Remix Late Assignment 2: Remixing Literature

I’m sorry to do this two months late. That was never my intention and I certainly don’t want to end the semester with missing assignments. I tried multiple times to write some relevant black out poetry but I was never satisfied with the results. My attempts mostly turned into gibberish. However, here are some pleasant blacked out news articles that ignore the mostly depression political situations that are discussed throughout the actual articles. My intention was to illustrate that the media can be incredible toxic and biased and life would be a lot more pleasant if we could just read happy and apolitical words in the news.

This was inspired by the research I did for my final project. I spent some time exploring the power that the media has in shaping opinions, particularly opinions of foreign lands. I found inspiration for this project after a mid-semester trip to Cuba in which I realized that the fear of the area was not necessary. The fears of my friends and family were all sparked by recent news articles about mysterious sonic weapons that were used on U.S. Embassy workers. I was literally shaking with terror as I entered the country but I quickly realized that Cuba was friendly and vibrant. They lived in a world full of music and dancing and little to no internet access. Not only did they seem happier than the typical American, they also seemed infinitely closer with their neighbors. The entire country resembled a block party and seemed worlds away from the private blocks in the suburbia where I grew up. I only spent three days in Cuba and it feels like a strange and distant dream now. However, the misconceptions about the country left a lasting impression on me and inspired me to shift my final project topic mid-semester.

These may not have much of a message but with this assignment, I aimed to find calm and pleasant words in an otherwise scary and depression news article. All of these articles involve politics but all of them include facts that could be remixed in multiple different ways to convey a different message. 2 months has gone by since my Cuba trip and as I search the internet for source material, I’m now finding an abundance of articles that question the legitimacy of these mysterious sonic attacks. Cuban officials point out the lack of evidence and claims that it’s slander by the American government and media. I guess the purpose of this blackout poetry was to remix it into a happy LaLaLand version of reality. Maybe I don’t care who’s innocent, who’s guilty, who’s a communist or who’s a dictator. Maybe, I’d prefer to find only the happy calm words in articles and live under a rock when it comes to politics.

 

Havana great time 🙂 Why can’t news just be all puns?

 

Source Articles:

“Vulgar, materialistic, apolitical. Why do recently arrived Cubans get a bad rap?”

U.S. deports twice as many Cubans in 2017 vs 2016

Cuba bugged by US allegations of sonic attacks

Cuba policy on Cuban-American travel to the island has political and economic tentacles

U.S. to Restore Full Relations With Cuba, Erasing a Last Trace of Cold War Hostility

FWD Milestone 4

Project 3 Milestone 4

I think our third project turned out pretty well. Our group got along really well and we were all pretty easygoing and agreeable. I was hoping to do more of the Vue portions of the project but Lou came in with a solid idea and a head start so he handled most of the Vue parts. I recently downloaded the Udemy course for Vue and I’m looking forward to continuing with it over the break. I ended up doing more of the design portions of the project which was fun but if I could do it again, I’d push to have more tasks with Vue. Lou has more of a computer science background and knows a lot more about programming than I do so it was easier for him to do the more technical parts of the project. However, I still learned a lot by closely examining all of the code and I did enjoy working on the retro design for the project. During the presentations, we were jealous of Greg and Amanda’s group because they managed to do a similar idea but also involved Firebase capabilities. If we could go back, we’d try use VueFire and go a similar direction with our project. This is a project I’d like to continue with. I’d definitely like to take a look at Greg’s code and learn how to involve some Firebase functionality. It’s a good substitute for the backend portions of the project. Hopefully in the future, I’ll be able to start learning some basic backend computing as well.

Final Remix Presentation

Final PSA Video

Capstone 12/6 Presentation

FWD Project 3 Milestone 1

For Project 3, I’m working with Lou and Hudson. We’re hoping to use Vue.js as our framework since we all enjoyed Matt’s guest lecture. Our main ideas are to either make a boardgame that Hudson suggested. I believe it’s a two-player game called Mill and involves marbles. Lou’s top idea was to do a version of Waze that is for ski resorts. This would allow people to update the status of certain runs and lifts so that users know if a lift is overcrowded or if a run is icy.

Journal Entry 11/28

I have a lot of work to do as I’m coming back to post-break reality a little late. I’d like to start the process by focusing on my PSA assignment and brainstorming how this assignment can fit into my larger project goals. The goal of my final project is to explore how the American media can misrepresent foreign lands and instill fear in Americans. My PSA will be about how we portray Cuba as an unstable and alien land despite it being only a 45 minute flight from Florida. I found some intriguing historical videos as well as a video about how Obama managed to change relations with Cuba after decades of frozen relations and travel restrictions.

For my final project, I’m hoping to play around more with Photoshop color filters. My favorite part of my midterm project was when the video transitioned from black and white to vibrant colors. I’d like to find a new song that captures the same emotions during the transition scenes. I think that my Photoshop work could be a lot cleaner so I’ll probably start over and spend longer on each of the scenes than I did for the midterm project.

I’d like to focus on having my presentation tell a story. My personal story with Cuba began with fear and an undying curiosity that led me to book an impromptu trip to Cuba with my equally adventurous friends. As I traveled through Cuba, I was endlessly shocked by how much the reality of this country didn’t meet my terrified expectations. The country was safe and pleasant and infinitely different from the media portrayals.

As an American citizen, I’ve only been fed American media portrayals of Cuba. After all, the Cuba/U.S. relations are so bad that there’s nowhere in the U.S. that will exchange Cuban currency. I’d like to capture my personal story and experience with Cuba in a way that incorporates accurate political and historical facts. I chose this topic because it’s truly fascinating to me and I’m looking forward to exploring more about the complicated history between Cuba and the U.S. and remixes the media portrayals into a more accurate and hopeful portrayal of Cuba that uses my own footage.

FWD Project 2 Milestone 4

During the critique, I tried to emphasize that my main project is the photo submission form. I don’t feel that my online store follow the 80/20 rule. I spent a long time working on my store but felt that I had to rely heavily on tutorials in order to have a fully functional store. I began this project with the idea of making a mock store for my friend’s business but my friend actually wanted me to make a functional store that processes payments through PayPal. While I ended with the fully functional store that I wanted, I didn’t incorporate the Firebase skills from class into the store and ended up having to go a different direction for the project than I originally intended. However, I wanted to show it during the critique because I worked hard on making a functional store as my project.

I was excited about my photo submission form when I first got it working. However, for the critique it wasn’t accepting any photo submissions and I was unsure of why that was. I wasn’t particularly happy with my project but I was happy that we learned Firebase because during the critiques I started seeing all of the possibilities of what I can do with it. I’d like to learn back-end at some point but for now, knowing how Firebase works is exciting. I believe that Greg and I will be incorporating Firebase into our project for Space and I may even use Firebase to make an interactive message board for another project. This was definitely a topic that I really enjoyed and I feel like this is only the beginning of where I can go with this knowledge.

Capstone: Previous Projects Presentation

P5 Explainer Video

Monopoly Game

Remix Journal Week 11

This week I focused on fixing the parts of my project that were critiqued. The first thing to go was the cheesy song. I had originally felt that the song fit perfectly for conveying a switch from sad to happy (my “remix”) but after making my midterm video, I’m thoroughly annoyed with that song. I’ve already found multiple other songs that set the stage for a sad to happy tone remix. My main focus with my edits is to show how happy the Cuban people are and how friendly they were to us. The idea behind this is to “remix” the media portrayals of the Cuban people. I have multiple videos of my friends interacting with Cuban locals and I even have videos of the local boys cliff diving, playing basketball and skateboarding with my friends. I’m hoping to remix this in a way that the viewer feels more hopeful about the state of our international affairs. I also have a few videos of local men serenading my friends with their guitars and sweet voices. My goal is to capture the rich interactions that we had with the Cuban people. Although we only said we were traveling for “people to people” so that we could cross the border, it ended up being a true statement since we interacted with numerous locals (and only one scammed us out of all of our money).

As far as design goes, I’d like to practice more with the Photoshop effect of going from black and white and slowly fading into color. This took an embarrassingly long amount of time but was somewhat of a fun and therapeutic process. I really enjoyed coloring on different objects to give them a feel of being brought to life. This felt like it was making the video clips even more original. I’d like to spend more time playing with color as I work towards my final edit.

Recap:

More Cuban locals

less cheesy song

more Photoshop color effects

My “remix of the week” is related to my observation of how 5 different people from our Arizona trip could remix the same collection of footage to make entirely different compilations of our cliff diving and shenanigans. Every single one of them features me zip lining with an inflatable pretzel. One got 40,000 views. They all use the same footage that was taken by two videographers and they all remix the components to give the work their unique flair.

Some clever artistic remixes that I came across:

https://weburbanist.com/2015/02/04/classical-art-in-modern-contexts-25-clever-art-remixes/

Project 2 Milestone 2

I’m interested in building a mock interactive store that uses Firebase to store favorited items, a virtual “shopping cart” and payment and shipping information. This is an exercise for me to explore how to save data. I realize that if I were to make a real store, I would need a system that’s more secure than Firebase mixed with the creative.colorado server.

Here’s the mock-up that I intend to follow:

 

This is based off of my friend’s actual store that he made using StoreEnvy. My goal is to explore how easy it is to craft a virtual marketplace using my level of coding skills. I’m also interested in playing with the Firebase authentification.

The default color scheme that was chosen for this simple BentoByte store is pretty lackluster. Here’s a quick scribbled prototype of the new color scheme I plan on using. I’m aiming to achieve a cooler and more badass vibe with the updated hand-coded store.

I would also like this project to be an exercise in creating a brand and working on graphic design.

Each item will link to a virtual cart just as it does in StoreEnvy. My aim is to completely revamp this default setting BentoByte store so that I can give it a more appealing vibe that attracts the same type of users that the clothing appeals to.

Here’s the link to my mock-up of the potential HTML/CSS design:

http://creative.colorado.edu/~memo1581/fwd/mockstore.html