I thoroughly enjoyed the 3 studies that I completed over the past few weeks. I found that not only was I learning things about Max significantly fast, but I was also learning things about myself which I didn’t expect upon starting these studies. In regard to the creative process, I think that this might be the most challenging aspect of creating interactive art. I often found myself spending a lot of time trying to come up with an idea for this study. An issue that was always present was thinking my ideas were either too simple or too hard, and as a result I believe I wasted a lot of time. This was also due to the fact that my confidence with Max isn’t very high because I’m still learning how to use this software. But I think that the most important thing that I took out of this experience would be to set yourself ideas or goals for projects that might be ambitious, because in the end of these 3 studies I achieved things that if you had asked me to do 2 or 3 weeks ago I would have definitely said no I can’t do that. Although my 3 studies might not be fully functional or working to its greatest capacity, I have learnt more in the creative process than anything else which is ultimately the most important thing.

What I have learned about the techniques of interactive art is that there are no bad ideas. I realised from the start with this study that just because an idea can be perceived as simple, doesn’t mean that the end product is boring. An example would be my first study. Originally, I thought that this would not be a very good piece of work because it was a simple idea with a simple end result. But I had a really fun time not only making the piece but also using it. And it felt great to make something that worked how I intended it to be. Using Max has made me realise of all the various things someone can create with a simple bit of software, and seeing people in class create some really cool things has opened my eyes to interactive art. It has also been an interesting experience to see how us as humans interact with art through these studies. By making this study a tactile experience it has made realise how important it is for us as creators to think about how we want our audience to interact with our art. I think a good example of this for me would be study 3. Comparative to study 2 I wanted study 3 to be a lot more interactive which made me think of how I would approach such a task. As a result, I put human interaction first on my list of priorities when setting about the task. Because of this I think that study 3 was my favourite piece of work, because I understood what was needed in the interactive art making process.

What I would consider successful about my work so far would be that I have set myself a goal of just being able to have somewhat of a finished project as I am still learning the ropes with Max. I wanted to make sure that my work was at least 80% functional as I’m still learning how to use Max I don’t think it is quite possible for me to have a piece of work that I am fully happy with yet. I think what has also been successful is the fact that I have set myself challenges with these 3 pieces of work, and they have all come together in a way that I am happy with. I have come to the realisation that a piece of work being successful doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be functional to its highest degree. It could also be successful in terms of coming up with a great idea. This for me was study 2, as we came up with a great idea for our project, but ultimately, we were limited by our knowledge of Max so our finished product was pretty rough.

How I believe my work could be improved is just with some more projects to create. I feel as if I have a good foundation with Max in terms of knowing the basics, but I would like to expand my knowledge and set myself some even more difficult tasks to really push myself and see how much more I can learn. I often found myself outside of class going onto forums and various other websites to see if anyone else had posted things that I could use in some of my projects. I also found myself going onto YouTube and watching some tutorials for things such as the synthesiser I made for my third study. I think that one thing I can seriously improve on is fine tuning my projects to make sure that they are 100% functional with no faults, ultimately this is my end goal for this semester.

Statement 3:

In my third study I wanted to set myself more of a challenge than I did in my first. I set out to again use the keyboard, but I wanted the experience to be more interactive. In this study I wanted to recreate something reminiscent of a walking piano, as I remember them being in movies and etc as a kid. I set about making a synthesiser. My main theme for this piece of work was to make users feel as if they were a kid again. By having so many keys available to the user to interact with, I was hoping that users would have a fun and enjoyable time using my piece of work and would get a taste of child hood. I experienced a lot of technical issues with this project that are still present in my final piece of work. Making this piece was not far out of reach, but I still found it at times to be quite challenging. I often found that I was needing assistance to fix things, but ultimately this study is not 100% polished, and I wish that my technical skills were more advanced so I can fix some of those issues

Statement 2:

In the second part of this assignment, I was working with Ziggy and Tristian. Our group ambitiously put out an idea where we would create a censored twitter feed from Donald Trump, where we would censor out various words to alter his tweets. The theme behind this idea was to exclude some of the controversy things the president tweets on the daily. What we realised further down the track was that our idea was a lot more complicated than what we originally thought, and as a result at times we actually thought about changing the idea to something that was more achievable. But we were egged on by the challenge and thought about various ways to go about the task. I think that the biggest technical challenge we experienced was no one really had the best idea of how to approach such a task and there were a few different ways that we could’ve done it. It was complex as well since we were taking tweets live from Donald Trumps twitter, so there was a lot of communication within Max itself. But I would like to thank Ziggy for being such a wiz with Max and figuring out the most efficient way to do this challenging task. This group task was one of the most challenging things we could have done in Max, and as a result I learnt a few things about Max and also my thinking process

Statement 1:

This piece of work is used to creatively interact with an audience via the use of the keyboard within Max 7. The work itself uses the keyboard keys (A, F & J) to trigger the webcam on the laptop. Users are then presented with a live image of them self in Max 7 as well as a pop-up window. After this the user can press the left and right arrow keys to disable the webcam. This work is intended to represent a self-portrait, where the audience can interactively use the keyboard to show them an accurate live feed of them self. And once the audience decides that they no longer need the webcam on they can once again interact with the keyboard to turn off the feed. On a technical level there were many challenges trying to achieve this outcome. Mainly being the fact that I am not familiar with Max 7, so it took me a while to get to grips with the software. As well as this it was hard to dedicate keys to trigger a function in Max without some assistance.