Vector Journal is an electronic publication from the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. Auto defined as a Journal of culture and technology in a dynamic vernacular, the site launched in 2005 puts together projects from a wide array of themes at the intersection of technology, creativity and culture in an effort to discover how technology affects social relations
This commitment to technology and multimedia is not a mere intention, is the basis of the form in which the projects are presented in the journal, looking for more immersive and experiential narrations in the scholar projects that the site exhibits.
The exhibition analyzed for this review is called Objects of Media Studies, curated by Amelie Hastie and designed by Raegan Kelly. This exhibition could be interesting to our class because it is focused in the analysis of objects, also, as its name says, because is deeply connected to Media Studies, and last, and probably the most important reason, because is the result of a scholar research project turned into an online exhibition.
Objects of Media Studies analyzes a selection of media artifacts from different periods of time, not only from a materiality or physical dimension but exploring through each artifact biography the implications and paradigms of those objects in our culture. Even when it is an exhibition about things, is far from being an exercise of fetishization, here objects are analyzed in their context and relation with other objects, with their history, their environment and the people who use them, giving this objects social meaning and a cultural frame in which they exist. This aproach reminds Appadurai’s idea of things and the transactions in which they are involved are invested with the properties of social relations“Today gift is tomorrow’s commodity. Yesterday’s commodity is tomorrow’s found art object. Today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk. And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow heirloom.” (1)
As a scholar project, the collection of objects reviewed is the result of a twelve-week debate and conversation process by a group of eight scholars at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California. As the culmination of a group exercise in which each person brings an object and shared his particular story with it, the exhibition is presented to be read, not only as a single essay but also as multiple paths of a collective conversation. This is probably where the exhibition fails, in the effort of bring those stories together into a single woven narration that works as a whole.
From a design and usability perspective, the exhibition represents a challenge to viewers because it ignores or unconsidered some important principles of usability.
Each project has a great amount of information and data to explore, but the fact that they are presented together tends to confuse and distract the viewer.
The use of colored boxes for each project is not clear enough to separate one project from each other. I only realized this detail when I read a comment by a user in the feedback section:
“Although the navigation became complicated at times, color identification for each subject was incredibly useful.”
Sometimes the boxes seemed to be too small for the amount of text, making difficult to read and understand the ideas.
There is not a consistent and similar way to watch and browse the images through the exhibition. Also there is a big challenge for users in the use of unclear and awkward ways to navigate through the site, using the edges of the boxes as click areas to navigate. The use of randomness as a key of the narration, tend to confuse and overwhelm the viewer, making difficult to absorb and comprehend the exhibition as a whole or to get immersed in the details of each part of the project.
Although the content of the exhibition is relevant and attractive, the main problem of the exhibition is the absence of visual clarity, defined as the capacity to display information that can be read quickly and easily without causing confusion. (2)
In the other hand, as part of the same issue of Vector Journal, is another exhibition, called Digital Dynamics across cultures explores the characteristics and cultural legacy of diverse tribes of aborigines from Australia. This exhibition provides a much better visualization experience allowing users to understand and navigate in a mush more expedited way.
Finally to use a Bill Brown’s idea from last week reading, Thing Theory, I would say that Objects of media studies is more an exhibition about things and not about objects exclusively because the narrative technique does not allowed us to look through those objects in search of part of our history and culture, instead, the result is what Brown called “just a glimpse of things” (3)
1- Arjun Appadurai, The Thing Itself (2006) Duke University Press
2- Patrick Jordan, An introduction to usability (1988) CRC Press
3- Bill Brown, Critical Inquiry ( 2001) Th University of Chicago Press