Art Studio 179 (Digital Art 1) Winter 2014
Week 2: Thursday
The Web Project is due Tuesday January 28. Discuss your proposal next week with me.
Discuss reading: Vannevar Bush, As We May Think
- Leibniz, calculating machine
- Charles Babbage, difference engine
- Vannevar Bush, Memex
Early days of the web
- Dial-up internet connections, Interactive CD-ROMs
- Popular websites back in the day
- Olia Lialina on the vernacular web: under construction, starry backgrounds, welcome to my homepage, etc
- Academic homepages
- Olia Lialina on the vernacular web round 2: transparent backgrounds, personalized homepage, glitter, etc
- Web 2.0
- What are the characteristics of the web today?
Some examples of net.art (~ 1994-99), plus
- jodi.org (1993-) another one
- Alexei Shulgin - form art (1997)
- Olia Lialina My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996)
- Vuk Cosic - ASCII Deep Throat (1998)
- Mouchette (1996)
- Shu Lea Cheang - Brandon (1998)
- Young-Hae Chang - Heavy Industries - Bust Down the Doors
- Heavy Industries - Dakota
- Mark Napier, Shredder (1998)
Hacktivsm, tactical media, culture jamming, and more
- Wikis: Hacktivism, tactical media
- Barbie Liberation Organization (1993)
- The Yes Men, gatt.org website, play on the WTO's website
- The Yes Men vs. the US Chamber of Commerce video
- Electronic Disturbance Theater - Floodnet (1998), 2010
- Electronic Disturbance Theater - Transborder Immigrant Tool (2008-present)
- moddr, Web 2.0 Suicide Machine
- Men in Grey
- Feral Trade
- Tim Schwartz, commodify.us (2013)
See more examples
Introduce the Web Project
- project description
- Discuss your proposal next week with me. Sign up for a time during office hours.
- Consider drawing a site diagram, another example
- Drawing a state machine can be useful for interactive projects. The circles represent states (light on, light off), the arrows represent how to transition from one state to the next (flip switch)
Getting started with HTML (HTML4 is OK for our purposes)
- If you haven't written HTML before, you should read Parts 1 and 2 of Learning Web Design this weekend (see dropbox)
- You can also do the Web Fundamentals track on Code Academy this weekend
- In doing so, I'd like you to be familiar with the following:
- See a few basic pages in Dropbox "HTML junk"
- The Document Object Model (DOM)
- The simplest html page (index.html in "HTML junk"): doctype, head, body tags
- head contains title, meta tags, include stylesheets, javascript here
- body contains the main content of the page
- Text: headline, subheadlines, paragraph, similar to a news article
- Images
- Hyperlinks
- Lists
- Tables
- Frames
- If you're done with that, play around with CSS (Part 3 of Learning Web Design); you can dig deeper into this early next week
- Set up your Stanford AFS account. Upload an index.html page to it with some text that says "hello world".
- If you need, activate CGI on your AFS account - it takes 24 hrs
If you're done with that, other things you may want to try and some handy tools
- HTML5 Boilerplate, a template for rapid development
- Twitter Bootstrap, a framework used to build many sites today, also quick to get started
- Typekit
- HTML4 tags
- HTML5 tags
- 0to255.com color browsing
- Adobe Kuler color wheel
- Colour Lovers color palette browsing
Browser Extensions. Many of these are for Chrome, but Firefox has similar ones too
- Web Developer
- Firebug Lite
- Chrome Sniffer - see what other sites are using
- Colorzilla or Eye Dropper - identify hexadecimal or r,g,b colors on a site
- ruul. Screen ruler - measure width/height on sites
- WhatFont - hover to see what fonts are on sites
- Other extensions: Edit This Cookie, JSONView, Speed Tracer, Postman etc
Food for thought
- A few examples to help you think outside the box, outside of your own experience. You can interpret these issues imaginatively.
- Aaron Swartz and Taryn Simon, Image Atlas
- Reading right to left, bidirectionality, BBC in Arabic
- Accessibility: for example, the visually impaired
- Browser statistics around the world
- Browser statistics by month
Reading for Tuesday Week 3
- Six selections Oulipo (NMR #12)
- Theodore Nelson, A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate (NMR #11)
- Come next time with a draft/proposal for your web project