A Certain Vision, But with Creative Possibiities

While traditional media sharply distiguishes the author/performer from the reader/audience, new media encourages a mingling of these roles.

In this project, you will invent a concept that enables others to contribute to your site creatively and expressively, but within a certain focus, tone, and vision that is yours.

Your project is similar to a "theme and variations" work in music: you provide the theme, your contributors provide the variations.

The point is to provide a concept that is

1. specific and purposeful enough to give your project a consistency of statement and tone--as if you had created all the entries yourself--but
   
   
2. suggestive and open enough to enable your contributors the opportunity to create something new and individuaizingl--within the parameters you've established.
   
   

Examples

Here are some examples, which use (or could use) this social-creativity technique for various political, artistic, confessional, satirical purposes.

• Fleeting Stories
• Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form
• Departures and Arrivals
• Lee Friedlander's Chain-Link Fences
• Make Your Franklin
• In Search of Oldton
• Limerick Dictionary
• Noon Quilt
• Sorry Everybody (2004, after George W. Bush's re-election in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. See also the rationale)
• 50 Sad Chairs (not socially participatory, but could be)
• "Implementation" by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg (notice the rationale page)
• PostSecret (blog)
• People of Walmart
• Black People Love Us (see especially the Your Testimonials! Page) (see also more about site creator Jonah Peretti)
• Uncyclopedia (Wikipedia's entry--you can't trust Uncyclopedia's own "About" page)

Note how each of these examples enable contributors to participate creatively in producing the project, but each contribution is a variation or elaboration on the same idea, effect, or joke.

Criteria

1. that the project consists of a Home Page, Rationale Page, two sample "lexia" (that is, two pages, two blocks of text[s], two units of meaning, which serve as examples for more by you or others)
   
2. how fully the conception and execution of the project recognizes the properties of New Media--while not necessarily obeying them
   
   
3. the extent to which the project attempts to inspire and enable contributors to produce a text that achieves meaning and effects creatively and to share that creativity socially
   
   
4. how strongly the requested contributions are defined and unified by a common purpose, vision, tone, and/or attitude, as expressed in the "concept"
   
   
5. that the project specifically defines guidelines for the contributions: a form or genre that gives shape to a participant's creative impulses.
   
   
6. the degree to which the project demonstrates the author's technical grasp of the software, techniques, and work flows learned in class so far
   
   
7. how usably and aesthetically the project is visually designed and presented, including how the pages are linked together
   
   

Resources

• Form as World View (Mikhail Bahktin)
• How to insert fake form fields (including Insert > Form > File Field).
  [Note: you are not expected to create working forms for this assignment. If you're interested, however, you can find steps for a working file field here.]