ARS162, Spring 2006
Instructor: Barbara Lattanzi

Virtual You / Virtual Other

Due on Tuesday April 4

GOALS:

• To create, for the web, a fictional dialog based upon texts associated with an individual whom you have already identified, from one of the social spaces on the web, or via that individual's blog or online diary. The dialog will inlcude your "interrogation" or "interview" of that individual using their texts as responses.
• To develop, using Photoshop, complex combinations of layers, textures, texts within composite images that describe, illustrate, or counterpoint the text of the fictional dialog.
• To explore the "dialog" of visual elements within and among the layers of a complex image.
• To use the scanner and camera macro-focus settings to examine and document texture. And to combine the physicality of texture with other images that describe, illustrate, or counterpoint the words of the fictional dialog.
• To incorporate these images in webpages that have a dynamic interface (specifically using, image "behaviors" in camouflaged rollovers and pop-up windows) for staging the fictional dialog.

TECHNICAL PARAMETERS

Your fictional dialog will be composed with a minimum of 2 HTML pages:

• At least one web-page using DHTML ("dynamic" html, using javascript behaviors)
• at least one spawned web-page, i.e., a specifically sized and located pop-up window. (Here are a few simple examples of javascript control of webpages.)
• at least one page will use sliced images and camouflaged rollovers.
  (Here is example of camouflaged rollovers.)
• At least one image, 800x600, that includes a minimum of 3 distinct layers.
• A mixture of your own text (in the form of questions) and appropriated text.

Here is an example by a student, Katie Servos. (USE THE FIREFOX BROWSER. Note that it does not work in the Safari browser.) It was done in a previous semester for a similar assignment (except without component of the fictional interview/dialog)

CONCEPT AND BACKGROUND

The artist DAVID ROKEBY describes interactive digital technology as "a medium through which we communicate with ourselves - a mirror" which both reflects and "refracts", that is, which transforms our reflection. The expressive power of the interface is partly based on the way it fractures and displaces the viewer's subjectivity in the viewer's act of "dialogue" with the machine feedback system. How much (or how little) interactivity does there need to be, for the viewer/interactor to be critically aware of a cultural or psychological transaction taking place - an interplay, on some level beyond functionality, of subjectivity and control?

The cultural theorist SHERRY TURKLE writes in her book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, that our cultural relationship to computers and computing has changed from "a modernist culture of calculation" to " a postmodernist culture of simulation". She continues:

"As human beings become increasingly intertwined with the technology and with each other via the technology, old distinctions between what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex. Are we living life ON the screen or life IN the screen? Our new technologically enmeshed relationships oblige us to ask to what extent we ourselves have become cyborgs, transgressive mixtures of biology, technolgy, and code. The traditional distance between people and machines has become harder to maintain." (p.21)

In this assignment, you are asked to expand on the ideas of life on and in the screen, and the issues of interactivity as an inter-play of subjectivity and control.