Jeu de mots
- Installation + CD-Rom: Jeu de mots (Wordplay)
- Concept: Claude Faure
- Design: Claude & Vincent Faure
- Interactivity Design + Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
- Producer: Béatrice Selleron & Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie
- Video: Wordplay Interface
Claude Faure is a conceptual artist who often works with puns, or “wordplay”. For Claude’s CD-Rom, produced for the City of Science and Industry in Paris, I was given free reign to design the interface as well as the interactivity, and to program the installation. The animations were designed by Claude and Vincent Faure.
Very quickly into the project, I developed an index based on the tautological nature of the dictionary: amlost all dictionaries contain the 26 letters of the alphabet themselves, along with the words used to describe the various terms. A dictionary defines itself with itself. Here, the design goal was to create, as always in my work, an adequation between the so-called “interface”, its expression, its design, and its function. There is no index “separate” from the contents, they both form a single experience of wordplay.
The interactive figures were voluntarily simple, and were culled from the various research projects I had developed at the Laboratory for Interactive Aesthetics.
[...] It’s also interesting, after sitting through the (eye-opening) iphone sdk video, and now playing around with the DS touch interface, to see how far we have all come on physical gesturing, no matter what the input format. I’ve found myself adding a lot of iPhone-style touch gestures using the very limited input of the DS, which is very eerie for me, because a lot of these gestures hark back to efforts I made back in the 1990’s (remember when CD-Roms were all the rage?). These gestures take on new meaning for me, now that they’ve been placed into this new historical context offered by the Wiimote and the iPhone. For example, a lot of the work I did with Claude Faure (see video) was already playing with the physicality of the interface. This was quite clear to us, even then. But that said, this work takes on new meaning now that all these gestures have come of age — or are simply breaking out in all their pimply pubescent enthusiam (it all depends on how much you like or dislike these new semiotics). [...]
Pingback by abstractmachine — 13 March, 2008 @ 23:12 pm