Friday, June 8, 2007

On Take One / Leave One

I really enjoyed YiRan Liu's penny-tray inspired Take One / Leave One - It’s kind of a more tasteful, less gratuitous PostSecret, tapping into a more humanistic interest and general concern for others than the kind of rubber-necking that so many communal-narrative-contribution sites rely on to hold a visitor’s attention. Though there are a range of ways to interact with the site, but by far the most effective are the postcards – the aesthetics of the handwriting really works, and it’s also worth considering that unlike all of the usual typed-text on the internet, the handwritten postcard responses are invisible to Google’s perpetual web-indexing circus, which gives them another level of intimacy and dignity. The fact that the responses are “blind” in this regard reminded me of some of the conversation we had in class about the significant of creating and moving between networks. How does the “invisibile” nature of these responses on the web shift their content? Was this aspect of the project a conscious decision – or did it just kind of happen that way? In some ways, Take One / Leave One takes the web offline without destroying it in the process: Each postcard has a short story from a previous contributor on the front, to prompt the handwritten response on the other side. In that sense, a network of response and interaction continues to exist – though it is displaced from the immediacy and universal access we take for granted online.

No comments: