The Halbeath piece will influence my project because of the way that a place (Halbeath) is described by different ways. The beginning shows you a product of the place (the Motorola phone) while giving you directions to the place. Then the piece goes on to show you current images of the place while listening to an old folk song about the place. The end describes the place with more info written down in loose paragraph form. I am going to try and describe my original place in multiple ways such as text, images and the “character” that is there. I will also be thinking about Shredder 1.0 when thinking about how my character is going to be. I want to use familiar things and transform and combine them in different ways so that they are almost unrecognizable when re-assembled. Shredder does this with websites…I will use that same logic to create a character.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
B R A N D O N
A Visitor's Guide to London Heath Bunting, 1995
A visitor’s Guide to London created by Heath Bunting in 1995 is a unique website because in form it resembles a children’s coloring book while the title seems as though the site is going to be strictly informational. When I think of information a children’s coloring book is the last thing I think of...so the site is already interesting before you even start clicking around because you are expecting information and you are presented with child-like drawings. After you make it past the title and opening image you realize that you have the power to go to multiple places from the one picture. This is where this visitors guide is different because of it’s medium. The Internet allows the audience to decide where to go…the pathways that are available (jagged lines, person walking, letter “A”, and intersecting lines) are not exactly indicative of where you are taken next. It’s kind of a surprise! Unlike a traditional map or book, the website allows you to explore London in a new order and way every time you visit the site. I also think it is interesting how the artist uses black and white images to represent an old place while using a medium that allows for such vast interaction and many different color combinations.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
wwwwwwwww.jodi.org
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Shredder 1.0
The Shredder 1.0 website was created by Mark Napier in 1998. In his piece summary Napier explains that in his view the web is not a physically representation of information in the same way a magazine or book is, but instead a temporary graphic created when browsing software interprets HTML instruction. The focus of Shredder 1.0 is to reveal this hidden truth behind the Internet and give the user a new interpretation of common web pages. I think Napier realized that most people that use the Internet have no idea how the Internet works or how web pages are created. His piece gives the user a glimpse into how web pages look on “the inside” while adding his artistic spin to them. It also seems that Napier created a new browser, using the “1.0” adds to that conclusion, but, from what I can tell the shredder interprets each site the same way… the individual source code of each site determines how it will display after being put through the Shredder. That is exactly how a browser works. Napier has just created a browser that is more concerned about making an instant art piece rather than conveying what the creator of the web page was actually trying to show.