It has arrived much quicker than feels appropriate. The end of the semester is upon the Public Interactives Independent Study group. Our time together felt really short, but potent. As a group we familiarized ourselves with this emergent communications form and field, and even managed to prototype, test, and evaluate our own Public Interactives project using QR codes.
Our last class meeting has passed, but I feel it necessary to write and reflect a little bit on the conversations that we had, particularly one aspect that relates very closely to the notion of understanding, designing for, and perhaps INVERTING the relationship between virtual and physical spaces. Our group took time last night to discuss this relationship in the context of their final QR code, location based narrative.
It feels like only half the conversation to describe the relationship between virtual and real as simply a matter of perception. As augmented, annotative, virtual, and sensorial technologies continue to proliferate it appears as if the barriers separating these experiences will continue to lower, or disappear all together. One only needs to check in with the ambitious (and extremely well funded) MAGIC LEAP project for proof of these vanishing boundaries, or rather, for proof that these perceptive or phenomenological witnessing experiences are on the verge of revolution.
Our class read and discussed Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation this semester in an attempt to develop some type of framework towards understanding a differentiation between the real and the virtual. Baudrillard concerned his observations surrounding the nature of witnessing the simulation and accepting it as the real. We made fun of, and alluded to, pumpkin spice ALOT. But there is something profound about the cultural acceptance of pumpkin spice as THE REAL. We can point to this phenomenon as an example of where a certain sect of popular culture incorporated pumpkin spice into its ritualistic and seasonal narrative celebrations of winter and fall.
Using pumpkin spice as a type of bridge, our class observations with respect to the virtual and the real veered more towards understanding and contemplating whether there would be clear differentiations between virtual and physical in the future as enabled by technology, and what implications does this have with respect to Public Interactives proliferation, where many of these communications devices rely on suspending or manipulating aspects of sensorial perception in order to create their experiences.
Many Public Interactives rely on scale.
Our class experimented with scale by situating QR codes near Federal Hall on Wall Street, within a relatively large geographic space of a city block, allowing our user, Murilo, to traverse between the codes while witnessing, perceiving, and engaging with a chapter of Bartleby, the Scrivener. Murilo used his mobile phone to interface with the QR codes, which linked to small sections of a chapter presented in an audio book format.
The group was definitely riffing on Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” assertion when we asked Murilo to describe his experience in interfacing with the narrative, and also while asking Merrilee to describe her design process. Murilo explained that his experience felt, somehow, small because he was so focused on his mobile device while listening to and reading the text. This touched off a very long discussion on the perceived size of narratives, and led to some interesting questions that I would like to test with future Public Interactives classes:
- Is there a perceptive, cognitive, and/or correlated relationship between the size of a narrative and the size of a geographic space that it is situated? For example, what would happen if you were to geo-locate a narrative that took place in Central Park but required the viewer, listener, or user to witness the narrative in a small space, such as a small room or closet. Can you effectively tell a story about parts or areas of a closet while having the user, viewer, or listener witness the content while traversing from place to place in a park? Are there perceptive differences in geolocated or geo-based narrative? Will an audience perceive location based audio, video, or graphics projects differently in the context of these questions?
- Does distance traversed in the context of witnessing a geolocated narrative effect or affect depth of experience? For example, in experimenting with depth of experience, how would a user perceive a haiku (or any short form narrative) that was geolocated over a great distance which required considerable travel in order to interface with each piece of the narrative. Or, what about a novel that is geolocated over a great distance. In considering the scale of each narrative, which has a deeper experience?
- What IS a big story? Is it amount, or time? A story that takes place over centuries, or one that covers a great distance?
- Is there a relationship between scale of narrative presentation and experience, or, the smaller the scale of presentation the more introspective, enclosed, or “small” the narrative feels?
- In terms of design, with respect to “small” experiences, does priming or prompting the user to behave specifically affect the perceived scale of the experience?
The group settled on, and felt that, the manner in which content is presented, and at what scale, definitely matters in terms of depth of perception.
We had a great time this semester exploring many aspects of the emergent communications form that is Public Interactives.
