Final Project Assignment:

Telematic Identities

Everyone who uses the Net has as a result formed new ideas about who we are, and how we relate to others. It is inescapable. The Net is changing everything around us: our sense of self, the way we communicate, the way we conduct business, and the way we make art.

For our final project, I want you to analyze or possibly even fabricate your telematic identity. How do you think of yourself in relation to the medium? Are you Utopian, with grand aspirations for the future of the medium? Are you a Luddite, with great skepticism about where the Internet is leading us? Are you a Lurker, who likes to roam anonymously about the Net? Are you an Anarchist, who wishes to undermine established hierarchies from politics to aesthetics? Are you a Hacker, with a desire to write subversive code that can bring monolithic Websites such as Amazon.com and Yahoo to its knees?

Whatever your telematic identity might be, I want you to create a final project that explores this brave new world. We have already looked at many sites and will continue to look at more that demonstrate these ideas. Depending upon the nature of your identity, you will want to reveal to the viewer the implications of the Net and its impact on our sense of who we are. This can of course take many forms, and that is for you to determine.

The first step will be to define your telematic identity. For next week I want everyone to establish an identity (real or fabricated), and write a short summary explaining how it has evolved and what it implies. Include in this description in what form you will present your telematic identity as a project: perhaps in narrative form in which you take the viewer through a specific situation that reveals your character; you could construct the environment that your telematic identity inhabits; you could create an interactive dialogue with the viewer that enables them to interact with your identity; or perhaps you might construct a fictional scenario in which the world is transformed into a cyber-dysfunctional society of telematic Anarchists, or starry-eyed Utopians, for example. This project summary needs to be posted as part of your Web notebook. This is due next Wednesday, April 11th. We will go over them class.

One you have written your description, you will have three weeks to do your project. They are due for final critique on Wednesday, May 2. Since we are spending the last part of the semester on Flash, I want everyone to incorporate Flash in some manner. You can build the entire site in Flash or use it for specific elements such as animation, sound, interactivity, etc. Andy and Chris will be covering the Flash technique for the remainder of the semester.

I want to give everyone maximum freedom in this project, but there are a few criteria that I want to emphasize. Your project needs to be constructed as a hypermediated environment. That is, using links and multi-threaded construction to lead the viewer in a non-linear sequence through the site. Those projects which best exploit this idea will be more highly rewarded in terms of grading. Another criteria is the strength of the original concept (as demonstrated in your paper) and your ability to use the medium's specific capabilities (as we have discussed in class) to articulate your ideas. I am not going to favor projects that are sophisticated from a technical standpoint, but rather from the conceptual and your ability to use what is unique about the Web, including many of the design concepts we have discussed, to communicate to the viewer. All projects must incorporate some aspect of Flash, but no shockwave files created in Director.

Good luck!