Questions, Reflections

What is my research question for Labyrinth?

What would a labyrinth website look like? Can we create a web experience in which the user becomes disorientated going from webpage to webpage?

Generally a webpage has many anchors to the rest of the internet in the form of links. What if we give the user no access to links? What if we can only progress through the labyrinth step by step, and any attempts to access later pages early on are denied? Can we get the user to backtrack, revisit patterns and motifs?

Labyrinth (Green Park) by Mark Wallinger

“I guess the labyrinth returns one to one’s self”

Mark Wallinger, About Labyrinth

The theme for the labyrinth is duality.

What is the focus of this website? I’ll have to write 500 words about it. Let’s say a blog post every week / if not more. What about reading and analogous inspiration? Let’s say two hours reading another piece of work outside the must read pieces related to what I’m interested in. It would be really nice to block out a routine so I have a pattern that can balance all these things. I’d like to use line drawing effects to indicate that there is something at the bottom of the screen for the segment that requires users to scroll down.

I’ve been writing an a4 page in the morning regarding this project, here are some questions that came up; should there be a seperate exit? No. A labyrinth has one entrance and exit, I can do something more complicated if I have the time. Keep it simple for now. Discussion around the felt sense of the heart, using intuitive sense to navigate UI, playing with noise functions to create a sense of being lost.

Tutorial Session with Alex May

I got Alex May to test out the initial draft of the website. He brought my attention back to the focus of the unit, the design of an interactive piece is heavily based on what you want your user to experience. He also recommended asking the following questions – why do you like that? what got you into doing it this way? why? why? why? These are good questions, I will continue to ask them throughout my project.

Initially my project is not very useable. There is no indication on starting that you should click on the screen other than the pointer icon, which is difficult to read (an only shows if your mouse is on the screen). The second experiment for webpage scrolling relied on the half scrolled scrollbar to signpost what to do next – on a mac device with firefox, this scrollbar doesn’t show up until you start scrolling. Alex asked me to consider the learning curve of interacting with the website – did I want it to be a series of puzzles? Could the user learn the mechanics of interation through a series of tutorials, embedded in the experience design as in modern video games?

We both liked the idea of not using words, so that made me think of other solutions… two cursors? a simulated cursor hinting at what to do. This made me think of the singularity of online presence and interaction, oftentimes there is only one cursor on the screen interacting with elements (notable exceptions google docs and microsoft office online). Making the cursor slightly transparent and ghostly would reduce the idea that there is another presence with you in the labyrinth, just a helpful guide.

I might return to that idea but I don’t want to get too caught up in it. Online presence, simple interactions, frustrated interactions, learning curves, mindful use of elements, consumption, contemplation, distraction. These are the things that are important.

A Philosophy of the Labyrinth

Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The same goes for content viewed online; not singularly, but in both ways. We have the choice as to whether or not we arrest our content and commence contemplation. To pause. To stop scrolling. To right click, then click ‘View image’, to see the image without external distraction. How much of the labyrinth will be offered up to the viewer’s contemplation? How much will their interactive journey reside in their control, or outside of it?

The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The online space requires basic interaction – the mouse and keyboard. This is often interaction without contemplation, especially on social media sites. Novelty and distraction are rife; the point of the website is often to grab and maintain attention. Repetition dampens novelty. Contemplation isn’t encouraged if the repetitions are performed habitually. Can the labyrinth find a balance between repetition, novelty and nuance to take attention and also provide space for contemplation? Or is it the nature of the labyrinth to wander without contemplation, allowing subconscious thought processes to complete their journey?

Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it… In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

This is the nature of online engagement. The distracted mass, described in the context of people milling around architecture, now mills around the architecture of the internet – social networking sites. Like ants in a colony, engaged consumers witness the flow of information, being rewarded with spectacle and distraction, occasionally redirecting, morphing or adding fresh input towards the collective vision of the internet. This becomes the collective vision of a subset of humanity (when considered through the lens of Reddit’s r/all feed) or a subset of a collective vision (when considered through the filters and priorities of Twitter, Facebook and TikTok’s personalised algorithms). We speak the same language; our context of speaking references the weight of what we all have seen, what we have reacted to, what the whimsy of the crowd has carried forward into the minds of millions. Some users are closer to the online connection. They check feeds daily. They follow popular sources of content creation, surfing major trends and regularly investigating new rabbit holes of enterntainment. New context; new references.

But every other beat is missing, bababooey, the “mario kart” lick – some of the multi-million view videos on my YouTube homepage. How many million views before it’s more likely than not that the average daily internet user has seen the video? Perhaps it’s time we collated a list of the most popular 10 million plus views videos on YouTube and had users scroll through them, clicking whether they recognise the video or not. Before, books, magazines and newspapers defined collective understandings, now, the algorithms of the internet determine more and more the nuance of how we percieve the world and connect with each other.

Entering the labyrinth, we go on a journey of transformation. In losing ourselves, we have the opportunity to rediscover ourself anew. We can die before we die, leaving behind all our history for total acceptance of present existence as it is. This follows the same lines as the great reduction in Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square; to create the new and transformative, the old must be destroyed. To make a conscious effort to destory the old, to reduce all that was systematically, requires one foot in the one context, one foot in the new. However, in the labyrinth, every turn takes us away from the old context, until we have no context left; it is then we have the openness required to transcend old conflicts.

Quality content is content that you can enjoy watching a second time.

Whilst meditating, open up towards the spaciousness. Holding on too closely, conflict deepens. Letting go, our subconscious finds a resolution.

It’s best to take a break after consuming highly varied and disparate content like this.