Tag: assignment3

With another assignment done and dusted, it’s time to go back and reflect on the first truly interactive piece i’ve ever created: Judging by the Cover. Judging by the Cover is officially a Korsakow based project that looks at music in a unique way. Typically, when we look at album covers, we think about them and their meaning with regards to the music on them. Despite this, every album cover is its own piece of art, something that tells its own story. We decided to use the theme of first impressions to create a total of eleven 30 second videos, with each one depicting our first impression of a different album cover. Each of these videos appears on our main Korsakow page, with a screen in the middle to view each individual fragment. We also created a 12th video that acts as a credit sequence to reveal to the audience the album covers that have been recreated in the piece. Each video has one life, with each video disappearing once engaged with by the audience.

One of the main aims of this piece was to explore the ideas of modularity and variability, which I believe we were able to do quite well. Our project explores modularity in the way that, while each video is tied together by a common theme and idea that allows the audience to immerse in the project as a whole, each modular fragment has its own micro story, meaning that each fragment can be thought about as an individual part and can be engaged with individually. Our piece also responds to the characteristic of variability, as our piece is nonlinear and has not been organised to run in a specific order. This means that audiences are able to choose the path they take through our piece, with each audience member in turn having a different experience of it.

Overall, I was very proud of what we were able to create as a group. I love the fragments each of us created and I love seeing the way that each member captured their own honest thoughts in a way that wasn’t always consistent with the other team members. Of course, there are always improvements to be made, and things that I would of done differently that could be helpful to think about when moving into our next assignment. In terms of our group work, I hope with our next assignment to set out a clearer timeline and stronger deadlines, as many of the soft deadlines we made for this project were not met on time. In terms of the project work itself, while I did enjoy the 11 first impression fragments, the 12th credit sequence video is something I would have liked to have worked on further. Ideally, rather than having the credits as a thumbnail on the page that anyone could click on, even if they had only watched a video or two, I would have liked to have worked out a way to ensure the audience watched every fragment of the piece before seeing the credit sequence, so that it could act as a reward for finishing the piece. The length of the credit sequence also broke our time limit constraint, and despite this, the actual sound sources we used were unable to be credited directly on the video, rather through a Google doc link. As a group, we highly value the sources we used, and wished we could of displayed them directly within the credit sequence.

The formulation and creation of this project has helped me to expand my learning surrounding online screen production.The biggest thing I have learnt about online screen production throughout the creation of this project surrounds the idea of purpose within online pieces. A question I have kept in the forefront of my mind throughout the entire semester so far is ‘what makes something an online screen media piece?’ Each assignment has developed this definition even further, with assignment three being no different. As I have developed Judging by the Cover, I have learnt that an online screen media piece does not have to have a large important purpose to be defined as a proper piece of media, we really do have the ability to explore everything. Before I started on this project, many of the interactive projects I myself had interacted with were made to serve a real clear purpose, to tell an important story or bring awareness to something. This meant that, when we initially came up with the idea of working with album cover recreation, we became so fixed on coming up with a reason why we were exploring it that we nearly gave up on our whole idea. It wasn’t until we discovered Korsakow and started exploring the projects on there that we realised that we were making the purpose too big of a deal. Whilst discussing some of the Korsakow projects I had watched throughout my development blog posts, I began to realise that, unlike some of the other online screen media pieces I had engaged with previously, the purpose of these weren’t so clear. Building on this through class discussions, it was clear to see that Korsakow allows for a huge range of different pieces, with many of them being made to express a thought or think more deeply about something. We were able to explore the idea of first impressions of album artwork just because we were interested in the subject and wanted to explore it, we didn’t have to have some big fancy reason why. This assignment has helped me to even further broaden my knowledge of what can be considered to be an online screen media project, and I am so glad we did not give up on our idea simply because it didn’t have an obviously important purpose.

When I completed my last assignment, myself and my partner had to think outside of the box to create our interactivity, as we had very little knowledge of the technology necessary to create something that flowed as it was supposed to. This was something that I hoped to learn more about when creating our third assignment, as I felt as though knowing how to construct interactive pieces with the ability to be either linear or non linear was important to my knowledge of online screen production. Making this project has developed my knowledge in a technological sense, as it asked us to use the software Korsakow to create our piece. Not only have I learnt the basics of using an actual interactive online screen media software, but I have also learnt the importance of making fragments that are all of the same format and dimensions, as little errors like this can effect the final outcome of the piece.

