Overview
This is the final written component before the midpoint assessment, marking the end of the first half of Unit 2. I would like to take a summarising approach and reflect on the evolution of my position. This text will talk about the latest iterative studio practice progress, bridging the studio process towards the midpoint assessment followed by a brief discussion on the planning and making of the visual essay. Then from a retrospective point of view, I will observe the holes and gaps exposed through the studio progress, in order to pan out action plans for further practice of MAGCD Unit 2.
Latest Studio Progress
After the iterative exploration over digital publishing decisions and content, I decided to combine these newly acquired knowledge and create this experimental site. It is a barrage of found contents across the cyberworld––comments threads, trending hashtags, lines from news stories, tweets and Instagram stories––all these detritus stacked upon one another, mimicking a brick wall.
Upon a quick impression, the user is granted the control of the page’s content. By hovering over the page to reveal or conceal contents to their liking, yet due to this digital publishing’s nature, undesired contents are in fact unavoidable if the user wishes to reveal certain content. The liberty thus turns out to be an illusion, amongst this landscape of informational detritus, with purposefully obstructed and frustrated UX and legibility.
Colleagues’ feedback helpfully pointed out the lack of focus on the position as communicated through the GCD lingo. To move forward, I focused on the prompting theme of the good life, and gathered contents ranging from Instagram influencers’ posts with impressive stats to timeless interpretation of eudaimonia from classical literatures––all put in the same space, as a query for the validity of their original architectures. To bring out the interrogation, I optimised the hover-to-reveal experience, toning down the frustrative UX to make it less stark and distractive, while pairing them with images and footage for users to discover, interact and contemplate. I am hoping to sketch out a candid cyberscape––littered with detritus and basked in the scorching sun outside the allegorical cave––the rays of an unalienated reality of this world inhabited by us.
Visual Essay/Prose
Compared to a presentation style animated carousel, I would take the visual essay as an opportunity to add a rhetoric layer to my iterative studio practice. Edited to the choral arrangement of Ticheli’s Earth Song, the narrative started mimicking general browsing activities, rushed with fragmented information. The narrative gains focus to bring out the position as the music proceeds, before showcasing the studio iteration at the climax. I emphasised on communicating my deepened position in the visual essay, with more effort invested in the videography than rigorous verbal communication. With such a universally relevant position, the tone and rhetoric are as crucial as execution and the rationalisation of which in the GCD process. This visual essay––or more accurately, visual prose––was therefore taken as an early exercise.
Past and Future of Unit 2
Throughout the entire term of iterative studio practice, the original position evolved from a general stance to a more specific ethic in a particular field of practice within the GCD discipline. The looming spectacle in a macro sense can therefore be observed, thought about, dismantled, iterated and presented with nuanced micro aspects.
During practice, there have been a handful of iterations I would like to try out but did not have the technical skills for their executions. As a constraint posed by the platform I work with, the digital publication cannot go public for real user interaction. Sole reliance on stimulated user interaction stunts the progress towards the universally relevant architecture I am hoping to build. I therefore plan to explore some backend techniques and hosting options, such as running live HTML on Github, to make the design accessible for a substantial audience, and have their responses as a crucial part for further iterations.
Relying on the laymen’s web-building tool (ReadyMag) presented another constraint––iterative explorations could only be based on a handful of features from a finite list. Moreover, I want to acquire necessary skills to interrogate the nature of digital content in terms of their ecology––their incubation, distribution and consumption––by engineering only the frameworks for the users’ organic contents to fill in, instead of me orchestrating these contents manually up to this point. I believe the users’ personalised contents will make the UX more impactful, because our algorithmically stacked feeds are an extension of our experience, lives and reality. I hope acquiring relevant skills over summer break could expand my deployable assets, enabling me to deepen my position without being held back by technical difficulties.