Breaking Apart: Technique to Metaphor

Breaking Apart: Technique and Metaphor

A consideration of the Web composer's tools is not a mere technical exercise. While we don't have access to every Web composer's design process (e.g., what software s/he used, which functions, etc.), in the case of Web design we may have access to code or other information about design technique. HTML code, for example, may contain not only information about how a site was made, but writing itself, remarked out of the surface text, but left for us to see. Metatags, where Web composers can list site descriptors or other information, may also be a source of information available within the code, as we have already seen in the eneriwomaninterface. Flash, the multimedia authoring program used by Chan to create it, effaces many such marks of authorship, following the drive toward "transparent immediacy" characteristic of new media (Bolter and Grusin 30). However, the software interface itself is still available to us if we choose to look and at least one of its design metaphors both suggests and underwrites the thematic as well as formal possibilities of Chan's site.

In her New Masters of Flash tutorial, Chan describes how she uses Flash's "Break Apart" function in order to create what she calls a "rainfall effect." (NMF 278). "Break Apart" allows a designer to take apart vector graphics, and reconfigure them as separate symbolic units that can then be manipulated over time and space in a Flash movie. Chan demonstrates how she creates the effect of type cascading down the screen and fading away, much the way that raindrops travel at uneven speeds down a window. In the Rainfall example, dates (such as "1.18.99" or"6.01.99") are separated into symbolic units, placed into separate layers and manipulated on the movie timeline." The Rainfall Effect

Although Chan never specifically tells us what the dates reference, it seems likely that they encompass the time she spent creating the site when she began it as a "New Year resolution" in 1999 (NMF 261). She describes this production process in her EWI artist's statement: "It is a series of redos and undos, construction and deconstruction. It is a hobby. It is seven months of social isolation." Chan's foregrounding of the site's production, along with its content, underscores the role of production as part of the performative work of the autobiographical subject. Moreover, her use of this technique represents not only a commentary on time, but, in the context of the eneriwomaninterface, on the production of identity as well. >>>



Breaking Apart: Technique and Metaphor A consideration of the Web composer's tools is not a mere technical exercise. While we don't have access to every Web composer's design process (e.g., what software s/he used, which functions, etc.), in the case of Web design we may have access to code or other information about design technique. HTML code, for example, may contain not only information about how a site was made, but writing itself, remarked out of the surface text, but left for us to see. Metatags, where Web composers can list site descriptors or other information, may also be a source of information available within the code, as we have already seen in the eneriwomaninterface. Flash, the multimedia authoring program used by Chan to create it, effaces many such marks of authorship, following the drive toward "transparent immediacy" characteristic of new media (Bolter and Grusin 30). However, the software interface itself is still available to us if we choose to look and at least one of its design metaphors both suggests and underwrites the thematic as well as formal possibilities of Chan's site. In her New Masters of Flash tutorial, Chan describes how she uses Flash's "Break Apart" function in order to create what she calls a "rainfall effect." (NMF 278). "Break Apart" allows a designer to take apart vector graphics, and reconfigure them as separate symbolic units that can then be manipulated over time and space in a Flash movie. Chan demonstrates how she creates the effect of type cascading down the screen and fading away, much the way that raindrops travel at uneven speeds down a window. In the Rainfall example, dates (such as "1.18.99" or"6.01.99") are separated into symbolic units, placed into separate layers and manipulated on the movie timeline." Although Chan never specifically tells us what the dates reference, it seems likely that they encompass the time she spent creating the site when she began it as a "New Year resolution" in 1999 (NMF 261). She describes this production process in her EWI artist's statement: "It is a series of redos and undos, construction and deconstruction. It is a hobby. It is seven months of social isolation." Chan's foregrounding of the site's production, along with its content, underscores the role of production as part of the performative work of the autobiographical subject. Moreover, her use of this technique represents not only a commentary on time, but, in the context of the eneriwomaninterface, on the production of identity as well. >>>
erin smith \|\| esmith@wmdc.edu