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.