100 screengrab exercise – just what we need to warm up after a stagnant spring break. The brief is aiming at getting us started without pondering over ‘meaning’ or ‘value’ for the entire Iterate & Position brief.
The decision anxiety was discussed at the F205 session – the fear and indecisiveness to set our first step towards a large, interconnecting project is well shared and empathised. So without further ado I went into the Google Drive where all materials of the Elaborate project was stored, and started with snippeting and iterating.
Every iteration is created by taking a screenshot of the previous screenshot, immediately presented by the computer, without any modification (no zoom-in). The image size quickly reduced over the first few iterations and then settled curiously, as if it reached some kind of critical mass, as evident in the following video:
Quickly the image displayed on screen is barely larger than a poststamp, every manual screenshot would crop over a little bit of edges. This resulted in the disappearance of motifs around the edges (the traffic light posts, the car’s headlight, etc,), stripping away the narrative, identity and sense of anchor carried by the image.
Elaborate was a project started from an extremely personal place under the influence of being stranded at a quiet, secluded environment which I saw as home; but developed into a web-design project with a strong public message: a cyber oasis is needed in the internet, for any user to shelter from the chaos every now and then. The Iterate & Position brief does not have a MEANING or VALUE yet, what kind of MEANING or VALUE it could lead to is curious.