For this project, I wanted to integrate my summer work into an idea that I came up with for our new brief of Maps and Networks. Borrowing from science fiction, horror, surrealism and digital culture, my idea involves a fictional entity stuck in between dimensions/timelines of reality, attempting to break through to ours using interference through our screens. At first, I only thought about potentially creating websites and social media posts that make the page look broken, but combining it with my street art-inspired summer project opened up a new idea - graffiti artists usually have a path around a city they tag, which one can follow by seeking out their distinct tags. This entity has a character and personality, and the only way they communicate is through digital street art. They have found themselves trapped and thus try to break the pixels on our screens to ask for help. There could even be a comedic element where they forget that their "screen" vision is mirrored, and whatever appears to our human eye is confusing mirrored writing.
In terms of sound design, I have a spray paint can which I could record and manipulate using Audition to make it sound glitchy and distorted. I aim to work independently, thus designing this character and integrating the web elements alone. I feel that this idea definitely fits in with our unit outcomes of using experimental practice in our work as a transmedia/multimedia piece. For a physical installation, I could utilise multiple screens and headphones for viewers to produce an immersive experience. I would like for viewers to work out the context and narrative on their own, which means I will implement several artistic clues to lead them to the right conclusion. This project is meant to push the boundaries of conceptual design, so I will continue developing ideas to further enhance the innovative and interactive features of the final outcome. I'd like the installation to feel convincing, so that viewers walk in and immediately feel unnerved by a presence that is trying to contact our world.
Practically, there are many things I need to figure out. Using the skills I learned in After Effects to create the spray-on graffiti effect, I could find a way to overlay those animations onto a web page by exporting them with transparency and integrating them into a custom-built website using Adobe Dreamweaver.
I have not yet decided the ratio of how much will be video versus website-based content. The website aspect is heavily inspired by Yahoo! GeoCities and the surviving tool, NeoCities. I would build the page using NeoCities, however it is purely code-based and I would have insufficient time to complete it; using Dreamweaver would be more visually intuitive and thus more effective. As mentioned in previous posts, I have a high interest in liminal spaces, eerie surrealism, creepypastas and "cursed" aesthetics, so this is the style in which I'd design my page(s). Here is a NeoCities page for reference: https://housefly.neocities.org/index.html
I would design the pages using a mixture of my own photography and illustration skills in Photoshop. The themes of graffiti and liminal spaces work well together as they both utilise urban environments with an "After Hours" feel (covered in this post last year). For source material, I could visit gloomy backstreet areas of towns I visit outside of Farnham and photograph them, then editing them and using them as the backgrounds to my web pages.
In After Effects, I took notes on this tutorial and followed it with my own adjustments to help achieve a test animation for spray-on text. Then, I exported variants after playing around with things like blend modes and the Power Pin effect to give the illusion of dimension, as well as a GIF I found which I used as a test background to represent the binary code behind the screen breaking.
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