Artifact
My choice of the artifact is a captioned image in the style of a meme. Very popular with the internet in these days, memes refer to "an an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." [Merriam-Webster Dictionary] One widespread category of memes (thanks also to website like Memegenerator) is in the form of a captioned image.
I used the fact that the mask produce by the program is not perfect to replicate the feeling of certain meme (see the "foul bachelor frog" meme). The caption is hopefully humorous and self-referential. For more examples relevant to Cornell, one can refer to the Cornell Memes Facebook page
Project Notes
I implemented the project following the directions given. In the picture one can see the cost graph expanded from a given seed point.
Artifact Creation
During the creation of the artifact, I discovered a bug for which the mask would generate spurious artifacts, as is shown in the figure. For this reason the mask I eventually utilized was generated by the solution code.
Compositing was done in Photoshop. The original picture was imported as a layer and clip-masked by the mask created with magic-scissor project.
The background and captioning was done in Photoshop, as well.
Files
Here is a picture without captioning and a link to memegenerator to create you own Snaverly Meme