Something that became very clear to me through my developmental blog posts was the importance of looking at online screen media in a more modular, fragmented sense. While this may seem to be a very obvious realisation, as the entire point of this class is to think about online screen media production ‘in fragments’, I feel as though this is one of the first projects I have made where the fragments themselves have been more important than the overall piece, and one of the first times I have been able to see through my own project the importance of each fragment being able to stand alone. Through my developmental blog posts, I thought a lot about creating the individual fragments, what these individual fragments would do in terms of shaping the project and how each would be able to stand alone as their own micro story. During previous assignments, this has always been the other way around. I have always thought about the project as a whole, and what I need to fill it with to create this whole project. For example, while ‘Explore RMIT‘ had many different fragments that could stand alone, as we came up with each fragment, we were constantly thinking about them with regards to how they would progress the overall story, not how they would stand alone. While the entire reasoning behind ‘Thinking in Fragments’ has always been a relatively straight forward concept for me, this is one of the first times I have really been able to practice the idea and see it weave from my theory to my project itself.

A question I posed during the creation of my last assignment surrounded the idea of nonfiction media, is it possible to create something truly nonfictional? This is something I have continued to work through with my developmental blog posts during the making of this project. The reason this question has come up again for me is that the piece we created for this assignment falls into an interesting grey area between fiction and nonfiction, where the first impressions that we are recreating are real, but the actual micro stories we filmed are works of fiction. It has been said in the past that nonfiction pieces are simply representations of the truth, and I feel as though our piece thinks about this in a very interesting way. In saying this, I feel as though I have come a long way in answering this question of whether or not something can truly be nonfictional. In my second blog post, I discussed the ideas stemming from the reading ‘Making with Korsakow’, where the author suggests that ‘linear films lie’ as linear films are constrained to a beginning, middle and end. Thinking about this with regards to our own piece, the non-linearity of our piece did allow us quite a lot of freedom with what we created and how truthful our first impressions were. While I do feel that our first impression videos were as close to our true first impressions as they could be, I felt as though the constraints of time and using pieces that were achievable to film did mean that our pieces were less real than they could of been. This assignment has pushed me to think about what makes something truly nonfictional, and I feel as though the less constrained, nonlinear films, like those that can be created on Korsakow, are more likely to be closer to real nonfiction. Despite this, the difference between fiction and nonfiction is still something I am questioning, and something that I hope my final assignment can shed some light on.

When we first began brainstorming this project, we had high hopes for what it could end up being. As we began working on the project, we chose to focus on the elements that we felt were achievable to create, leaving out some of our bigger ideas that we did not necessarily have the ability to create. One of the things we liked the idea of in the beginning was incorporating other media forms, in particular text based pieces, to support the fragments we were making. I had some of the Docubase pieces I had viewed in mind when thinking about this, one in particular called Deprogrammed, that offers the audience essay style pieces to support the visual content. One thing we contemplated doing with our piece was providing an optional viewing pop up with each album recreation video, which when clicked on, would pop up over the main video and provide the audience with a written insight into where our first impression inspiration came from, and some information on the real album cover and its meaning. I felt this could of been an interesting way to compare whether or not our ‘first impressions’ were accurate, and potentially make a very strong point about judging something on it’s cover. It became clear when using Korsakow, however, that the text we were able to add was quite limited and would not accommodate for large expanses of written supported content. This has left us with the question: How does including multiple different forms of media into the one piece change the way the piece is interacted with?

We posed this question during our presentation this week, which was met with some great advice for things we could explore in the future, such as comparing people who gain deeper information through reading and those who simply ‘read the headlines of articles’ and do not dig any deeper. I am feeling very confident that we will be able to use this question to branch out and make something with quite an interesting impact. It was great to see from our presentation that our project and format was well received, and placing the original album covers in a separate video was able to add to the fun of the piece.

As discussed earlier in my reflection, this assignment has helped me to broaden my knowledge on what is considered to be an online screen media piece. While I feel as though my definition of online screen media is becoming clearer, I do feel that there is always going to be more to know. Therefore, I will continue to keep the questions ‘what makes something an online screen media piece’ and ‘how does one properly produce an online screen media project’ at the forefront of my mind moving into the final assessment. With one final assignment left to work on, I hope to answer my final questions about online screen production and fill in the blanks surrounding this type of production.

 

Click on the picture above to discover ‘Judging by the Cover’

The completion of assignment three is fast approaching, and it’s been very fun to see all of our fragments slowly come together, and see how the theme of first impressions has been represented through the different pieces each group member has made. Now is the time to start thinking about the Korsakow section of our production process, and decide how we are going to organise our piece.

In my last assignment, one of the constraints we set ourselves was to make sure our piece was multifaceted. With regards to that assignment specifically, we looked at how we could involve pieces of different media, such as text and video, into the one concise piece. Initially, this was something we were also hoping to explore through the making of this piece, though our idea did evolve and change over time. When creating assignment two, and thinking about assignment three, I simply believed that the only way to create something multifaceted was to create a piece that involved different elements and pieces of media. When I think back to my last assignment, I realise that I never really explored the parameters of what makes something multifaceted, or what it even truly means. One definition of multifaceted is ‘having many different aspects or features’, which perfectly fits what I created in my last piece. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that these features need to be completely different in terms of their form. A piece doesn’t have to involve a mix of video, images and text, it can also involve the connection of different pieces of media. One piece of media, for example one of the first impression pieces we have created, can connect to every other fragment we created through its similar theme. This project as a whole could also draw connections to music media fragments and other existing album recreation pieces. The idea of creating something multifaceted, connecting one piece of media to many others, has been important when thinking about how we plan to connect each of our different fragments in our Korsakow project. One way we considered doing this was by grouping our impressions into their music genre.

Genre has always been an important element of media, particularly in regards to music. Simply, people identify with genres they like, and are more likely to watch or listen to media pieces that fall into that genre. In terms of using genre in our own piece, this could be both a good and a bad thing. If we organised our first impressions in terms of genre, people may be more willing to choose and engage with the genre’s they like, while also offering a clear way of organising our content. In saying this, organising our Korsakow project using genres could also pose some problems. For starters, audiences may only have incentive to watch the genres that they enjoy, rather than engaging with the piece as a whole. Besides this, one of the main purposes of our piece was to look at music in a different way. By organising our fragments by their musical genres, we may be taking away from this purpose, as we will be thinking about the music on the album rather than the album cover itself. Having weighed up our options, we decided to move away from the idea of genres to organise our Korsakow project. Besides, while some people such as the person known as ‘Trigger’ on Countrymusic.com say that genres are important to the music industry as they help with diversity and to enhance creativity, music listeners now have the ability to create their own playlists and blur the various genres into their listening, so genre may not necessarily be as important as it once was to musical tastes.

Heading into our next feedback session, we were definitely in need of some advice on the Korsakow front. Our session not only helped us to decide that genre was not something we should focus on, but also made us think about possible incentive for people watching our piece.

The piece that we are in the midst of creating is both variable and modular, as the audience will be able to have a unique experience whilst choosing which singular fragments they wish to click through. The issue this poses, however, is that people don’t necessarily need to engage with the whole piece, which is why we discussed how to give the audience incentive to engage with the entirety of our piece, to keep on working through it. We initially planned to fade in the original album cover at the end of each fragment so the audience knew what they were watching. It was suggested in our session that we think about taking this out to make the audience think about what they have watched after they have actually finished watching it and to keep them guessing. Despite this, there is still a general consensus within the group that we would like to have the original album covers featured somewhere. From this discussion, we came up with the idea of changing our 12th fragment from another album cover recreation to a credit sequence that reveals each of the covers that will hopefully be engaged with once all of the other videos have been watched, meaning the audience needs to watch the entire piece to find out which covers the videos are depicting.

Overall, we have decided to create a simple piece, with a large screen in the centre for the piece you decide to engage with, and 11 thumbnails around the outside. In this way, we feel as though our piece allows for modularity, as the fragments can be viewed separately or one after the other in a concise piece, while also allowing the audience to choose the path they take, creating a varied experience for every viewer. Ideally, we would have liked to of found a way to make the credit sequence appear once every piece was viewed, so the audience has further incentive to keep watching and find out what the recreations actually are. At this stage, however, we are not sure how to achieve this, and therefore are thinking of leaving that fragment as a thumbnail with a lower rating so it is less likely to come up until the end. The Korsakow project has been both new and exciting for our group, as we are finally having a chance to make something that is truly interactive.

