MEDI 116 (Website Initial Ideas)

In our group we came up with a lot of ideas for spaces we could represent on the web. They ranged from very obscure things such as the back of a sofa to more ordinary things like towns and places.

After doing a mind map:

 
We narrowed it down to three ideas we liked most:

Dartmoor:  

• Journey through Dartmoor 
• Places
• Poems
  
• Ghost stories
• Painting
• GPS
• Google Maps
• Audio and visual story telling
  

Sofa:  

• Whats in the back of it?
• Real and imagined objects; keys, change, remote, little men, fluff, cats, Jesus etc.  
  
• Dark material and textures
• Flash based animations
  
• Sounds
• Writing
• Audio and visual story telling

Clock:  

• Moving clock
• Inner mechanisums
  
• Revolutions of gogs bring up text
• Animated menu
• Artistic
• Original poetry
• How government manipulates peoples thought (propaganda)
• Actual space is time - paradox
• Steampunk in feel.
  

In the end we went with Dartmoor!

• Choose river or forest area & take pictures.
• Possibly do a lot of different areas or focus on smaller areas.
• Dartmoor as whole?
• Google maps
• GPS
  
• Photographs
• Video footage.
  
• Sound recording; rivers, wind, crunching leaves, nature sounds etc all on location.
  
• Animation - Still in keeping with the site so maybe photo based.
  

We have chosen to take an arty stance on it, maybe including poetry and image or narrative of some sort. Our main idea is to gather as much raw data of the place as we can and then see what bits we think are worth compiling into the experiance. 

I have a friend that is in love with the place and I know he has written some good poetry about it that could be good to include. I also personally am very taken with the notion of emulating something a little like Lev Manovich's data base cinema as that is something that I find interesting.  I also in terms of sound like the idea of The Tonematrix from 'aM laboratoy' and think that maybe we could do something similar with a map being the grid or possibly pictures of Dartmoor. It is a really cool toy but may be a bit complex. 

I would like the website to be interactive and have a wide range of media types including sounds, image (still and/or moving) and text. To fully capture the essence of a place and display it in a 2D setting I personally feel there has to be a wide range of information.