ProjectThree_mw

=**WEBSITE**=
 * (works best in Firefox)**

Moodboard (Ambiguous/Ambiguity):

Project 3 Exercise 1 here
What happened afterwards: I was brainstorming the various different meanings of the word 'ambiguous'. Here's a scanned copy of my mind map below:



First Draft

It was suggested that I try not to have the viewfinder very obvious; that maybe the image underneath should have some blurriness as well; and of course, I'm missing words. Otherwise, I was actually stuck as to how to expand my idea...

I was also told that I needed better imagery, despite having experimented with Scriptographer and its functionality in Illustrator.

[|semi finished site]

I'll admit, I was struggling big time with this word. I first thought project 2 was supposed to link with project 3, but starting with a connotative word, I was totally confused. This was especially since I wasn't sure if "Inception" was a connotative word or not.
 * Thoughts:**



So after I got more feedback after my poor attempt in finishing, I randomly got an idea from the suggestion of splitting images into 2. Somehow, I ended up thinking about art and the age-old debate about what exactly it was. That should be ambiguous enough right?

That's how I got started with my first screen; I thought of splitting up Duchamp's fountain:

I had also thought of using his bicycle wheel too (seen below), since it has a sense of symmetry too:

So I took the advice to split the image in half and to treat each half differently. The first half is treated as if it was art, having a slight parody of using a fake CMYK overlap treatment commonly found in graphic design (irony is that to some, graphic design is not considered art), while the other side was the commercial art that Andy Warhol was so famous for (which wasn't really considered 'high art' or art for that matter). It's pretty self-explanatory considering the yellow circle's question in the middle.



I also thought of using art from artists such as Lichenstein, Rauschenberg and other artists whose work is not considered 'high art' or art is general:

And as for the 'high art' side, I was thinking of using works from renowned artists like Van Gogh, Monet or Rembrandt:

//Screen 2:// To stay within the "art is ambiguous/could be anything" theme, I started thinking about the Mona Lisa, and what was so special about that painting... Who **is** Mona Lisa? What's so special about her **smile**?

I looked through a link about her: Mona Lisa on Wikipedia

Despite the webpage about her, still there is little known about this person.

I decided to appropriate her infamous smile; still the animated gif is a little freaky and well, basically defaces this painting... would it still be considered art? I looked through Google for various different photos of people "smiling". There are different types of smiles: the genuine ones, the cheerful ones, the grimace that can be mistaken as a smile (sort of), the fake/forced smile... and yet Mona Lisa's smile is its own category. Is she happy? Is she bluffing? There's so much mystery behind her.



//Screen 3//: I've always wanted to dwelve into the topic of optical illusions. They're so cool! There's the infamous two faces and a vase, the spinning circles... but I wanted to try something new, so I actually looked through some sites:

Skytopia's Collection of Optical Illusions Optical Illusions

So I tried my hand at making optical illusions, with the help of this video: Animated Optical Illusion How To

I formatted it so that when you press the right and left arrow keys, you can move the lines, so that's the interactive part of the site (optical illusions part 2). I was also fascinated by a certain type of optical illusion as well:

That is where the background of my 3rd screen came from; I just didn't want to copy it completely because it would take the attention away from the yellow circle, which voices the ambiguity of optical illusions: what are they used for? Are they only for entertainment, or is there a deeper meaning to them?

My 4th slide is pretty much the same thing as my "semi finished" site. I still wanted to implement the idea of searching for something through a viewfinder. I know that suggestions before said that it only seems like something got cut off or something, but I thought by simplifying (yet keeping the mystery) the image that was to be exposed by the viewfinder, it would pose more questions.

"Why did she include a random symbol like that?" "What is that symbol exactly? Is it the mathematical therefore sign? If so, why did she use it?"

etc, etc.

To be honest, I thought it was nifty to somewhat tie the microsite together subtly by pulling previous elements. In this case, the "glyph" was actually the holes of the Duchamp fountain that was covered by the yellow circle. Kind of a spoiler there, but at least now you know. But the main point is that it would get people to question the motives of it, which is what ambiguity is about.

Btw, I actually tinkered with the jquery code throughout this whole process; I just didn't say so until now. Before, if I stuck with the original code, it would've been like this:

Demo for jquery Photoshoot

My last slide also reflects on that as well. With just a simple yellow circle with a question, you're kind of stuck there, left with only quitting the window because there is nothing else to do...