APIs and Your Internet Artwork

This week we learned how to use API’s and what they are. I found that the video lucky made was extremely helpful firstly in helping us to understand how to get an API, secondly how to read the data the API provides and thirdly how to use the information the API provides to change elements within the HTML. Last year, it was extremely unclear to use exactly how to use API information because the video we received was about file conversions, and using D3.js to change CSS, and HTML elements. Overall, this week’s API videos were helpful in explaining more about API’s.

For my artwork ideas, I thought I would make either something relating to animals, shopping or friendship. For my animals idea, I wanted to have a photo in which each pixel represents one animal of a particular species eg. more endangered species will have a more pixelated photo This would be a commentary on the disappearance of animals on our planet. My shopping idea would be setup as a shopping page where you could see products of luxury brands or fast fashion brands, and the longer you spend on the page, the more filled it becomes with clothes that are “thrown away”. This would be a commentary on fast fashion and the rate at which things are just discarded. My last idea is about online friendships. For this idea, I would make a page which looks like a social media chat page, and it would display the progression of a pair of friends bonding. The idea here being that online friendships are just as important as in person friendships. Currently, I am leaning towards the online friendships artwork because I am more passionate about the message and have more of an idea of how I could make a prototype of it for our first assignment.