BCM114: Digital Artifact – Making

About My DA (Once again)

So if you’ve never been here, my Digital Artifact is an Instagram Account and WordPress Blog (FINALLY!) based around cyberpunk themes and telling a story of an artificial world. The visuals focus around highly edited images with a sci-fi/cyberpunk feel to them and feature both people and landscapes.

My Making Process

My making process started off extremely slow with me not having a lot of time to edit photos or to write up blog posts. Fortunately now because both of these things are up and running, it is going much more smoothly in terms of content being produced. I had some doubts that I would ever actually make it to posting anything on the blog side of The Somnus Project, but I eventually got around to it so I can now begin creating longer segments of information regarding the world I am creating.

You can find my first post on the blog here

Upload Schedule

I am currently working on putting an upload schedule in place as part of using the feedback from my ideation process. Time is something that I really struggle with however I think having an upload schedule would make it astronomically easy to keep engagement up with both my accounts.

Creating My Photographs

Cameras

I am still only using my phone and my camera (Fujifilm X-E1) to take photos, however I am occasionally using old photos backed up on my computer and other peoples artworks (editing and giving credit to the original artist). Using other peoples artworks is not only a way of reaching more people who are a fan of their work but also a way that I can save time as often it doesn’t take me long to edit an image.

Programs

I use quite a few apps in order to edit my photos to fit the theme of The Somnus Project. I do not necessarily use all of these on the same picture:

• Polarr – For the primary editing of all my images. I use this to adjust colours, light, shadows, contrast, hues and sometimes to add effects to the lights already existing in the photos as they were taken. It allows me to edit every aspect of the photos and to add gradients, radial effects and overlays.

• Meitu – This application is mainly for the use of selfies should I take them, however I do occasionally use this application for the filters and effects that you can lay over photos

• Facetune 2 – Serves as an application where I can fine tune different elements of photos, especially in adding more shadow or light to a persons face

• RAD VHS – For the videos behind my story posts relating to radio broadcasts I use RAD VHS. It’s helpful for giving a slightly glitched look without me having to pay for anything.

• Werble – Werble is really cool for creating moving pictures, or gifs I guess. I usually upload them as a video on Instagram. This gives me variety.

These applications all help take the first picture to the second picture to help it fit within the world of The Somnus Project. Shout out to my friend Toby for helping me with these photos.

Inspiration and Learning

Part of my project is learning how to edit photos without overdoing it, but still keeping in mind the style of the account. I look to other photographers to do this, in particular demas and noealzii who both put up tutorials on how they edit their photos, and friends who are photographers.

A Comparison Between When I First Started and One of My Most Recent Posts

Blog

Now that the blog is up I have started making posts based on files and the characters within Somnus.

Using this blog allows me to inform my followers more about the world I am creating and to add more depth to it. I have not yet seen any sort of feedback regarding the blog on whether it has helped me reach more people or if my followers from Instagram have used the link to go to my blog. At the moment it is difficult to tell where my followers originally see my content.

The Future

In the future I would like to start using Reddit as a way of further promoting my content. I have also thought about creating some form of physical promotion material such as fliers or stickers. I would like to create a series of extremely short videos which add to the lives of the characters. Maybe in the distant future, given enough people like my content I could end up selling prints of some of my photos. I have also been given the suggestion of making a virtual reality game; while this is an amazing idea, I don’t have the skills for it, nor the money to make it happen, so alas it remains a dream.

IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY

You can find The Somnus Project here at https://thesomnusproject.wordpress.com/ and here at the_somnus_project on Instagram

BCM112: Not Everything Is As It Seems

Framing can be used in many different ways but the two most prominent that I have noticed is when people use it to filter their content to content that matters, and when they use it to shape a persona for themselves online.

WHAT IS FRAMING?

Framing is to take aspects of reality and to refine them to a point where an audience perceives that to be real instead. It is then making these refined parts more salient in order to draw attention to this “new reality”.

CONTENT

Content is often filtered down to only the best and most relevant information and ideas. This is so the content surrounding the core idea isn’t jeopardized by anything that doesn’t fit. The content is also used to help create the persons online persona. Framing in this particular circumstance can be used to portray events in a certain way.

PERSONA

It is often assumed that what people show on the internet, especially by celebrities, is a real representation of their life when it is usually a glossed up version of it. Not everything is how it seems and this persona is usually cultivated and carefully created by stringing together select pieces of content.

Below is an example of how I take a few of my cosplay selfies which is an example of framing:

The Picture I Took

The GIF of How and Where it was Taken

 

BCM112: Closed Cathedral, Open Bazaar

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a book by American software developer and open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond that describes his theories of the “Cathedral model” of closed source media and technology verses the “Bazaar model” of open source media and technology.

An example of closed source media would be something like apple products and the App Store. There are some apps that are released on Google Play that just don’t make it to the app store.

This of course has its ups and downs. By Apple being so controlling over the content that is put on the App store they are able to very easily filter out anything that could be harmful to a persons device such as a program with a hidden virus. That being said Apple is also able to censor their content; you make an app that Apple doesn’t like? Well it’s not gonna show up on the app store any time soon.

This website shows these pros and cons in a lot more detail. Take a look if your interested.

Below is a meme describing the desire for more open source content:

BCM112: Memetic Warfare

What the hell is memetic warfare you may ask? Well look no further for the answer because it’s literally staring you back in the face.  Memetic warfare is exactly as stated, some kind of conflict using memes.

An example of this is the # DraftOurDaughters campaign which was started as an attack against Hilary Clinton by the “Anonymous” persons of 4chan (*wonderful place that is). This attack was spread over many different platforms like Reddit, Twitter and Facebook as a means of spreading the attack even further. On top of this, it was carried out so well that some people actually believed it.

It can be argued that memes are the way to go if your looking to publish a message to a widespread audience, and that memetic warfare is incredibly powerful (like the infinity gauntlet powerful, that shit should be used wisely).

I have made this video below to further illustrate my point: