Last Post

hello all, 

quite the shame we weren't able to get the vanitas site up and running but all the same i think its nearly time for some all round congratulations. 

This is the link to the facebook ad page that would have been launched had we made it online: 

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vanitas/79684635946

Well, good work everyone. All the best and all that

. 

Juan PdR. 

Dear Gherkin:)

I have not posted anything for a while, because I was too busy with the actual production and... it was finished yesterday!!!:-)

Now I just need to-three more texts for the store section (will be grateful if you send them to me ASAP, Juan:) when I place them inside the whole construction the project will be ready to be uploaded! (hooray:)

I played with publishing settings in Flash and decided that this will be a better solution for us than relying on Dreamweaver's table. More details- on my blog (will post it this evening)

I think we need to finish it ASAP and upload in order to be able to advertise it on posters and on Facebook and get some audience interactions. I hope they like it and flood us with their e-mails and photographs:-) I am working on a poster which will be simple and consistent with the stencil I designed for the 'stencil' section of the website. 

Looking forward to seeing you soon!

eve de la balazinsky

More Photos

Hey I asked my friend to take some photos of stuff he thought was interesting and/or funny, I didn't get him to use the arrow as by not having him use the arrow it shows people there are no set rules for submitting photos.

I haven't put the, into the gallery yet but am about to and I thought I'd upload them now.

Matthew.

Clock Sounds

Based on our intention to have clock sounds within our website, I found free clock sounds which could be useful.

20090405.clock.stereo.dry.wav, 20090405.clock.mono.dry.wav and Grandfather clock.wav can all be found on the following website http://www.freesound.org/searchText.php.

For some background music I found this track which I felt sounded a little like a countdown as well as being quite light and soft.

If we used this track for our home page, rather than have it playing in the background and giving the user the choice to turn it on or off we could play it for a few seconds and have it automatically end in doing so creating a sound logo.

This is the sound logo for Mercedes Benz and as you can see it's just seconds long.

As the song posted above is quite long I found some shorter audio tracks which I have posted here.

Countdown Sound
An acoustic sound
A blues number

Matthew

More stuff.

This would be used as a menu page for our mission statement, the sizing is wrong but you get the overall idea. I have also included some pieces of art which we would use and I think it would be best to combine these with some of the ones that Juan had posted earlier so that we have contemporary and classical styles. Though I know we're supposed to be quite positive I do think that these images make a nice contrast to the positivity we will be producing through the photographs, as well as the lighter tone of Juan's writing.
Matthew.

More stuff!

The stupid blog wouldn't allow me to load any more stuff onto the blog, so I have to make a new post.
So, here are some more images, the horizontal arrow as well as some designs with the new logo inside the frame.
Enjoy.

OMG, this stupid thing isn't letting me upload anything else, I'll post another blog and put the other images into that.
Bye.
Matthew.

The Arrow in use.

Some photo's of the arrow being used, which we can use for our gallery.
I also have some designs for our menu page here. I also have an arrow. with our logo in.



Matthew.

Some countdown examples

Are we still willing to include a countdown in our website? I've just found this one, it is quite neat and it is easy to change its size. But not colour... On the other hand it would look ok and contrast nicely with the frame...
I will continue search for a perfetc countdown...
By the way, this one comes from http://www.countdownr.com/

another one is

EB

New frame

Hello!

I really like the images- especially the strawberry one!:)
I reconsidered the names and also think it's good if we stick with VANITAS. It sounds nice and actually I agree with your arguments that it would fit the theoretical content.
Yesterday we agreed on the logo that would be made using font from dafont.com and it would look like the image on the left. The font name is BarMKode Inverse and it was designed by Manfred Klein. It gives nice effect and resembles a stylized bar code which neatly links with the ideas of consumptionism and culture jamming etc.
We'll see how it looks with the rest of the interface.
Rearding the frame- I found a nice one, royalty free one from stock.xchng. If we use it we ensure that there will be no fuss as it is free to use. The previous frame I showed as an example was from Google Images and its copyright status was not clear.
It's cute, isnt it? It will look like this in Flash frame of the size we agreed to use (850x650px) so now the space for the interactive will be around 688x503px.

