October 26, 2012

Daniel and Ubiquitous Computing

Daniel's webtext, "Public Secrets", was done in a medium that I have not really seen before.  That is why when I was watching/listening to the webtext, I immediately thought of Bolter and Grusin's "Ubiquitous Computing."  I would consider the medium in which Daniel executes her text to be just as crucial as the text itself. The medium that Daniel uses brings her text to life and closes the gap between the text, the reader, and the real world.  While watching, I found the way the black and white colors shifted and reversed themselves to be interesting and to having a definite relation to the text.  Daniel's topic was about the barrier between a women's prison and the outside, seemingly oblivious world. 

She related this to "public secrets" which is "secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself" (Daniel).  She constantly referenced "inside" and "outside" and that contrast was clearly represented through the medium with the black and white shapes constantly changing and reversing, sort of blurring the lines of the barrier.  A quote that really stood out to me in Bolter and Grusin's text that I related back to Daniel's was about the line between the text, reader, and reality.  Bolter and Grusin claim "in laying icons, texts, and images over visible objects in the world, augmented reality frankly admits that it is a digital medium interposing itself between the viewer and an apparently simple and unitary physical world" (Bolter and Grusin 216).  Overall, I think the medium of Daniel's text is crucial to the point she is trying to make.

3 comments:

Huong Le said...

I really enjoyed the medium too. I thought it was interesting, and it reminded me a lot of the Pine Point case that we looked at. We are given both pieces and allowed to interact with them, to look at them in our way, at our own pace. The difference is Pine Point had images and had faces that you could connect to the text. Public Secrets doesn't have faces and it kind of seems like it is just meant to be an collection of stories that could be from anyone. McCloud said it was easier to imagine ourselves as other people when they are depicted more abstractly, but I'm not sure that is true here. I found it much harder to relate to the women in Public Secrets than I did to the videos from Pine Point. Maybe the images aren't the only thing that induces memory.

I felt a really stark contrast between the intro of Public Secrets and the interviews of the prisoners. With the color scheme and the difference between the narrator's voice and the prisoner's voices, there's a sense that they are two completely different worlds, and I felt like that was an effective way of bringing the audience into the situation for a while.

Huong Le said...

By induces memory I totally mean induces empathy. Oops!

John Smith said...

I ask, can augmented reality be assocaited with the internet? The quote that you used actually refers to real objects in the world. The only thing real or tangible about the internet, and by extension this project we viewed, was the computer by which we acted. Unless, you would like to conceive of the internet "as" the augmented reality that lays over the screen of our computer. However, the website does give the illusion of going "inside" of a text, and this misconception, as you pointed out, is crucial to her concept.

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