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In particular the way in which it both separates and connects the written essay and your visual work as different commentaries on you and the question of what interface might mean. Taking the hyperlinks between the sparse written commentary to the rich surface of the visuals is like a kind of 'multimodal explosion' that I think places your intensity of meaning making in the visual and the writing as secondary. The facilities of the screen offer the potential for you to incorporate both image and word on the screen simultaneously or to use image as a visual object to link and critic the written text. They offer the potential to go across the boundaries that you have designed between image and word--but instead you keep them separate through the facilities of the screen in a way which maintains the interface as a boundary. I wonder what it would have been like if you had not preserved this boundary between word and image--if you had used the interface to bring the distinction between word and image, academic writing and 'art' into question more.
Within the writing I like the way in which you use a range of voices to establish who you might be, moving between fiction and academic voices and your own voiced experiences of the Yale interview, your live in your room and so on: very Bakhtin. This multi-voicing serves to interrupt the discourse of the essay as an academic piece and brings in the personal voice in a way that kind of repositions me as a formal reader to a more casual observer of, well, of you. The way in which you use "--" to mark your 'personal' voice from your 'academic' voice is another boundary that I think you establish in this interface to separate out rather than merge/move across meanings. Through the design and editing of the 'comment' part of the screen you also create and mark a separation between writer and reader: a place for you and a place for 'me'. I was wondering what the "--" parts of your essay 'meant to be read by a human' would be like if they were audio clips--how that would construct these parts of the text differently.
by carey jewitt on 5/14/2003 at 10:20:55
Peter Lunenfeld: It's the hypercontextual work (like your emails) that come to define how a given project defines itself in the world.
I couldn't agree more! Inviting, enticing, seducing response is integral to the design of communication.
by max bruinsma on 4/27/2003 at 09:37:48
I'd like to imagine this is "an asynchronous dialogue" between you and me.
Ok, so be it ;-) But then, we need an interface! The problem with "dialogue" is that without immediacy, it becomes a series of monologues. So the main design/interface/interaction problem for "asynchronous dialogues" is how to compensate for the lack of real immediacy of the kind we know from live conversations. I need to copy/paste the quote I use as if you said it, and I interrupted you (as I often do during dialogues, I must shamefully admit :-). I would want the interface to make this more direct. I would want to highlight any section, and then say "react". Or click at any place and say "insert comment". I would want to read comments on mouse-over at any point there is one connected to the passage I'm reading. Without, of course, losing contact with the exact spot I was when I started reading comments. This kind of "contextual interfacing" is easy to think, but quite complex to make. It's a design challenge!
by max bruinsma on 4/27/2003 at 08:56:12
I'm interested in new forms of visual intellectuality, so naturally, I find your thesis, which intertwines textuality, interface, and imagery, and which encourages interactive commentary, provocative. But, like another of your respondents, I too have a question about what this thesis actually is about. You don't really come down definitively on one side or the other on whether the word "interface" is bandied about too readily as a metaphor. You seem uncomfortable with the word applying to everything from on-screen bitmaps to ancient cityscape, but you don't draw any lines in the sand, explaining it all away with the inarguable (and essentially meaning free) statement: "After all, life is much more complicated and unpredictable than computers."
I'm also very much interested in the choices you made, and didn't make, when you chose to use two distinct voices in the thesis. Your use of "--" from Director lingo, as the indication of a more personal, less analytical voice isn't explained until the middle of the thesis, and frankly this lingo convention is not so typographically distinct as to make it apparent at first that you're using it to effect a multiplex vocality. Combining it with other typographic interventions or innovations might have rendered this tactic more legible.
Finally, I'd like to comment on something you've done that I found remarkably effective. Your first line is "What makes you read this essay?" I have a direct answer: I read it because you sent me not one, but two emails asking me to read it. Each was weighted with names and opinions well chosen to tempt me to click on the email's embedded link. We tend to discount this sort of strategy as being ex parti to the design process, but in a networked environment, I'd argue the opposite. It's the hypercontextual work (like your emails) that come to define how a given project defines itself in the world.
by Peter Lunenfeld on 4/24/2003 at 01:41:39
Interface is really a broad wonderful thing. It's a shame it's gotten so narrow. Interface doesn't even have to have a human on one end. I think the dictionary says it best when it calls it a "situation."
by Simon Greenwold on 4/09/2003 at 17:01:17
