Rubber Band Art

CONTRIBUTIONS:

Research, Visual & Conceptual Development, Web Development (Front and Back-End)

TOOLS:

HTML, CSS, Javascript, Node.js, WebSockets

DURATION:

4 weeks (January 2024)

Still image of the GUI for Rubber Band Art. This was a desktop-only web application. See the interaction video at the bottom of this page!

PROJECT SUMMARY:

"Magnet Writing" is a website I created using vanilla Javascript, HTML, CSS, and Node.js.

This website was inspired by rainbow looms and rubber band peg board art. It is a collaborative drawing board where you can use "bands" to create abstract shape artwork. You can use different colours and choose whether or not to fill in each shape you make, then when you finish a shape, your addition is permanently added to the website. The result and hope for the website is to encourage collaboration through the web and spark creativity in a fun way. You can work together with friends to draw or make your own mark on the collaborative board, or you can alter the shapes that already exist on the webpage.

TECHNICAL WRITE-UP:

My Javascript experience before this project was fairly limited and this website pushed my coding abilities and gave me experience in both front and back end web development. Node.js was combined with front-end Javascript to create a collaborative drawing board with permanent art made of draggable custom shapes.

PROJECT BRIEF:

My undergraduate thesis project was an eight-month process involving months of research, ideation, and experimentation. I made significant leaps in teaching myself Javascript, particularly with the expansion of back-end development, specifically Node.js to work with permanent data storage. "Rubber Band Art" was a website I built and designed for this thesis project, for which I worked on several websites around the idea of designing my own version of the web with the goals of collaboration, community, creativity, and craft. It was one of 3 final web projects I created.

EXHIBITIONS:

This project was displayed in GradEx 109 in 2024, OCAD University's graduating student exhibition. Visitors were invited to scan a QR code to join the website at the same time as others to write and play together.

This work was part of an exhibition that took place over four days. At the end of each, I saved an image of what visitors had made over the course of the day. See the grid below to check out what people made!