DIGITAL FORMS
I was intrigued while tracking my phone usage of the statistics in the screen time section of its settings, mainly how many notifications I get a day. My first project focuses on my notifications during the first week of classes (January 31st – February 6th). I used the same template idea as an iPhone already has, but photoshopped the specific app notification and counts. The time on the phone (11:33) was the total number of notifications I received that week even though I was only able to show the top seven apps. Also, I chose to leave the battery low because all of these notifications drain a phone’s battery, but also drain our social battery.
DIGITAL ACTIONS
For this project I wanted to focus on the action of scrolling and wanted to use a GIF format to portray this. I took four photos on my four most common scrolling apps: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube and combined them to show the scrolling motion in the final GIF. The backdrop is the top blanket I have on my bed because that is where I tend to scroll most frequently.
DIGITAL OBJECTS
This project was by far the hardest one for me to get an idea for and once I had the idea, making it a reality turned out to be harder than expected. The idea I had stemmed from a quote from Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, “It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others…the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism.” This made me think of how the laptop revolutionized growing up for me and I remember the first time my family got internet and a laptop. I have to imagine that the portable book was similar at that time. To try to show these parallels I took a book and propped it open on a dark background to look similar to an open computer.
INDEPENDENT PROJECT - IT ALL COMES DOWN TO ZEROS AND ONES
For my final project, I wanted to investigate the evolution of video games throughout the years. I focused on six main games: The Oregon Trail, Pacman, Tetris, Solitaire, Mario Kart, and Among Us. I added a rainbow background to show the earliest to newest progression and titled the command prompt with the year it was released. The idea and title behind the project came from a computer science course that I took where we learned how computers run programs and video games. No matter how complex the program, computers boil it down to a string of zeros and ones.
