear the artist take a couple of breaths out of the helium tank.



Double-checking things: title was "Hymn", by Mark Wallinger (1997)
Lyrics: http://www.kididdles.com/lyrics/t105.html

for older browsers:

Week 8

Okay this was quite fun, and pressure-some, but I don't know how to show what I did.

This class started off with a focus on Anne Zahalka Portraits: 1987-2007.
Example: zahalkaworld.com.au/pages/welcometosydney.html
Personal favourite:


Not sure why, I think I might just like the strong lines of man-made objects.

But anyway, after all that there was this intense two-hour sitemaking of which I am unsure how to present on such a site as this :-/

I must admit I got a little sidetracked by trying to have moving eyes that followed the mouse. Originally I wanted to have a face that looked side to side based on where the user's mouse was but I have no idea how to do that :-(

The facial images were these two:

Week 6 stuff

Er... something's not right here, they've gone Awol, all I have are notes about how awesome studio Ghibli's animation is.

Maybe this was the week in which I showed my admittedly sub-awesome website idea. I'm sorry but all I can think of is something pseudo-organic.

Week 5 Items

Now this was fun.

Rollovers! Animation! Etc!

If you return to http://codey.net.au/webclass/10.html you will notice that the sun, bird, and three of the rocks in the water change their appearance if you put your cursor over them.

The code to do this is

onmouseout="MM_swapImgRestore()" onmouseover="MM_swapImage('Original Image','','Alternate Image',1)"≥≤img src="the other image" name="Original Image Name" width="whatever" height="whatever" border="0"

Which dreamweaver adds in ALL BY ITSELF which is unquestionably awesome.

That said, making the alternative images is really fiddly in photoshop, using "Export for web and devices" to get the original page and similar for the alternate images which invariably seem to be .gif images...

Now this was the incredibly creepy animation I did: I was only supposed to move the eyes a little, with tweening and all that... but I got distracted.


Wheee! Click for movement!

Week 4 Items

I was going to post these things over the weekend but I had some kind of a cold and hid under the covers, so here goes:

Using Illustrator we sliced up images into clickable areas for dreamweaver. Instead of going with the numbers-overlaid-on-an-image idea, I thought I would just set regions of possible interest in the image as clickable places.

The original image was:


I sliced it using this slicing tool - hidden under a crop tool from memory - and uploaded the result to http://codey.net.au/webclass/10.html with links to everybody else's pages.

Unfortunately the first time we all uploaded our sliced images they looked horrible in firefox with thick blue edges around clickable images, ruining the layout.

The code I used to fix this was:



Turns out the initial stuff was ignored by firefox so what does all the work is the "

" bit.

WE CAN PUBLISH THINGS FROM CLASS?!?

And here I was wondering how the hell one could come up with two things a week. I wish this thing had a backdated posts option because that would be quite appropriate.

Example: Week 3 was about CSS and html section IDs so that that can work. Example:

Motion or Identity, motion or identity...

Every time I swing towards one the other pulls me away. I think of motion and that leads to old rusty things, machinery and steampunk. I think of identity and I think of steampunk... machinery... and old rusty things.

I start with something that aims for motion and end up with something involving language. Where will this go next?

Maybe this text thing could work

This is just a little mockup in photoshop, but maybe it could work? So far I cannot rotate the words but allowing people to click on a letter and a word "grows" out of it - hopefully following a curve so that it grows like a tree or a vine. I still can't quite get away from the identity thing so maybe I should make a list of words about an identity, or separate lists people can choose from...

God this is hard.

Flash seems easier than I thought though.

Essays are hard

Maybe I should do something to do with language instead of steampunk pipes and mechanics and such. I've just spent two weeks losing evenings and entire weekends to a major essay for one of my subjects and quite frankly it's amazing how many words spiral out of a single concept. Maybe a word tree? I don't really want to have to do this in flash because I don't know flash, maybe there's a way in javascript...

Should probably mention my own site idea

When I looked at the theme of "Movement" I thought of machinery, specifically steam engines. But in a modern way... if that makes sense.

When I looked at the theme of "Identity" I thought of 18th century clothing (Big hats) and... steam engines. But used in a modern context. You know, out of place but still makes some kind of sense.

Basically either way I ended up on the idea of "steampunk". Unfortunately that doesn't really help get me anywhere.

There's the awesome ideas of Tom Banwell in terms of hats/clothing and a few movable type items, but apart from that nothing that comes out as "art on the web", more just a web-based view of art that is based off the web.

But just static images doesn't feel right, even were I to focus on Identity, I would still feel that motion was somehow necessary, so I figure a focus on Motion with a sub-focus on how I identify with it, might be a suitable method of attacking the task at hand.

From a motion-based viewpoint, all I could come up with was the idea of an animation that expanded to show the viewer... _something_. Nothing specific, just "something".

I finally thought, what if the expansion was just to reveal the thing that expanded, not to uncover something else beneath. This idea took the form of some kind of "mechanical tree", as in a tree that grows from the user clicking on parts of it. And mechanical by virtue of being composed of pipes, pistons, puffs of steam, and for some reason some art-deco style sculpture seems to fit perfectly in place (The kind of architectural art style that I believe came out during the end of the great steam-powered ships).

I used to be very interested in the Titanic as a child, that could be a possible influence. I used to wonder what would have happened if the Titanic didn't sink, and the ships kept getting bigger and more frivolous, with no worries about the possibility of it all being lost at sea.

Now I'm more affected by movies - or was that what got me interested in the Titanic? Not sure what came first. I also think a lot of that scene from Pirates of the Caribbean - where Captain Jack looks for a hat - you've got to have a hat (and it's got to be the right hat). However I don't think that will go very far. Can't have hats on machinery, they don't like it.

Anyway, this was my idea proposed last week:


However for that I used shapes to make up the tree, which reminded me of the art deco thing... so who knows what I'll end up with. I think the idea of the tree that grows when you click on it is too good to pass up however.

Critique of another class member's work

Tom -> Identity

Starting out with a 9-sided die, the user is assigned one of nine different alignments like in Dungeons and Dragons (Lawful - Neutral - Chaotic / Good - Neutral - Evil).

His site is for the identity theme and will show political/famous people (possibly photoshop-amended) assigned to each role.

The concept appears sound, and there doesn't seem to be any major difficulties that he will come across in his thought-through development process.

7/10

I give up.

I tried to find something with more design in it but I couldn't. This image just kept nagging at me until I put it here.

I have been in the outback not too long ago and this image just reminded me of the desolate expanse out there. The road extends forever past the horizon and the vegetation never gets more than about a foot high. The car has two tanks, either for water or petrol - a lot of storage needed with nowhere to replenish. No sign of civilisation is shown - the path ahead is unsealed and only sustained by the laying of tracks by each person that has driven along it - apart from the car and the person in it.

When I used to see images like this I used to think it wasn't as bleak as all that. It wasn't until I had seen it for myself that I realised that the horizon doesn't change for hours of driving, and the bleakness captured in images such as that is the bleakness one sees for hundreds of kilometres at a time.