 

Dementia: It’s a bit of a bugger is an interactive project created by Annie Bungeroth on Korsakow. The piece features nine images in a square that, when hovered over, come to life and play as a short video. Each video is of Bungeroth’s father, who is suffering from dementia. When explaining her piece in Mediamatic, Bungeroth states that she never knows what she is going to find when visiting her father, how much he will remember or who he will even be. This was one of the main reasons Bungeroth decided to use a non-linear Korsakow project, as it clearly represents the randomness of the disease. Each video shows her father doing something basic whilst speaking, with very little context given with regards to the actual conversations they are having or what has led to this moment. The piece is a clear example of an interactive screen media piece that is both modular and variable. The audience is able to interact with every video and the project as a whole to gain the whole perspective and idea behind the video, however, they are also able to interact with the fragments individually in an order that they choose.

This is something we hope to also achieve in our own piece. We wish for the audience to have the opportunity to view the album cover recreation fragments that they enjoy, without necessarily having to interact with the project as a whole. Our project will not be linear, and we therefore also expect that the experience different people have with the piece will vary, and also allow audience members to immerse in the project with a different experience each time.

Prior to this class, I had not heard of Korsakow and it’s abilities, and was therefore interested in seeing its capabilities. I was also interested in seeing how the online projects I had immersed myself in so far, particularly the interactive pieces on Docubase, differed to the ones created on Korsakow.

One thing I noticed straight away when viewing Dementia: It’s a bit of a bugger on Korsakow was that the actual context of the piece and overall meaning was not clear instantly. On Korsakow, the piece was simply listed as ‘It’s a bit of a bugger’, and while it was clear to see that the subject was an older man with a lot of confusing thoughts in his head, it wasn’t until I actually Googled the piece that I began to understand the purpose behind it. It became apparent that this was not the only project with a potentially confusing initial meaning. In class, we discussed Talk with your hands like an Ellis Island Mutt  by Steven Wingate and the complete randomness of the piece that, even after discussing it, makes little sense to me. I found this to be in complete opposition to the pieces I had immersed in on Docubase, as each seemed to have an introduction, or some sort of explanation of their point, and covered quite large issues such as environmental catastrophes and the influence of cults.

When speaking about Korsakow, Anna Weihl explains that ‘Korsakow documentaries are based on evolving modular storytelling and intimate, personal narratives; instead of featuring the big issues of our world such as climate change or the exploitation of natural resources’. She also notes that ‘Korsakow documentaries can be considered as effective tools for thought, as poetic miniatures zooming into the very small details of everyday life in a contemplative way’. Up until now, I have always been stuck on the idea that whatever online screen media piece I made needed to have a clear purpose, really needed to mean something and tell a story. However, from my exploration of Korsakow, I am beginning to realise that making a piece to simply ‘explore something’ or even ‘express a thought’ is completely okay. The pieces don’t need to make sense, sometimes they are simply made to allow the creator and the audience to explore.

This idea of exploring a thought has been a very important thing to think about when creating our own fragments. Having had a number of sessions dedicated to researching album covers and selecting ones that gave us really strong first impressions, we are now in the stage of shooting footage and creating soundscapes that accurately depict our first impressions of the artwork to the audience, while also beginning to think about what we hope our final Korsakow project will look like. To develop our project, we decided to break up the work, with each group member choosing three album covers they liked and capturing their first impressions of that piece. This has meant that some of the fragments have been literal video depictions of the artwork, while others have been completely out of the box and not even necessarily made sense to other members of the group at first. Up until now, I have been concerned about this, and the way that our pieces may not be completely consistent with each other. However, once reflecting on the idea that Korsakow can be used to simply explore ideas and thoughts, I have realised that the purpose of our piece is to capture our true first impressions and explore these ideas. We do not wish to create something that is fabricated or altered so that the fragments are the same, the small inconsistencies in our fragments will be a highlight of our finished product. The first impressions might make no sense to our audience, in fact, the whole purpose of looking at album covers alone may not make sense to our audience, but our purpose really is simple: we are exploring our thoughts.

Throughout this studio the question on the forefront of my mind has been ‘what makes something an online screen media piece?’ In answering this question I have focussed highly on genre and form, finding out that online games and interactive pieces can be considered to be online screen media. My work so far on assignment three and Korsakow has broadened the parameters even further for what can be considered online screen media. Pieces do not need to be made to satisfy a purpose, they can be made to explore and work through a thought or idea. Simple.

