visualization #1:

self-explanatory enough; pink represents women, blue represents men.

visualization #2 – men:

visualization #2 – women:

these are still works in progress as i am having a tough time getting the cells to place where i actually want them in the sketch.

sluts across america as of 6/17/12

today, the site has about 8,700 submissions.  i’m hoping to slowly get up to 10k by the end of the summer.

a few things helped get the word out about the site:

- clay shirky tweeted the site to his followers in the first 24 hours of launch

- a fox news affiliate in las vegas posted a story about the site within the first 24 hours

- i did an interview with the jane dough about the site and my motivation for creating it

- slate’s “xx factor” blog posted not one, but two pieces directly related to the site (a pro-sluts piece and a rebuttal)

- the daily what posted about the site, which helped me cross the first thousand submissions and launched me well into 2-3k.

next steps include: creating a secondary site or art piece that visualizes the data in an effective way, that can be sent to lawmakers in september (well before the election).  this is one of the primary goals i have for work that should be accomplished over the summer.  i also would love to create a physical form of data visualization from the information i received from this project, but i’m still in the process of thinking out exactly what i want to do and how i want to do it.

this was a completely wonderful experience.  i think the most unexpected part of the sudden surge in popularity was how few posts i got that were intentionally inflammatory or hateful.  99% of people’s submissions were sincere, supportive, and completely illustrated what i hoped to accomplish with the site.

i was a little overwhelmed with the response at first, especially because i had a lot of people asking me about what came next (indeed, a lot of people at the show asked me what i was going to be doing with the submissions that i collected during this process).  at first i saw it as pressure, but i slowly realized that this is a really interesting and gripping thing to have taken hold of this way, and people are just enthusiastic about seeing it grow and amount to real change.  i’m excited about continuing on with this but i’ve also been really careful to think it over, because i need to do justice to the thousands of people who shared their stories with me and contributed to the site.  my initial thought with this was to make it a piece that did something for a greater good, and i want to make sure that whatever i do next really carries that through to fruition.

* “sluts across america” and the insanity of having your website go viral

* “tenement” (spatial media final)

* “gortha” (design for playful learning final, which we will be submitting to games for change 2012)

* “community of liars” and the process of making a connected doc

* “gallery 182” and the quest to create a new ITP tradition

the first installation in gallery 182 on the ITP floor (aka locker #182).

“TRUST”
by
Phil Groman, Benjamin Light & Roopa Vasudevan
open until 4/2/2012

this week’s assignment was about participation and transaction between at least three parties in storytelling.

as i mentioned in my class presentation, it took me a really long time to decide what i wanted to do this project on.  i wanted to do something where i could ensure that i got people talking and participating, but i wasn’t entirely sure what platform that might necessitate or the subject matter that would encourage it.

eventually, i just decided to do something that i was passionate about — and nothing really incenses me more these days than the GOP war on women & birth control.  i’ve been involved with activism around sex ed, birth control and abortion for a while now and it really boggles my mind how a select group of rich, conservative white men think that they can make value judgments on an entire group of women based on a set of behaviors.  after talking with marianne about the angle i need to take for this, i decided to emphasize just how absurd this debate really is.

“sluts across america” proposes to create an environment for women (and those who love them) who object to being called “sluts” or “immoral” based on our desire to be responsible about sex.  in it, contributors will complete the phrase “i’m a slut because…” by articulating valid and appropriate reasons for choosing to use birth control, or supporting birth control being widely available with no co-payment on all health insurance.  it’s a project designed to take back the word “slut” from the vocabulary of our opponents and show that just because a woman decides to protect herself, it doesn’t make her a bad or unsavory person.

this demo was done in processing, but i am going to build it for the web as my final for the class.  i plan to launch the site in mid-april and see if i can get responses from users all over the country.  i’m hoping that it can become a way to show politicians and voters that taking birth control away from the women and men who need it will cause much more harm than good.

for our conversational spaces midterm, ryan viglizzo, james borda, matt london and i decided to create a space online where members of the ITP community will feel free to submit thoughtful, honest critique about each other’s work that will benefit the artist in future iterations.  critique is something that is lacking on the ITP floor, mostly because the sense of community is so strong that saying things about each other’s projects that are not positive can make you seem like a bit of a jerk.

we set up the site to run using cargo collective, a framework used mainly by artists for portfolios and displays of their work.  the reasoning was that viewers would feel comfortable looking at the site if it was divided up by project, and if each work could have its own separate space with separate comments.

we tested the site at the !spring !winter show that was held at 319 scholes on march 3 and 4.  we hoped that a large number of users would feel compelled to contribute after seeing the works in the show live.  unfortunately, the L train ended up being down all weekend, reducing the number of people who went to the show, and thus limiting the comments that were made.  we were also unable to figure out how to tweak the comment box to ask more targeted and thought-provoking questions of the user, something that would have improved the quality of the responses that we got.

ryan and i both still think this is a really good idea, and the feedback we received definitely underscored that and made it clear that something like this is necessary in the ITP community.  future iterations of this would include more pointed prompts in the comment sections, as well as the ability for artists to submit and upload their own pieces at any point in their process to collect feedback from the community.

http://itp.nyu.edu/~rv670/sinatra/lies/

we also have a submission box set up in the lounge for people who would rather write out answers by hand.

next steps include:

1. finding a couple willing to participate in our “newlywed game”-style thru narrative
2. fielding people to actually participate in interviews/storytelling
3. gathering data for the visualization.

we’re going to present our alpha with test video in place that we can easily change out when we get our real material. the hardest thing for us to do, as i imagined before, will be getting people who are willing to speak on camera about this stuff.

i decided to build a processing sketch for this one (going the true nerd route and coding!).  the idea was to look at the objects in my room as having stories of their own, particularly the furniture that i got used or vintage.  a lot of the stuff in my room was purchased through craigslist or secondhand, so the stories about who i bought them from and what those experiences were like, i think, adds to the flavor of the pieces themselves.

see video below.  i’d love to be able to build on this a little bit more in the future.

one thing i do wish (and i spoke to a friend about this afterwards as well) is that visitors were able to go to the museum and experience it without a guide, or without being on a tour.  as marianne pointed out multiple times prior to the visit and afterwards, the way they have the visits structured now depends so greatly on the quality of the guides that the experience may be really uneven on different occasions.  i think it would be interesting to integrate some kind of interactive feature — either through mobile, augmented reality, or through dedicated “iPad tours” or the like — that allows you to scan objects in the apartments to get more information about the family that lived there or see photographs of what life was like in the early 20th century.  the way the visit was structured made it seem like a really basic “show and tell” session and i think there could be a lot of interesting ways to engage the visitor and really get them to envision the history of the tenement instead of just looking at photographs and standing in a room filled with antique objects.