see you on Tuesday at 1pm.
EB

Responses

Bonjour y’all,

So,

Matthew – not sure if you’ll found this useful but i looked around for a few examples of what i thought was more in keeping with the joyful transience theme: 

Ewa – i see no reason why we can’t use parts of Epicurus in our project but i’d very much downplay other parts of it, as i think i said the associations with nihilism are just a touch too unpalatable for some, and there’s really no need to potentially alienate certain – probably religious – groups.  Just a concern is all. Moving on, i quite like the vanitas name, but if you’re not sure we should explore some alternatives. Not to be critical about your name suggestions, but do we really want to market ourselves in this way? It just doesn’t seem to fit our purpose; i saw us very much more highlighting the absurdities of advertising and its anything for attention rationale.  

 as for i, i’ve mocked up a manifesto – just drafted out some points but i think we need to talk over our exact aims and ideas so that i can set about creating some more expansive texts. also i’ve been looking at different transitory sounds to punctuate our website, clocks, footsteps that kind of thing. Will share all on Tuesday.

Juan PdR.

Border for inside the frame.

Hello,

As mentioned at the last meeting, we decided to use a frame as a border for our interactive website. I was assigned the role of making some designs for what would go inside the frame. So, whilst I was working on some designs I decided on posting what I have been doing throughout the day and edit the page as and when I finish a design. 

I have been collecting images that represent Vanitas and fit in with the theme of Epicurus and Seneca. I tried to make some designs in Photo shop but had some difficulties loading them up so I made a folder which contained these, I'll have to show them to the group on Tuesday.

Most of the images i collected are quite morbid and feature skulls and wilting flowers. I suggest we take our own photographs of landscapes etc which can be used as background images, I found some really striking images online and they were copyrighted, so I thought we could just make our own. I have a folder full of images which I have divided into two themes, Vanitas/Transience which contain busts of Epicurus, images of Seneca as well as baroque image, the second folder, Joy contains some photo's I think capture time passing but are more positive and uplifting.

Just read Ewa's post. 

There are a lot of names there, personally if we are going to maintain the link between Seneca and Epicurus, then I think Vanitas would fit well. To me Vanitas, more clearly than say Vanx or Travanx, matches the images we have been looking at as well as the philosophical work we have intended on including in our mission statement. By changing the name to something more contemporary  we would shift in meaning and tone, and would therefore have to rethink some of our ideas to match the new name. 

I do however think that if we were to take our own photographs which are more contemporary and celebratory we could go with one of the names you suggested. If we went with Travanx, based on Dansei's idea that the inclusion of the X suggests a more dangerous youthful tone, we could take some photographs which better represented the change in name and use them as a background to our interactive menus.

Matthew.

Some more

Just to give some feel of vanitas, Pieter Claesz, Still Life, 1630. (this one is taken from http://www.cognitiones.de/doku.php/vanitas?DokuWiki=os3a7sm986i5llp6e7el9bbnv6)

I think it will be original if we stick with the idea of vanitas motive in painting.
Useful source of images- Olga's Gallery, mainly under the section on baroque.

Best,
EB

Some more ideas; NAME REVISITED

Ave (Latin= hello:)

First of all, I like the ideas of both Seneka and Epicurus. Why do not we go for both of them? As I suggested, we can have a "shop with ideas" where our audience could browse and buy our "products", i.e. our selections of philospohies&theories regarding simple life as opposed to conspicuous consumption.
I have a visual idea for interactive images with a scrollbar. When image gets clicked a product description comes up on the side- drafts will be posted ASAP to give more detailed view. I did such Flash tutorial some time ago and it was fairly easy to apply.

Secondly, I came up with some ideas for a name of the product (somehow I don't really feel happy with simple VANITAS).

Some theories first.

According to Marcel Danesi (2006) the more associations a name causes, the higher the connotative index (CI). In order to check what is CI of a particular brand cosumers are asked what they connote the name with. As Danesi writes, the higher CI, the greater its psychological force.

