Interface Key Considerations
Does the design of the interface force the users attention to follow certain lines of focus as opposed to others?
- Yes
- Dependant on how you define your interface
- People who write in this media don’t make new media so they often write strange things
- People who write on new media are talking generalisations and write some crazy things
- Useful to think about the interface as muse-en-scene – a visual space – the visual weight – are all ways you indicate relation and hierarchy within your work.
- When you build an interface you’re building things that medium allows you to do
- The interface is not just a public face but looks inside to the database itself and its how you make visible what the database does
- Why doesn’t the interface let you see a list of keywords – it’s drawing interface from the viewer – a very deliberate decision
- It could show the lives, the number of videos, the length of time – but it doesn’t. these are decisions – what not to show – is just as important as what to show
- Don’t treat your audience as dumb – it’s not google, it’s not a library database – it’s a world you want to invite people to explore on your behalf
- Don’t tell them everything at the start – there would be nothing to explore
- The design is about seduction, reward, an invitation to explore
What are the key considerations when constructing a multilinear work?
- How do I want it to end
- What platform or software best suits the direction i want to go in in terms of expressing the voice
- Is it open or closed – can participants become involved
- What are the different layers and threads – linear, multi linear – how can i from connections
- Having an idea about what i want to create – how am i going to approach the work
- Sketch process doesn’t stop…working out how to produce work
- Think about the design of the screen in a spatial sense
- How you use previews and the design of the viewing window
- Relations between the parts – fundamental to Multi linear work
- What material is being filmed/worked with and why?
- The scale of the bits that go into the project – the smaller and more abstract the material – the easier it is to have more connections to other parts.
- The shape of the work arrives through the making – you don’t draw the relations until you start building – we don’t know which parts are going to be the more important parts.
- Architecture emerges through the making
- You have to learn how to listen to the material
- Risk – related to emergence – there is a moment of risk in making and the viewing because you don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen next – element of joy and danger that is exciting and interesting – work produces unexpected connection – not preset – realistic representation of the world – is about risk and non linear connections
Luers talks about databases in K-Films working on relational knowledge, and as such you can replicate narrative film techniques like flashback and montage. However is this disregarding the K-Film’s intention of exploring non-narrative?
- K-films are not only interested in non narrative structures
- It’s still possible to explore micro narratives in a simple SNU
- It’s important to be clear that montage is not necessarily a narrative technique – it’s more a technique of generating and implying meaning between two images
- Linear film it’s easy to do flashbacks because you have a timeline – Korsakow does not.
- Visual examples – you can embed one image beside another – visually without
- Korsakow – learn how to listen to the media that you’re using