Design & Technology Thesis: Lilliput

Lil­liput is an inter­ac­tive trav­el­ogue of per­sonal pho­tographs and recorded mem­o­ries that explore the rela­tion­ship between the seen and the remem­bered. The project derives its name from an island in Jonathan Swift’s fic­ti­tious travel novel Gulliver’s Trav­els. The island of tiny near-sighted peo­ple is at war with its neigh­bor­ing island of Ble­fuscu over the proper end at which to crack an egg. This war is the source of the term endi­an­ness, a com­puter sci­ence con­ven­tion for com­mu­ni­ca­tion when infor­ma­tion is bro­ken into pieces for trans­mis­sion and reassem­bled upon recep­tion. The inter­ac­tive trav­el­ogue of Lil­liput attempts to pro­duce mean­ing by assem­bling pho­tographs and nar­ra­tive mem­o­ries in dig­i­tal space.

(Best viewed in Fire­fox.  Be sure your audio is turned on.)

Many thanks to Gae­len Green for help­ing with project man­age­ment, to Anand Krish­nan for pro­gram­ming assis­tance, and to my the­sis pro­fes­sors David Car­roll and Adam Chapman.

In pro­duc­ing this the­sis for a Design & Tech­nol­ogy major at Par­sons, I inter­ro­gated doc­u­men­tary ethics as they might relate to dig­i­tal sto­ry­telling.  As much work has been done in devel­op­ing dig­i­tal meth­ods for pub­lish­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and col­lab­o­ra­tion, it seems that tech­niques for dig­i­tal, inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling have much room for devel­op­ment.  The last decade of schol­ar­ship on Baroque art and sci­ence, specif­i­cally on the Wun­derkam­mer, pro­duced a vocab­u­lary for defin­ing tra­di­tions of inter­ac­tive nar­ra­tive lead­ing up to dig­i­tal media.  Work­ing with video game design this semes­ter pro­vided me with some imme­di­ate tech­niques for inter­pret­ing the art his­to­ri­ans’ work on the Baroque for a con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal art project.

I began the­sis with the hope of get­ting a bet­ter grasp on inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling.  As pro­duc­tion got under way, my famil­iar­ity with the ethics of visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion ham­pered my abil­ity to inno­vate.  I end this project more inti­mately aware of the ten­sions in doc­u­men­tary tra­di­tions and hum­bled by what I still can learn about inter­ac­tiv­ity and narrative.