What is more, there are some features which help in improving the CI. For instance, a letter X in the name, such as in EXXON (previously ESSO). According to Danesi's research, new name "sounds like it's going to last", "is exciting", "sounds like adventure" (p.39). On the contrary, the previous name- ESSO was described as "soft", "smooth" and "steady" and it evoked much less associations.
Danesi (2006) deploys several examples to emphasise that "the brand names with letter X seem to tap into the reservoir of connotative meanings in a largely unconscious fashion" (p.41). "The letter X is associated with youth, danger, and all the X-citing things" (p.40). Danesi (2006) provides a list of cultural meanings associated with letter X, for instance thge Roman number ten, a symbol for Christ or the unknown especially in mathematics. Similarly letter Z- it is also "power-sounding".

Brand names can be also amalgams consisting "of two or more morphemic parts, each one suggestive of a specific word." For example, Fruitopia=Fruit=Utopia or ViraMax= Maximum Virility (Danesi,2006:50-1).

Baring in mind the above, here my candidates:

XTRAVANZ- extra+vanity+Z; brings associations with extravagant, extravaganza. I quite like it.
VANITRA, VANTRA, VANITRANZ= vanitas/vanity+transience+Z to make it look
VANITAZ- its obvious; sounds a bit street-wise
XTRAVAN- extra+vanitas/vanity, googled it and there is already a company named in this way. It's not surprising that they hire "xtra" vans:)
VANX- vanity+X
TRAVANX- transience+vanity+X

If I come with some more, I will post them here as well. Please think about these and give a shout when you come across the most suitable name.

Best,
EB

Designs and Icons

Salut,

Haven't written for a while, after our meeting I thought it might be good if we used some images of Seneca as it would fit in with this theme of using motifs from Art as well as adopting some of his philosophies. I'll photo shop some stuff by next week, but these are the sort's of images I would be using. Here is a link to Peter Paul Rubens Death of Seneca. This is a link to a database of images of portraits of a number of philosophers as well as attempts to picture their theories. Went onto the Transience/Vanitas section of the Rijks Museum website to get a feel for some of the imagery we'd need. I'll get to work with desgining the look of our pages this week and will post some of my work as and when I finish it.

See you next week.

Matthew.

Wikis, Metaphysics and the search for the right sound.

Ok, first things first. I’ve set us up a new email address and wiki using the vanitas name, we can always change these later.

We are now reachable via:

vanitas@live.co.uk   (the password is the same as for the blog)

and

vanitas.pbwiki.com   

There’s not much going on there at the moment but i’ll keep playing around until i get the hang of it. Also , I’ve been looking around for some ambient music to set the mood for our web pages but so far found nothing i really like, but theses look like promising sites to dig around in: www.royaltyfreemusic.com and www.estockmusic.com – i’ll keep looking.

 

And now to the nature of human existence; I’ve read up a little on Epicurus over the internet and this is what i’ve grasped from it so far: part of the human soul is dispersed throughout the human body, very much atomised amongst our corporal matter – indeed even making up part of our corporal matter. It is through these particles of human soul that we develop sensation – sight and touch and so on.

So then, there are three basic human desires/pleasures:

 

The natural – a desire for health, comfort and general wellbeing.

The natural and unnecessary – that which we merely find pleasant; smells, tastes etc.

The empty – those unattainable desires of human construction, wealth, fame, immortality and so on.

 

The main purpose of the soul, its route to happiness is to maximise its pleasures and minimise its pains; the empty desires very much being a cause for anxiety and pain and so ultimately misleading and harmful. – All very nice; take pleasure in the little things, happiness is all about moderation and appreciating what you have. Except, as the human soul is physically ingrained into the human body it ceases to exist when we do, there is no greater meaning or purpose to existence. Thus life should be free from worry and repercussions, but also, as this very much sounds like a kind of existential nihilism, where there is no objective right, wrong or valid means for authority; it may not be the best foundation for our project.

 

“How much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your life was left for you. You will realise that you are dying prematurely.”

