JOHN BUSSIERE - COMMUNICATION DESIGN

QUESTION

How does new media encode our memory, our senseof temporality and our experiences?

SCANIMATION

1. ART BOOK WITH CODE

2. DECODER 3. ANIMATEDOBJECT

PROCESS

Style Guide User Testing

Scanimation Testing Logo Testing

ARTIST STATEMENT

Throughout this project I have been grappling with how individuals relate to interactive media and how past media informs and recontextualizes what we see. My interest in technology and the archeology of technology is what inspired me to create this book. I wanted a record, a point of contact and new perspective on a topic whose very exponential nature hinders retrospective analysis. The book not only functions as a physical database of new media interactions but an access point to deconstruct and analyze how these interactions alter our own ways of seeing.

PROTOTYPE

Example Spread

Numbers CycleAnimated Page

Television GlitchAnimated Page

Rotating PolygonsAnimated Page

Our world is becoming increasingly more interactive, with many of our everyday objects becoming digital. .EXE is an animated book which simulates and explores these new media interactions. It functions as an archive of interactive media and technology; an analog embodiment of digital ghosts. The book utilizes tactile and physical interactions (via scanimation) to simulate these new media experiences. By revealing the code underneath the animation, the book functions to deconstruct the semiotics of new media. The code, which is the dissected frames of animation spliced together, not only obscures the content within but the aesthetics of the code itself visually mirror digital interpolations of images. The artifice of content and code becomes literalized via this physical interaction. This book also functions as an archive of new media and technology, a medium whose transient nature resists archival documentation. Through this physical form of animation the experience is crystalized and documented rather than an index of that experience. This book functions as a new kind of record keeping of interactions outside of the media they exist in. The temporal stability that books provide allow this type of archive to survive, a kind of ubiquitous time capsule. .EXE is an attempt to look at the recent past in order to understand the now and to critically engage with the familiar and the nostalgic in order to follow the lines of trajectory which lead to our current understanding of interactivity and the digital age.

PERSUASIVE TEXT

SCIENCE FAIR SUMMARY

The feedback I received from the Science Fair helped to concretize what I wanted the physical object to be. I had a few suggestions of scaling up some of the images to poster-size which I’m still considering as a complementary piece but the physical construction of the book itself also came up and it helped me decide how I want the “decoder” to function, either along tracks to guide the user or just open and I’ve decided to use the sides of the book to guide the “decoder” for the user, and having the first animation begin as the user removes the “decoder”.