BCM325 – Digital Artifact Context

I’m a Digital Media student, so I was interested in looking at movies and televisions shows, and in particular, the power they have to alter our perception of the reality, and also the influence they have on the future.

My main texts of research for this project were a journal article written by N.J. Schweitzer and Michael J. Sacks about ‘The CSI Effect’ and a movie directed by George Nolfi called ‘The Adjustment Bureau’. The CSI effect is essentially the phenomena where people believe what is being portrayed on television and movies as being the truth. For example, crime procedurals like CSI show a lot of technology and processes that are not real and false, yet people take it as the truth. Disregarding the main love story, The Adjustment Bureau showcases a form of teleportation technology where doors become portholes to other places. I used a fusion of both of these texts to conceive and developed the notion of my digital artifact. My digital artifact project is a combination of the CSI effect and the space-warping tech that’s shown in The Adjustment Bureau.

My project is a ‘Humans of New York’ style Instagram page, where this hypothetical technology of transportation from the movie is actually true. I ask people the question “If you had one chance to go through a door that led to any given place and time, where you want it to take you, and would you stay, or would you come back?”

The page is called @oneway_doorway which ties in with the end of the question, asking if you would stay or come back.

I chose Instagram because I am familiar with the format, and I like how the site creates a relationship between the photo and the text, even though the text is the main focus of the project, I took some pretty nifty photos of some cool doors up in Sydney.

I stuck with the concept of using photos of doors rather than a picture of the people who answered the question because I like the element of anonymity; anyone could have said this answer, you don’t necessarily know what the person next to you will answer.

In the movie the doors are all in the same reality and do not allow for time travel, it’s just essentially teleportation. But in the question, I added the time element because then it will allow for a broader range of answers, which is what I’m aimed for; about 9-12 posts that are about 50+ words each, depending on the answer, some were longer, some shorter. I also didn’t justify the question; if they had questions about my proposed question (as confusing as that sentence just was) I let them decide. All I gave was my question and let them ponder the parameters, which intern led to a broader range of answers. I even found myself questioning my own question, and ultimately allowed anything to be possible.

I did also experiment with QR codes a bit. You can easily generate a code for an online link and I tested it with a few of my blog posts. Just printed the code out and handed it out to my friends. Gotta get the traffic up on my blog somehow. I would like to further experiment with QR codes in the future, I just love the integration of the physical and digital words. It’s cool.

 

The Adjustment Bureau 2011, motion picture, Media Rights Capital, USA, directed by George Nolfi.

Schweitzer, N.J., Saks, M.J., 2007. The CSI Effect: Popular Fiction About Forensic Science Affects the Public’s Expectations About Real Forensic Science, Jurimetrics, Vol. 47, No. 3, 357-364.