                                                                                                                                                 (Seneca, 5 BC – 65 AD)

In the simplest terms Seneca thought that in life we all spend very little time living. In his view there is much less of a moral judgment or even spirituality, in essence we all waste our time in idleness,  excessive leisure in which the value of such time is lost due to its abundance, or else we lose time through obsessive preoccupations, in terms of vice as well as material gain or social status. In short we are wasteful with the only commodity that is truly and objectively precocious – our time. It is something that through the pursuit of other perceived gains we spend freely for everyone else’s benefit except our own.

In the same way any concentration on the past is useless and all preoccupation with the future meaningless as it may never happen.  “to what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” For Seneca, the only fair part about good fortune is that it comes and goes and so any happiness built upon fortune is unstable at best. The answer then, is to live in the immediate sensuality and spiritual pleasures of life; obsessive preoccupations over anything represent nothing more than wasted time.

 

Similar to Epicurus then, in many ways but just a little bit more palatable to conventional thought.

 

 Juan PdR

No worries; metaphor for navigation?

Hi,

we started work on the proposal and will send you for edition.

I found an interesting link which might be inspiring in creating the metaphor for navigation. Rijks Museum with loads of 17 century art- Click to see. Some sculls, candles, mirrors, books etc combined together in Photoshop and transformed into interactive bit in Flash? Don't you think this could be of value if we used some motives from the history of art?

Just an idea:)

Best,
EB

All Apologies

So, so sorry i couldn’t be there today, i would have given warning but it was kind of an unexpected occurrence.

If any of you would be kind enough to take me through any developments i missed i’d much appreciate it. 

Juan PdR

The Good Fight

Hello,

I’ve been looking into setting up our own wiki and there are a couple of places that will allow us to create a pretty straightforward and basic wiki for free:

www.Wikispaces.com

www.Pbwiki.com

So far i like the look of the second better...maybe i’m just hungry.

Ok, so Jurgen Habermas. You should all be familiar with Public Spheres but as a quick run through. A public sphere is a somewhat imaginary zone in which all people, uninhibited and free from coercion can gather and discuss political issues and through debate achieve consensus and a kind of dialectical progression.

The early form of the public sphere developed in the coffee houses and salons of 16th/17thcentury Europe. Here, nobles and the upper classes gathered primarily to discuss art and literature but over time the conversation turned to the increasingly expanding and complicated (thus regulated) economic markets and so political issues became the staple of these early debates. This is important as it marked the shift from political power being something held before the people - as in the manner of lords and monarchs - to something that if not held by the people per se, then was validated by them in the manner of public opinion, which in a democratic sense adds legitimacy to that which it supports.

As the complexities of the trade markets grew pamphlets began to circulate to provide details on stock prices etc. Soon these same pamphlets included the opinion of their producers in ever greater detail and voila, the first newspapers were born. Soon all shades of opinion, all be it in a very narrow class of property owners, had a mouthpiece and a means to spread their side of the great polemic exchange. Alas, as civil bourgeois society developed there became ever more institutional/official ways to voice opposition and hold those in public office to account. And so those newspapers that survived were free to happily pursue a more commercially viable purpose. Opinions were disguised as facts, ideologies became centralised and generic and all in the name of a larger share in the market audience, which in turn brought in a higher pay cheque from advertising revenue.

Soon, newspapers and all resulting news media became dependant on commercial revenue and so largely abandoned the idea of opinions and debate. Where once public opinion was a messianic figure there was now only the god of publicity and the one way dialogue of consumerism. However, the net with it's ridiculously simple, anyone can publish anything approach promises a return to a more inclusive and fully formed public sphere but with the rise of interactive branding and viral marketing our battle isn’t just about saving an intellectual space from the colonisation of advertising, it’s about preserving the last potential vehicle for true democratic participation!!

Quite compelling, i think you’ll agree.   

Juan PdR

Logo game (buttons and cursor)

Hello!
Name is Siobhan, and I'm new to gherkin productions :)

After the last meeting we were discussing to include a flash game whereby the user can manipulate, or change the logo themselves...
This I thought was a little ambitious however suggested we should create a panel of editing buttons which still allows the user to have some level of interactivity and control over the logos image.

