This all began as a Twitter account shared by my classmates at the Kansas City Art Institute. People in our department say funny things, and the best things get posted. After awhile, Overheard at KCAI became a large part of our studio culture. We're known as the class that "does that Twitter thing."
This experiment started with a question; "What happens when...?" So I began to put things together, with Twitter as the backbone, and various technologies to facilitate the experimental aspect.
My very first Twitter experiment involved building analog words out of particles (like grains of rice), and placing them on a surface rigged with a vibrating cell phone. Every time a tweet happened, the phone buzzed, moving the particles apart.
My second stage of experimentation was entirely digital, using Flash and ActionScript to parse and animate tweets. As my hopes and ideas for this project grew, ActionScript proved to be extremely limited. So I moved on to HTML5 and jQuery.
The middle of the semester (and the middle of this project's timeline) was spent learning how to piece this thing together. I learned enough jQuery and Javascript to tweak animations that I found online, making them do things that were close to what I wanted, but not exactly perfect. Lots of things were broken, and almost nothing worked 100% of the time. It was an awkward time, but it was necessary for progress. I learned a lot from it.
I eventually figured out how to make everything work exactly how I wanted. And I'm very proud of my accomplishment. It's been properly named and branded too! Tword is the word.
I think the near future holds something very exciting. I've been thinking about turning this into something even bigger. We'll see what happens.
Spring 2012 | Typography 4 | Erika Goering (Mastermind) | Chris Chapin (Instructor)