Course Director: Nadine Wettlaufer
TA: Nicholas Fox-Gieg
Introduces students with little or no experience in the creation of new media works to the issues and techniques that will enable them to engage critically and creatively with the area. In the relatively short history of new media, a new language and tool set have become pervasive in the world of art making. This course provides students with an introduction to interactive new media. Using HTML, JavaScript, and Photoshop, students will engage with the web as a creative medium. Projects will be based in a variety of new media genres including net.art, blogs, interactive narrative, and randomness.
World of Emotions
Saba Aafreen, Farah Shehadeh, Arsheen Viran
Our activities were inspired by tangible and intangible things that take part in the development of an emotion. Tangible pieces we decided to include for the happy pages were a gumball machine, balloons, and a beautiful scenery. These things bring joy to people of all ages. A gumball machine would excite children but as well as older people, balloons are used to celebrate and bring happiness as well, and the scenery with the rainbow would uplift the mood, therefore developing happiness in the user. Intangible items we created were abstract shapes and concepts that represent a mood. For the sad pages, we used abstract shapes for the user to interact with and a concept of an inescapable void to show how sadness feels visually. Lastly, for the angry pages, we incorporated a spinner so that the user can experience mindfulness and know the levels of anger, also in an intangible sense, we included interactive activities for the user to understand what anger is.
The Gift
Madeleine Gagnon, Tristan Sabado, Christina Yuen
The Gift is a game originally inspired by the group’s mood to do something Halloween themed. Knowing we wanted to do a game, the idea of a scavenger hunt worked well with a point-and-click adventure style of game. The visuals made sense for the atmosphere of the project and we built the game up from there. The ending of the game, where you give the assembled body your eyes subverts the expectation of a conclusive ending to achieving the objective and allows us to develop themes for the game including human condition, cycles, gifts and sacrifice.
COVID-DUTY: SAVING EARTH
Christopher Bolliger, Krishma Chopra, Taha Hossain, Hyacinth Vibangco
The player will explore the creation of exaggerated, satirical events that cause the earth to explode such as killer bees and true events in 2020 such as coronavirus and wildfires in Australia. This will allow the player to amuse themselves through engaging in imaginative pretence. They will see the past and the future, travel through time in the eyes of an alien. This game is an attempt to recreate the experience of 2020 with a lot more exaggeration and imagination. However, the extreme exaggeration makes this game more fun and allows the player to enjoy travelling through time and experience historic events. According to Sicart’s Theory of playfulness; “play is an activity, while playfulness is an attitude.” In this game the player will engage in the activity of play which is the world/time of 2020. They will also develop emotional, physical and psychological attitudes towards the game as they play.
Journey to the Mysterious Ruins
Ren Taat, Isaac Siaw, Jeffrey Smith
This puzzle hunt was designed to tell a story with the moral of “never judge a book by its cover”. It had a theme of subverting expectations and turned the artform of a narrative into a game. We approached this by thinking of ways we could take puzzles or ideas and changing them so that the answers to them were not what you would think they were at first glance, and get the user to think of outside-the-box methods for the correct answer. In the puzzles, we tried to get the user to think critically of every element to them, even hiding hints within images or text that would seem to only be important to the story. We also integrated the moral into the story itself by adding story elements, like the “treasure” that the adventurers find not being actual treasure, such as gold or gemstones. Instead, they find something that at first seems like it has little or no value, but in reality, holds a lot of value, in this case sentimental value, to someone else.
Return to the Digital Media END OF YEAR EXHIBITION 2020 • 2021