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Martin Calvino

week_1: draft of idea for mashups of news APIs as raw material for generative art creation


The overall idea for this class project is to mashup APIs from news media and from social media as raw material for generative artwork creation. The retrieved information for selected keywords contained in news articles (news media APIs) and the social response of news to those same keywords (Facebook APIs) will be used as raw material (data input) for the creation of generative artworks. The created artwork will have the dimensions of Facebook's cover image (851 x 315 pixels) and users will be able to download such artwork (created in response to their keyword search) via interaction with a button.

The objective is to create a generative art system that react to input data from news and social media sources and output a keyword-search-dependent output in visual form that users can download and use as cover image in their Facebook profiles (Figure 1).

The APIs intended for mashup are:

1_ News media:

2_ Social media:

Figure 1. When users search for a given keyword for articles to be retrieved (let's say based on number of occurrences for that keyword per given news article), a generative artwork is created on the page as combination data from the retrieved articles plus the number of occurrences for the same keyword across Facebook. Users can interact with artwork to highlight a links to the origina news source. In case they like the visual piece generated, they can download a .png file via interaction with a button on the page. The artwork will have the exact same dimensions as Facebook cover image for users to update their social media profile with the image.

Reference_

I previously created generative artwork based on rice genome data and 'influenced' the visuality of elements in the painting by mashing up weather data in real time retrieved from OpenWeather Map via API request:

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