Category: Intro to Computational Media

For my ICM Final, I created defining.technology It is a web application that tries to define technology in an accurate but somewhat whimsical manner.

I made it using a self-defined grammar with the help of Rita.

For my final project, I was inspired by gamedefinitions.com.

I am creating a definition generator for the word “technology” with the aid of Rita‘s Grammar feature.

My aim is to create definitions that are whimsical but also serious at the same time. I started off with regular dictionary-based definitions and then branching off by adding my own fillers wherever I see fit.

The work in progress can be seen below. It currently lives in this repository.

For the next week, I plan to re-style the website into something that more closely resembles a dictionary.

This week I teamed up with Schuyler to create a web music application. The idea is that the user is given a canvas to draw, we will then find a song that correlates to the drawing and play it for them.

The sketch is accessible here. (Though for now, you’ll need to fetch the access token manually, instructions are in the sketch source code).

The way it works is that we use DoodleNet, a machine learning model that can recognize drawings to get a prediction of what the user is drawing. We then use that information to search for a song based on the drawing result using Spotify’s web player and web API.

Something that I did this week is to create this (partially done) music visualization sketch that streams music from Spotify.

The sketch can be accessed here

Looking back a bit, I did wish that I focused more on the visualization part instead of trying funny things with Spotify.

For this week’s experiment, I was inspired by lava lamps.

I wanted to create something calming and has some sort of slow-moving animation. This is what I’ve come up with. Try playing around with the sliders for some effect.