Link: https://s3718638.wixsite.com/entangledmedia

Reflection:

My group, consisting of Jeevan Sidhu, Leah Hawkins and I, discussed our previous assignments and what they each had in common. Leah had a passion for poetry and creating a deeper meaning in otherwise overlooked mundanities, Jeevan had a pragmatic approach to his work, his ideas were communicated clearly and his work strictly articulated. My previous works often seem to delve into a sprawl of multiple ideas and come out quite abstract and unusual. We decided that a common theme of our previous works, and something that we wanted to explore further was interactivity, and Jeevan and Leah’s previous work had also directly related to nature.

We decided to make an interactive website narrative that depicted the life and thoughts of a common household herb used for cooking. We took a lot of inspiration from the website associated with Florence and the Machine (Link: florenceandthemachine.net), and we partially developed the idea of personifying a plant based on the infamous introductory Pixar animation of the lamp stopping on the letter I. The combination of our working techniques seemed to mesh quite well, I wanted to focus on ways to make the website visually appealing, using music, colour, contrast and animation. Leah focused on creating the story, the drawings and making the piece emotionally engaging, and Jeevan focused on the design, soundscapes, and structure of the collaborative work. I found that it worked very effectively to delegate tasks surrounding both our strengths and what we were each passionate about, incorporating that into the assignment.

By creating the interactive media with Wix, I inadvertently learnt basic techniques in Website design. I’m glad that we decided to do our assignment on an unfamiliar platform, because it challenged our knowledge and forced us to learn new ways to express our ideas. I also found while working on the website, that the concept of entanglement ties in with the concept of immersion. Immersion is when you’re fully enveloped in the situation or moment, and I believe that true demonstrations of entanglement can and should evoke feelings of immersion. Katja Kwastek talks about interactive media in regards to artistic concepts and the way that it contributes to experiences of immersion:

“The embodied action of the participant is indispensable for the fulfillment of the artistic concept, which is intended to be experienced and reflected upon while being unfolded.” ₍₁₎

We expressed our understanding of entanglement in this assignment by using multiple media modalities simultaneously with techniques of storytelling. This is where we came up with the idea to have 3 different sound files,

one with music,

one with an ambient soundscape,

and one with narration.

We wanted to tell a story in multiple ways to evoke different feelings and trigger different memories and thoughts. I personally favourited the narration, because it meant I could focus on the other aspects of the page while still paying attention to the story. I felt it made it easier to appreciate the drawings and empathise more with our personified basil. The violin and piano was my second favourite, and in a way actually made me more immersed in the experience, because I was focusing on the entanglement of different mediums: I was actively reading the poem, listening to the narration, the strings behind the narration, and paying attention to both the images that were there, and the images that appeared shortly after scrolling. Kwastek discussed the concept of flow to be vital to an immersive piece.

“I consider the concept of flow as key to an analysis of the aesthetic experience of interactive art, as it relates experiences based on intrinsic motivation – a central characteristic of any kind of reception of art in general – to action-based experiences, which have been identified as distinctive of the reception of interactive art.”  – Kwastek 2015

I took note of this, because I figured when making a piece with multiple focal points, the piece can easily become messy and hard to follow. I think we effectively displayed flow in our page by holding it together with an understandable narrative. I would be interested in exploring the idea of flow amongst chaos in Assignment 3.

Overall, this assignment has taught me a lot about the concept of entanglement, particularly in relation to immersion and interactivity, which I have been passionate about for quite some time. I would like to further practice ideas capitalising on the use of multiple modalities in Assignment 3. I would like to target more senses by taking advantage of surround sound, vision, touch and particularly interactivity and flow. I enjoyed the way in which our webpage provided different effects both in sound and vision that could be presented at different times, depending on the audio you chose, and the rate you decided to scroll. With Assignment 3 not being limited to one page, I’d like to explore the ideas of using an entire room to convey the concept of entanglement and immersion, creating a meshwork of different medias to be interacted with individually or simultaneously to create a range of different effects and thought-provoking ideas.

References: 

1. Liptay, F, Burcu, D, Kwastek, K, 2015, Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media, Immersed in Reflection?  The Aesthetic Experience of Interactive Media Art, BRILL, Sponsored by the Leiden, Federal Ministry of Education and Research pp 69 – 71

2. Omigie, D 2015, ‘Music and Literature: Are there shared empathy and predictive mechanisms underlying their affective impact?’, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 1250.

3. Walling, J 2005, ‘The Imagination of Plants: Botany in Rousseau and Goethe’, Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 2(2), pp. 211-225