Mashup: Children’s Book and The Pioneer

The Mad Tea Party.

Mashup Assignments: Mashedup Children’s Book

Mashup a children’s book based on another cultural artifact. For example, framing Dr. Who as a children’s book in the aesthetic of a Dr. Suess’s work. See example from College Humor here: http://www.collegehumor.com/article:181140

Since Scott asked us to have more variety of categories for our DS106, I wanted to do something in another category I still haven’t tried. A past blog post from the previous semester inspired to me to try this assignment. I think this assignment can also be under the design section.

How are people doing with their presentation preparation? Mid-term has started and we’re all having a hectic week. I’m suppose to be busy too, and I somehow spent a hour or two the other day just to search the right picture for this assignment. It’s my bad habit to go headlong at whatever I decided to do.  First off, I couldn’t find the desirable CC-licensed image of children’s books. I could immediately think of some well-known books and I had plenty of ideas. “The Snowman” was one I wanted to use, but that plan had to be put away. Instead, I found an gif animation of the famous tea party scene from Lewis Caroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” which I replaced The Mad Hatter’s face with Engelbart’s.

Can you believe it? I’m still writing about a Pioneer after finishing the first section. A light bulb went off in my head when I saw the dormouse. I made a little association with the Pioneer and the mouse (dormouse – mouse – computer mouse…Engelbart?).

The creative process of this assignment became somewhat difficult, because I had taken a gif animation and played around with it. Although you can’t really tell Alice is actually holding a x-ray-ed computer mouse, which the sparkle erased from the image. Check out the twinkly animation version of the Tea Party on Flickr. I wish I had the animation working on here too…I don’t consider this piece as one of my best works.

• Image: Alice in Wonderland (old illustration) :p by quicheisinsane –  CC Licensed via Flickr
• Image: Doug Engelbart :p by Rachel Smith – CC Licensed via Flickr
• Image: BXP58194 :p by tpmartins – CC Licensed via Flickr

* I just realized now that I was goofing around checking out some dormouse pictures and videos (they’re too adorable to avoid). No wonder I took more time than I expected to complete this assignment.

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An Album Cover: Like a Moon on the Tides / Sydney Weekender

Visual Assignments: An Album Cover

 So here’s something fun for everyone to do, should be quick and easy, but try to make it pretty. First, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The title of the article is now the name of your band. Next, go here: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 Go to the bottom of the page. The last four to five words of the last quote are the title of your first album Lastly, go here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Select the 3rd image. It is the picture for your album cover. Manipulate the picture, resize it, add some other color, whatever. Do the same with the band name and album title, put them over top. However you wanna do it. Make it look cool.

 There are more than forty people who have completed this album cover assignment. That’s a lot of participants and I thought I should be one of the bunch. One trivial memory from the creative process is that I had to reload quite a few times to find an image under the right license. All these impressive photos appeared, but sadly they said “All rights reserved”. The photo I finally found then was the base image for the album cover. Assuming from the photo title, the scenery happens to be somewhere in Paris, France. Despite the artist’s name “Sydney” weekender, the background image is of another continent.

 I tried using GIMP this time and failed to create a proper cover art I initially intended to make. During my first try, I messed up the original picture so I had to restart from downloading the image again from Flickr. Then, I resorted to Pixlr which probably didn’t eat up my computer’s memory. I was slightly mad at myself after realizing while working on this article that I spelled the word “Sydney” wrong (Syndey? What?). Of course, I went back to Pixlr and it was fixed. There’s not many photo manipulations done to the base image. Instead I played around with the fonts. I noticed for the first time that Pixlr lets you use the fonts you already have in your computer. The fonts used in the cover art are free, by the way.

• Image: 1081 Paris- Palais-Royal :p by I Am Not I – CC Licensed via Flickr

Infograph Project pt.1 – Review.

My group’s topic for the Infograph project is CYBER CRIME. The objective of this project is to analyze and critique the infograph your group chooses. We divided the image into five portions for each of us to review.

I am reviewing January’s section below. Click on the hyperlinks for the full version of the infograph and the original article it was used.

 Before going into the details of January’s report, here’s my insight on the introduction:

“79% of global respondents”?

The factual information in yellow under the heading supposedly indicates a vague survey result. However, it doesn’t show the details of the number of the respondents and countries for the investigation. Unisys Security Index has a clearer summary for the fact. There were more than 10,000 respondents from twelve developed countries according to the report. The infograph alone just doesn’t provide sufficient evidence.

“More than one successful attack per week?”

Where did Unisys get the average of successful cyber attacks? The corresponding article to this information is from Infosecurity magazine online which links back to a  Cybercrime report (sponsered by HP ArcSight). This source gives a much larger number of average successful cyber attacks per week. Thus, the information may be flawed. Though, somehow the remaining piece of information on increased annual security cost appears to be truthful to the report.

The Analysis for January:

“Massive Security Breach” and the “GPS-based mobile application.”

– The source is from the Wired mag’s online article. The article includes direct words from the application service (Trapster) of subject. Wired.com is well-known, and therefore, I expect the information to be credible enough. Although, it would’ve been better if the source gave extensive details about mobile application problems.

“Moblie Security Breach”

– Venturebeat seems to one of the top blog sites along with GigaOM, which we retrieved the infographic from. The article refers back to IBM’s actual official report results that anyone can see and even has a video embedded. I assume that the source is reliable.

Surreal and Kind of Cute.

Visual Assignment: Fat Cats make Art Better

 Using this site: http://fatcatart.ru/category/klassy-ka/ as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat.

 Unbelievably, I haven’t written any DS106 blog post for this section. After submitting reports and essays for other classes, I sort of went into short hibernation. Although, I have been thinking about this and that in my head starting from Neuromancer to Web 2.0 and the future of cyberspace. Was I slacking off? Kind of. Well, today I decided to be part of the Fat Cat craze and share my piece.

 I don’t reckon people know that I was an AP Art student back in my high school years. The art teacher I had constantly insisted that I should be a visual art critic, and I was and I am still interested in art history and philosophy. Yet, I chose to pursue another field of art, and thus, going through a bit of a rough ride I ended up being here in Temple. As I’m writing this I feel like I need to listen to the ballad “Dream On”. And speaking of dreams, the classical art piece I used for the assignment is one of the notable works of the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali, who portrays dream images and landscapes. I’m talking about a different definition of dream, but anyway, the title of the piece is “The Persistence of Memory”.

 This is my first attempt at creating an image using Pixlr which Scott recommended in the CIS blog on Monday. The online photo editor is quite easy to maneuver. I used GIMP to manipulate images for The Pioneer section and it took me time to figure things out. So Pixlr is a nice discovery. Thanks for recommending it Scott.

To tell the truth, there is not much to comment on the process. My initial idea was to place a cat in some wintry ukiyo-e, but I was unsuccessful in finding any that are usable. I abandoned the idea and turned towards western art. Dali was an easier piece to work on, because of the surreal nature it had. Placing a ginormous cat in the scenery would look just fine. Personally, I think at least half of the burden was on researching images for the process.

I love cats (or most smaller mammals) and lived near them all my life, despite the allergy I supposedly have. If you got interested, try this assignment and join the Fat Cat craze!

• Image: The Persistence of Memory :p by ahisgett – CC Licensed via Flickr
• Image: fat cat :p by Yukari* –  CC Licensed via Flickr