Lev Manovich writes about five major principles of new media in his text The Language of New Media, two of these being variability and modularity. Manovich describes modularity as being ‘the fractal structure of new media’, meaning that each piece of media can be broken down into very small pieces, for example, a film can be broken down into scenes, then broken down further into hundreds of still images and separate sound files. The important piece of this theory that relates to our projects is that each piece or fragment is able to act independently as well as within the project as a whole. When speaking about variability, Manovich notes that, with old media, the creator would assemble the media piece manually and it would be permanently fixed, with each viewer then watching the same piece. With new media however, pieces are often assembled by a computer and give rise to many different versions, with variability relying heavily on modularity. Modularity and variability are the two major things we needed to think about when deciding what to make our project about and how to construct it.

Having had some time to think about the project over the mid-semester break, we decided to explore the idea of recreating album covers, and matching the movements in these recreations to music. While we liked the idea of doing this in time to music from the album, copyright issues sent us metaphorically packing on that idea. We knew that it was going to be very important for us to make something with a unique angle, as album cover recreation is something that has been done many times before, especially in a comedic sense.

Cover for Me is a part of the ‘Music is the Answer’ quiz, held monthly at The Gun Pub in Hackney. The challenge involves people recreating album covers in under ten minutes, with many of the results posted on a Tumblr blog. Because of the time constraint, the results are very haphazard and entertaining. This blog is a great example of an interactive piece of online screen media, as it allows the audience to contribute to the project, while also looking at album cover recreation in a unique way. ‘The Kitten Covers’ is another Tumblr blog completely devoted to the recreation of album covers, with this blog getting album covers and replacing every human on the cover with a different kitten.

Through researching already existing album cover recreation pieces, it was clear to see that the most common ideas are comedic, photograph based projects, and that while those listed above have been very successful, there is a clear gap with regards to video and audio based recreations. Another thing noted was that album covers are always thought of with regards to the music on them, they are merely seen as a visual representation of the music. However, album covers are also individual art forms that have the ability to make the audience feel something when looking at them, without actually thinking about the music they’re based on. We saw this as an interesting idea to look at, and have decided to use video and audio to act out our first impressions of eleven album artworks, disregarding the actual music on the piece. Each individual fragment will be tied together by the theme of ‘first impressions’.

We will be working within some constraints that will be important to remember when brainstorming and finalising our idea. Each of the pieces we create will be based off art forms that already exist, we cannot create new album covers to suit what we wish to make. We are also constrained in the way that, to create consistency, we do hope that all of our videos can sit around the 30 second mark. We are also constrained in the way that we need to choose album covers that we actually have the technological ability to create, whilst also choosing pieces that we can look at objectively and that are elaborate enough to recreate.

Discussing our idea with some other groups helped us to further develop our piece. One group suggested that we think about our piece in terms of ‘judging something by its cover’ and the fact that we are changing the way we think about music. It was also suggested that we think about genres as a possible way to choose our covers or organise our final product. While we haven’t thought that far ahead as of yet, we will keep this in mind when deciding how to organise our piece.

Our project will be non-linear, whilst also falling into an interesting grey area between fiction and nonfiction. In creating this piece, we are recreating our real, non-fictional thoughts based off real album covers, however the actual micro stories within the fragments are fictional. The idea of fiction and nonfiction was something I discussed when thinking about my last assignment, where I questioned whether or not anything can truly be nonfictional. Nonfiction is simply a representation of how one person sees the truth, and it could be said that, while the aim is to be truthful, this isn’t always the case. The first time I heard the term ‘lie’ in terms of an online media piece was in the text ‘Making with the Korsakow system’ by Matt Soar. Soar uses the term lie when talking about linear films, where he discusses the idea that linear films lie.  The idea of linear and non-linear pieces was something I discussed with regards to my last project, where I discovered that nonlinearity does not necessarily relate to the order of the story, rather relating to the interactivity of a piece, and the ability for the viewer to choose their path. Soar notes that to create a piece with a beginning, middle and end like a linear film has, ‘a great deal gets left on the cutting room floor’, as the piece needs to be structured in a certain way. With nonlinear pieces, less gets left out as more possibilities can be explored and much less structure is required. This description clearly matches what we hope to create, a piece with multiple different stories and possibilities for the audience to click through.

