Project #10 Sousveillance Tool:

Shining Stars!

Design Process

I had big ambitions for my Sousveillance project. The general idea I had was using singular words and searching/matching that somehow with a bigger pool of words (paragraphs, search results, etc). I thought the second part would need some sort of web scraping though, so I decided to look for other sources / see what APIs were out there before thinking of a final design.

Phrase finder

Putting the output of the word of the day API to the input of the phrase finder API, this design comes up with the 'phrases of the day.'

Poetry finder

Putting the output of the word of the day API to the input of the poetry finder API, the design pulls poems containing the word of the day.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

This design takes the output from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, somehow figures out a way to create a color palette. This was the idea I liked best because I wanted to work with something visual, but I couldn't figure out how to calculate the difference between different colors.

I was also running out of energy and time because of finals week, so as I was working on it, I switched the direction to do something more fun and aligned with what I've been wanting to do in my coding project, which was to explore using and developing a personal artistic style.

Description

This is a story about a queer boy band that aspires use the fuel of music to reach the cosmos!

The unassuming boys in pink change into their galaxy outfits when you click the screen! The outfits change every day!

For this project, I chose to monitor & deflect the way that norm of appearance / dressing is expected from us. I wanted to make queer characters that dress and kind of also look the way I do. I reused elements from the illustrations I did for the data portrait assignment, and altered the styles a little bit to make the dream queer boy band.

I decided to change the outfit into something that is more monotonous, so that when the clothes become transparent & reveal the photo from the API below, it adds to the element of surprise. I also decided to carve out the stars to be transparent and add a dance movement as well to add to this effect.

Snapshots

Here are some cool outfits the boys have been in (from the older API URLs):