For this project, I had chosen to create a website, Twitter and Instagram for a mock celebrity which would take the form of an artificially intelligent being named AVVA. The goal of the project is to reflect on the constructed identities and on the artificiality of the personas adopted by the real-life celebrities we look up to.
One of the challenges which I have encountered was the fact that I was not sure how I could really emphasize the constructed quality of AVVA. When crafting her website and writing drafts for her Tweets, I often thought that they felt too real. I was having a hard time really emphasizing her artificial nature and I was scared that the intended message would not come across through the piece. I tried to make her feel more robotic, but it only came off as tacky and went against the point of the project. After reflecting on it, I came to the conclusion that this feeling of rawness and authenticity was probably not a bad thing as it can also be seen within the personas of our real-world icons as well. I eventually decided to embrace it and went for it. Another aspect of the project which I initially did not like, but eventually embraced was the fact that there was a lack of consistency within the drawing style of the different images of AVVA that I created. The first drawing I made of her was rendered in a way that made her look almost 3D (image 1) and although I would have liked for every image to be drawn like this, I simply did not have the time. I therefore decided to keep the original image as the front cover of the website and to render the other images in a more cartoony – less time consuming – style (images 2 and 3).
image_1 
image_2 
image_3
For the software, I used Photoshop to create the images needed for the project and Wix to put together the website. Given that I am very familiar with photoshop, I had no troubles on that side of the equation. The same cannot be said of Wix. Although I am sure this platform could have been very useful for another kind of project, it only proved to make everything more challenging for mine. The main reason for this is that, although it offered very well designed and beautiful templates, it did not allow much customization. This made it so that the drawings which I had spend a lot of time creating were resized and cropped in ways that did not allow them to be displayed the way I wanted to. To fix this issue, I had to create a totally new website to be able to use the older Wix interface and start from scratch.
Websites:
Ryan Bechara - Media Lab 