The idea that ‘linear films lie’ has brought up more feelings surrounding the idea of nonfiction films and whether or not they can ever tell a true story. The suggestion that nonlinear films are more honest makes me wonder whether nonfiction, nonlinear pieces are likely to be closer to actual nonfiction. While this is simply a thought wondering wild in my head at this point, I hope to think and grow on this concept as we work on our piece. Our next step with regards to moving forward with this assignment will be to settle on our album covers and commence the process of filming.

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Balloons in Bhutan  is an online documentary by Jonathan Harris that explores the idea of Happiness in Bhutan. Bhutan takes happiness very seriously, measuring Gross National Happiness as opposed to Gross National Product to measure its socio-economic prosperity. With this in mind, Harris created an interactive documentary style piece, where he asked a diverse range of people questions about their happiness, and rewarded them with a certain number of balloons, depending on how they rated their happiness.  He asked each person five questions: what makes you happy now in your life?, can you tell me a little more about yourself?, what is your favourite joke?, what is a memory that makes you very happy? and, after asking them to choose a balloon and write a wish on it, why did you choose that colour balloon? He split each of these questions into individual, very short pieces entitled happiness, identity, imagination, memory and hope. He spoke to a total number of 117 people, creating a collection of close to 600 short, relatively unedited pieces that involved the audio piece of the question/answer and an overlaying, corresponding image.

Harris has created a number of different pieces that represent the idea of interactive online screen media. In their piece ‘We’re happy and we know it: Documentary, data, montage’, Jon Dovey and Mandy Rose discuss one of Harris’ earlier pieces ‘We Feel Fine’. We Feel Fine is a project that involves a system searching the web for mentions of ‘I am feeling’ or ‘I feel’ in blog posts every few minutes, and recording the sentence the phrase is within. The system is also able to record information off the corresponding blogs such as the authors age, gender and location, and records this alongside the sentence, creating a large database of human feelings, which has the ability to be analysed and used for larger data purposes. In the Dovey and Rose piece, the authors mention that, by telling Harris’ story, they hope to make clear that “the Web is now a vast repository of social information that is potential documentary content. The live and changing nature of that data is a new affordance. We Feel Fine is not static, but generative”. They note that during his schooling days, Harris saw the fragments of information left behind by bloggers and other web users, and saw that some of this information had the potential to be grouped together, creating an interesting new way of analysing people and gathering information. While Harris and his partner on the project Kamvar hope the piece “makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life”, they managed to create something almost revolutionary, something that can completely change the way that myself and other online screen media makers think about our work and the impact it can have.

Turning back specifically to Balloons of Bhutan, there were many noticeable recurring themes within the piece. To start with, the basis of Harris’ piece was the idea of happiness, exploring the happiness of people in Bhutan. Questions relating to happiness occur right across the piece, with the overall premise of the piece following the theme of happiness and what makes people feel this way. Another key theme I noticed when engaging with the piece that was probably a little less obvious than happiness was colour, specifically within the balloons in the project. While the project was photography based with audio overlaying, many of the images featured balloons, with some of the videos also including discussions on the subjects favourite colours and their feelings towards them.

When thinking of themes for projects, it’s easy to instantly think of themes relating to the actual story you plan to create. In the case of Balloons in Bhutan, happiness was quite an obvious theme of the piece. However, it is important to also look at some of the less obvious themes that can occur within pieces, things that subtly tie the pieces together.

Assignment three asks us to create an interactive piece that displays both variability and modularity, and asks us to think about our pieces in smaller fragments that can be tied together with a common theme, such as those present in Balloons in Bhutan. When choosing our group for this project, we were asked to look at the classic production process of an online screen media piece, and rate each step with regards to what we enjoy most and where we think our skills lie. Of the entire process, I rated the process of actually coming up with an idea the lowest as I find it very difficult actually deciding on solid ideas that I have some passion about. I do, however, quite enjoy researching, writing and actually producing content, so it was important for me to find a group of people that complimented some of these skills. My group officially consists of Liv, Jackson and Natalie, and I look forward to seeing the work we complete. With the semester break just around the corner, we need to take some time to think about some potential themes for our own piece, and begin brainstorming ways that we can create something that is both modular and variable, while also being interactive.