Workshop 1
On Collage The web enriches and complicates our notions of collage, because it employs a wide range of media -- words, images, sound, and movies, just to name the most common. In addition, a web-based collage often offers a different presentation to different people. If, for instance, you and another student were asked to "explore" the web site for the Museum of Modern Art, you would probably see a lot of the same web pages; but it would be very unlikely that you saw all of the same web pages. The way each of you experienced the web site, therefore, would be very different. Likewise, if you both wrote a summary of the plot in Noah Wardrip-Fruin's hypertext novel The Book of Endings, your summaries would look very different. Not only do each of you have a choice about which pages to visit within a site, but the pages within a site are subject to change at any given moment. The Web therefore gives fluidity to our conception of collage. Below are some links to web sites that share some characteristics with a traditional collage. We'd like for you to visit these sites. If you have time, use a search engine to find other sites with aspects of collage in them. While you are browsing through a web site, consider whether there are any aspects of fluidity in the page. Pause whenever you encounter anything that makes you think of a collage, switch over to a word processing window, and describe the effect of this web-based collage. Try to use as many specific details about the visual, aural and textual presentation as possible. Double space between each of your written descriptions, so that they remain separate from one another. The goal is to create a collage of your reactions to the web. When you have written at least five different descriptions in your word processing window, read through your descriptions and arrange them into an interesting order. The easiest way to rearrange them is by using cut and paste from the "Edit" menu option of your word processor. |
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