Peggasus988’s Weblog

First week, third project. The brief consists of;

Content is now massively distributed, individuals and companies now disperse their video, graphics, text across the likes of ‘youtube’, ‘flickr’ and ‘facebook’. How do you organise and structure such content? Using the relevant, api pull data such as music tastes, video lists and friend’s lists from sources such as ‘youtube’, ‘flickr’ and ‘facebook’ and create a single page to display them. Your page should be an aesthetic and structured interpretation of the data retrieved that gives the user a visual understanding of the information and the relationships between its component parts.

Research

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/

squidsoup.com/ghosts

www.processing.org

http://www.vimeo.com/1802138

http://www.proximityofneeds.org/

http://labs.digg.com/bigspy/?popular

http://amaztype.tha.jp/US/Books/Title?q=labradoodle

http://www.vimeo.com/1593564 generative code based stuff.

http://glennmarshall.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/the-zeno/

Content Management;

http://community.joomla.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_systems

http://w3schools.com/

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/

From this point I have been currently working on the concept of manipulating RSS feeds, I am at the moment working on feeding my word press data into a web page to change the shape or size of an image or item depending on the content of which is being transferred.

Furthermore I have looked at two different but similar designs within the context of interface and advanced web design that use RSS feeds. one of the two can be found at;

http://similardiversity.net/

the other at;

http://www.pitchinteractive.com/election2008/

Current/Final Idea;

From the research I have formed my current idea which is to represent the popularity of religion within our society, while at the same time taking the piss out of it. I hate Religion, being brought up in a catholic school from a young age I was able to see how ridiculous it all is and how in a lot of ways it is also a very nasty ideal. My basic plan is to check through RSS feeds how many people are typing either God or Allah into Google and to then have the numbers represent shapes within my web page. From this I will not only be able to come up with some interesting images but be able to see who is more popular, God or Allah.

At the moment this is all very boring and has no creative flare at all. So how can I make this interesting… Well as a child I was very interested in superman and from a certain degree worshiped the ground he walked on. I had the comics, toys, clothes, you name it I had it. What if I included Superman into my survey, people would finally be able to answer that one question that has haunted them from the beginning of time, “Who is the most poplar make-believe character ever” Superman, God or Allah.

Ok so I now have the basic idea, how do I represent this into my web page, I currently have the idea to represent God, Allah and Superman as semi circles at the bottom of the page, the more data that comes through, the higher and bigger the semi circles become, if data is close or infact really far away the semi circles will branch out to form arches to one another, but this is only in the case of the God and Allah circles, this is because I believe that religions play off each other and I feel you couldn’t have one without the other, so I am trying to represent this in my work, plus I really like the idea of Superman taking on God and Allah. So the image works on the data being pulled in and hopefully will constantly change, I also plan to make the colours and type change as well as the circles get bigger. Furthermore I am naming the piece “Stairway to Heaven” because as the circles get bigger they will become representative of some sort of tower which could also imply a stair set, basically I think this name is very fitting for this project.

From this point with the help of my teacher I have been able to get some code together that will basically find the words God,Allah and Superman and source the data from a site into my web page, all I need to do now is get some visuals together and have the visuals react accordingly to the data being provided. The code for the sourcing is listed below, this is not just for documentation purposes but for me to keep looking back over it, to truly understand what it means.

EVALUATION

For the final idea I have decided to bring all my ideas together to form what I call the popularity contest.The popularity contest is an idea I have had all the way through this project, it is a great representation of how I felt towards religion when I was at school and in that respect this piece of work is very personal to me because I feel very strongly towards the issues that I feel I am addressing in this piece of work. The overall childish theme is purely reflective of my childhood or rather my childhood at school, I generally had a happy time which I feel is shown through the colourful imagery. Another reason as to why I have gone for the childish look within this piece is to make the point that I want the audience to see the piece from a child’s eyes, even to some degree imaging a child had drawn this, I hope by the audience seeing the image this way, they will be able to reflect back to their own childhood and recall their schooldays.

Why a popularity contest? this concept is the easiest for me to explain. Going to a religious school I felt at times overwhelmed by the amount of information the teachers would throw at us concerning religion, if one was to ever question the information being taught they would simply get in trouble. I grew up in school realizing that their was no freedom of speech when it came to religion, if you had questions relating to the bible that perhaps showed it in a negative light, you would simply get in trouble. I suppose out of all this what I am trying to get at is that I never really believed in religion( perhaps because of the way in which it was taught to me) and found the whole concept quite silly as a child, in my mind it was all make believe, but people would actually argue the point that the stories they were telling were true, even to the extent of trying to convince people of different religions that they were wrong.

I came to the concision as a child that perhaps the more followers a religion had the stronger it would then become, some truth to this I believe there to be. I realized it was all one big popularity contest. In terms of this project I have portrayed my views as so, all of the characters are lined up in a popularity contest jumping for top position. Superman was included to make the point that I find them all to be make believe, so in that respect it is no more outrageous to believe he is as real as God or Allah. In response to why they are holding their names up, as I mentioned earlier this is due to a wanting to be seen, they want the viewer to know they are there, as all religions do. Concerning the RSS feed within the piece this simply effects the speed and height in which the characters jump, for example If God had four votes and Allah has only three, God will then jump higher and faster than Allah to show that he is more popular.

Issues of coding this project were at the top of my annoyance list, I now know that I am not cut out for programing, that is not to say however that this project wasn’t a great learning experience for me because it was, I learnt several things to do with Flash that I am sure will help in the future and further my skills within the program. If I was to do this project again I would try to make the characters do more than just jump and I believe with my new found knowledge of Flash I could that. Overall I really enjoyed this project, not in terms of the coding because in all honesty I hated doing that, I enjoyed doing this project because it gave me a chance to reflect back to my childhood in school and really reflect on how I was taught there and how perhaps it has effected the way I am today. In essence its quite funny really because if I had been able to speak my mind at school and question freely then maybe I wouldn’t be the same person I am today, I like to think at least that it was the personal quest for truth and always wanting to wonder and question that made me the creative person I am today.

Under here is the final layout of what my final coding looked like, enjoy

var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoaded);

/*stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, bounce);*/
//this example loads the first entry from a log splits the entry into words
//the loop at the bottom then searches the text for occurances of the words
//allah, buddah, and god
//then counts them

var godcounter:int = 0;
var allahcounter:int = 0;
var supermancounter:int = 0;

var supermanbounce:int = 0;
var godbounce:int = 0;
var allahbounce:int = 0;

var superup:int = 0;
var godup:int = 0;
var allahup:int = 0;

//standard xml loading

var entries:Array = new Array();
var xml:XML;

function onLoaded(e:Event):void
{
//trace (e.target.data);
//load the xml
xml = new XML(e.target.data);
//pull the items from the xml

var il:XMLList = xml.channel.item;
//convert first item text into a string

var str:String = il.description.text()[0];
//split the sting into words b looking for the gaps

var toast:Array = str.split(‘ ‘);
//loop through the first 20 words

for(var i:uint=0; i< 60; i++)
{
trace (toast[i]);

//check for word god and count it repeat for other words

if(toast[i] == ‘god’) {
godcounter++
/*graphics.beginFill(10 * godcounter);
graphics.drawCircle(100, 15 * godcounter, 5 * godcounter);*/

/*god_1.width = 15 * godcounter;
god_1.height = 30 * godcounter;*/

}

if(toast[i] == ’superman’) {
supermancounter++
/*graphics.beginFill(10 * supermancounter);
graphics.drawCircle(300, 15 * supermancounter, 5 * supermancounter);*/

/*superman_1.width = 15 * supermancounter;
superman_1.height = 30 * supermancounter;
*/
}

if(toast[i] == ‘allah’) {
allahcounter++

/*graphics.beginFill(10 * allahcounter);
graphics.drawCircle(500, 15 * allahcounter, 5 * allahcounter);*/

}

stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, bounce);
stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, bounce2);
stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, bounce3);

}

}

function bounce(e:Event):void {

if (supermanbounce < supermancounter && superup == 0){
supermanbounce++;
superman_1.y = 250 – (supermanbounce * 10);
trace(superman_1.y);
if (supermanbounce == supermancounter) { superup = 1;}
} else {
supermanbounce–;
superman_1.y = 250 – (supermanbounce * 10);
//trace(superman_1.y);
if (supermanbounce == 0) { superup = 0;}

}
}

function bounce2(p:Event):void {

if (godbounce < godcounter && godup == 0){
godbounce++;
god_1.y = 250 – (godbounce * 10);
trace(god_1.y);
if (godbounce == godcounter) { godup = 1;}
} else {
godbounce–;
god_1.y = 250 – (godbounce * 10);
//trace(god_1.y);
if (godbounce == 0) { godup = 0;}

}
}

function bounce3(d:Event):void {

if (allahbounce < allahcounter && allahup == 0){
allahbounce++;
allah_1.y = 250 – (allahbounce * 10);
trace(allah_1.y);
if (allahbounce == allahcounter) { allahup = 1;}
} else {
allahbounce–;
allah_1.y = 250 – (allahbounce * 10);
//trace(god_1.y);
if (allahbounce == 0) { allahup = 0;}

}
}

loader.load(new URLRequest(“http://peggasus988.wordpress.com/?feed=rss”));