This time I learned a lot about the creative process when I’m creating my three works. As the requirements of study 6, which is creating a project based on other’s work, I learned that it is very important to reflect think others work. For my study 6 is a project based on Poppy’s original work, and when I was creating my project, I have to seriously reflect think about Poppy’s work, and through this thinking I learned a lot of her skills and techniques which I never used, also it exercised my creative ability and imagination and inspired me to come up with new ideas on my own work. Moreover it is more important to reflect think your own work when you need inspirations. Before I create my study 7 and 8 I re-watched my previous work and reflections, I found there were many ideas I wanted to do but failed, thus this time I gave them a new way to present — I combined my voice controlling idea with game idea and finally made a game which is using clap sound to control the movements of a image. Thus rebuild the previous work is not a bad thing , it helped me think differently, create differently, encourage myself to challenge and proved my skill’s improvements.
After the three works creating I learned that there are many techniques can create interactive art, however a good interactive art is better encouraging people to join in and thinking. As this time’s requirement is sustained interaction, the project needs users focus on 5-7minutes, thus I wondered in which way can make people sustainedly focus on the work. For my study 6, I decided to make a challenge game to make people sustainedly play with my project — I tried to make it interesting and easy to play (attract users) but also keep the difficulty in some extent in oder to give space for users to think, that finally made the project sustained and I used this idea in my study 7 as well. Additionally to make an interactive art needs to considered in users’ perspectives, while ensuring fun also consider whether it can lead users to think. Moreover, as another requirements for assignment of manipulating audio, it proves that audio can be considered as a useful way to satisfy interaction in many techniques expect using audio as a tool to control the system. In my study 6 I used a fast tempo game music as a background and use a sound effect when users win, the background music really helped to make users feel excited and think quickly, and the sound effect played an uplifting role as well, thus audio can be seen as a help for the interaction or it is interacting with users.
Comparing with my previous projects I feel much more satisfied with this time’s three projects. I think my projects successfully presents my improvements on operating skill and techniques’ exploration. This time I did the most of creating work of my study 6 and 7 (Camille still helped me a lot), both of them were complicated, however I didn’t try to simplified the process and keep trying solve the problem then complete them. For study 8 I almost done the whole project and explored the new technique of showing rhythm on “scope~”, thus I think I did a good job at showing my skills and exploring techniques. Moreover my ideas were bolder than ever which makes me feel satisfied— my study 6 and 7 were using the brand new and difficult “challenge game” idea for me, it proves my improvements on creativity. Furthermore I have seriously thought about other people’s works and my own works, and have a better understanding of the production of them, thus I was successfully develop my and others ideas (voice control, facial recognition and game) and fused on my three works this time.
For the three works I believe I had some improvements, however there are still some parts I can improve. When I was creating my study 8 I can feel my weakness on operating and also I was lack of technical knowledge. Though my study 8 manipulated vision and audio, the techniques which I used were basically off the shelf — I copied my previous work and “steal” the some audio parts from others. Thus I think I can do more research and exploration on techniques of audio and operating skills to complete manipulating audio and vision and more fancy work in the future. Moreover this time I used idea of “game” to create my study 6 and 7’s, it was a brand new and an interesting idea to sustain interacting, however I believe I can have better ideas than just creating them in “game”, which I can have a better improvements and thinking in idea’s diversity in the future. I do believe with my improvements on both technical and conceptual, my future work will be much better.