SweetClarity was a wish to bring inspiring art to digital screens that were beginning to pop up and dominate public spaces.
Sweet Clarity was born from my work as a photographer working alongside improvisation performance artists:
- I was unable to find a doorway into the “art establishment.”
- During small events and exhibitions, I played with converting still images into sequenced presentations which took on a story-telling quality.
- Digital screens were popping up in public places (usually with advertising which felt like pollution).
And so, an idea was born to create a facilitated platform that would enable artists to self publish story-telling presentations that would be presented in public places. The wish was to provide ad-hoc moments of inspiration through an informal meeting with art (while waiting for your coffee, as opposed to while standing in an art gallery).
Initially, I invested some money and paid for some branding and prototyping. But that didn’t get very far. So I decided to study web development and attempt to build a prototype on my own.
Design Challenges
- An administrative application for managing artists, presentations and customers (LAMP)
- A presentation editing tool that enabled artists to easily transform a sequence of stills into a sequenced and timed presentations (autosaving Javascript).
- An image processing backend that could adapt images to different resolutions and screen sizes and orientations. A creator could indicate the core of the image and the image processor strived to keep that core whole on any screen size and orientation.
- A screening app that could play presentations (Flash) to simulate how content is presented in a public space. In the prototype a user could either play random presentations or manually choose a presentation. A user could also alter the “pace” at which a presentation was played.
I also created a conceptual design for a “mood-setting” application that would enable customers to integrate audio sources with the video presentations to create a holistic mood in a space.
I invested ~2 years actively trying to give this life. It felt like it was falling between the cracks of startup and art cultures. It continued to live on in my heart (and for some years online) until I decided to let it go.