Project #5: Word Made Flesh

I am very happy with how this project turned out. :) Just in case anyone was wondering.

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For Project #5 I decided to elaborate on some of the materials and discoveries garnered during my previous project (Project #4: 12.04.2008). I collaborated with my boyfriend, Ryan Dunkerley, in creating a message board with a keyboard overlay that attached specific images from Project #4 alphabetically by order of chronology to the keystrokes used to post on the board. In doing so, an entire language composed entirely of imagery is thus invented. It is interesting to note the various combinations of the photographs, too, for both their aesthetic and implied meanings.

As previously mentioned, in finishing up Project #4 some interesting feedback was received. Many of my participants seemed to respond strongly to the image collage of my day -- some responded in kind by sending me response photos to some of my image posts -- and I had numerous calls for more work with this theme. I decided to heed those suggestions and abandon my previously planned project. I was interested in working more with the imagery of the day and continuing on the dialogue, but perhaps allowing others to have more participation in cutting up and arranging the photographs which represented the storyline in question. I invited the collaboration of Ryan at this point because I wanted to branch out beyond what I had previously been focusing in my other projects this semester and thought a fresh set of perceptions and ideas would do a world of good. (I also noted many students in our class were pairing up and collaborating as well, so I wanted to follow suit for once instead of continually striking out alone...additionally, I wanted to test our collaborative capabilities...I admit it...)

Ryan listened to my desires for the imagery and suggested doing a keyboard overlay paired with a message board structure utilizing 26 of my images from the previous project (paired chronologically with the alphabet), which I was unsure of until I saw his demo version. I wanted participants to be able to portray full English or other language sentences in photographs (using transliteration systems with the roman alphabet, if need be -- it's all kind of the same once it reduces to images). I also wanted participants to be able to portray non-languages and visual compositions based on this alphabet of images. Basically, I wanted the meanings to be multiple - something that could or could not be deciphered to another language but could stand regardless on their own as a new means of communication and inter-relation. I wanted to play with the idea of the image as the end of the communicative process. I've been working lately with the idea of translation and the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (although I am not Christian), and was intrigued by the idea of creating a universal means of communication that was not meaning or language specific, but rather resided in moments and concurrent imagery.

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A variety of applications and programming languages were used to create the keyboard overlay, including but not limited to:

-PHP
-Flash
-AJAX

...and, of course, HTML.

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I was pleasantly surprised as to the collaborative aspect of this project. Ryan is more of the visual and big-picture person between the two of us, whereas my interests have always more linguistic and detail-oriented, so this is kind of a blending of our outlooks in what I think is a very harmonious fashion. Before we've each just consulted or occasionally assisted the other in our own separate projects, but we have never worked like this together before. No creative fights occurred, either...except slight disagreements over Ryan's preference for drum-and-bass versus my preference for trip-hop while working...which is great news for our media production company. :)

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Now...without further ado...

Project #5: Word Made Flesh