As part of Gretchen Schiller’s Box of Practice activities, Blueberry teammate Katrina Schaag and I had a Google Hangout to share and discuss our Boxes. We each found that Schiller had asked us to do things we were already doing! As much as an activity, Schiller’s prompt was a sort of validation that our intuitions were on to something. Or at least that someone else had felt these artistic impulses and walked a related path.
In addition to Box of Practice, Love Letter to Practice, and Circle of Influence, we spoke of art, life, and many topics. One idea we touched on briefly was the idea of focus and how platforms like Theaters, Museums, Books, Churches, and others offer a high degree of focus, but the bounty of knowledge and ideas that is the Open Web seems almost antithetical to it. We wondered if this represented a loss of depth of experience? Or a loss of ego for the author?
Either or both, we each felt that focused presentation / focused experience is still something of value. I’ve started some very modest experiments in how presentation might offer a more focused experience for the interested viewer. Here are 2 full screen layouts that strive to do this, one for my own portfolio, and one a gallery of featured “single images” from WE, the authors of .Re/search.
• Practice Based.Re/sonate
• Portfolio.Vanessa Blaylock.com
And here’s 2 activities for YOU!
1. Send me a large image of your work to feature in our single-image gallery.
2. Leave a comment below and let us know how you think the Open Web can offer a focused experience. Or is that a conceit? Should we embrace the unbounded nature of the web and appreciate surfing the myriad waves?