Also to enhance this feeling of freedom and creative FUN, suggested changing the cursor to a paintbrush...

Found the Lynda login and password and a brilliant tutorial about how to change the cursor. The action script isn't too hard, so we could go through it on tuesday...

Will post again tomorrow about mcluhan

Siobhan

p.s sorry about the color, the other greens were too similar to yours and I thought it might get confusing...

Viral Advertising

Hey,

This is going to be brief, I'll go into more details in our next meeting, in Henry Jenkins Convergence Culture he makes many similar comments regarding advertising as the ones you mentioned from Lucas and Dorrian.

He lists how traditional mediums (TV, radio etc) have lost their attraction to brands as being the main place to attract consumers and how many companies have placed more emphasis on the Internet to advertise their products.

He documents how Coca Cola have used the Internet to create "love marks" which represent how companies attempt "to break into peoples hearts and minds. In that order.. We're moving to ideas that elicit emotion and create connections". Coca Cola attempted to do this by including a section of their website "where consumers can share their own personal stories about their relationship with the product, stories that get organized around themes such as "romance" "reminders of family" " by doing so Coca Cola turns the memories of the public into a marketing pitch.

I don't know if you had noticed but Lande has posted some comments on the blog, one of which contains a link to this website which encourages users to make a wish, over the phone which the website then posts on its revolving wall. Users can post whatever they want from the ridiculous " i wish my husband didn't look so much like Bin Laden" to the supposedly sincere " i wish for world peace". Similar to what we mentioned on Tuesday as it doesn't offer a guideline for how or what people should wish for.

See you on Tuesday,
guess it wasn't really that brief then,

Matthew.

(Not that) Fresh Ideas

Actually, I should have written this note ages ago, but somehow I didn't:) Therefore the ideas aren't that fresh as they should be...

To start with, as Lucas and Dorrian (2006) wrote, the media landscape has changed recently and moved into more interactive and audience engaging. The advertising has also shifted from conventional brand communication such as television spot to approaches which collide with Public Relations. It is no longer a one-way communication in predictable venues; advertisers are now seeking to draw the attention of the people in new surprising ways. As a result, the consumer has become invited to become involved "in something relatively new between the advertiser and consumer: a conversation" (Lucas and Dorrian, 2006:18; emphasis added).
Relating to the trend described by Lucas and Dorrien I think it's good if we also try to engage our audience into a dialogue.

What sort of dialogue could that be? Of course, something moderated by us, a sort of "chat" that would link with the product we want to sell, namely transience. I have checked the exact meaning of transience and it is

1. an impermanence that suggests the inevitability of ending or
dying
2. the attribute of being brief or fleeting [syn: brevity]
( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/transience)

It got me thinking about... OK, it will sound trivial and silly, but I started thinking about life that we often take it for granted and forget that it might end abruptly tomorrow or any other day. Therefore we should start enjoy it consciously ASAP! And don't listen to all the advertisements which try to lure us that happiness is impossible without product X or product Y. Hey, my observation is that the less we have (in material sphere), the happier we are (or is it just me?!) Instead of thinking about what we still need to purchase, why don't we focus on small things that give us pleasure and joy? CARPE DIEM, seize the day, start living your life fully today.

It instantly made me think of the optimistic philosophy of Epicurus (I will elaborate on this next time and will try to deploy some useful material. Now, just to provide a link: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/)

My idea now is to sell the prospect of happiness/joy which can be attained NOT due to consumption of a particular goods as advertisers would like to convince us. I should develop this concept soon in relation to SUBVERSIVE ADVERTISING.

Also, I was thinking about the promotion of our online campaign. I think we could use similar way as Crispin Porter and Bogusky (http://cpbgroup.com/) agency in Burger King campaign in 2004. The link to the Subservient Chicken (www.subservientchicken.com) was sent to 30 people who in turn sent it to their friends and after few days the website was seen by thousands. After we create our campaign and place it online (ideally at least few days before the deadline) we could send an message to friends on Facebook and invite them to have a look at the link & forward it if they like it. We can also send an e-mail to everyone at uni to encourage traffic to our online campaign.

Two more things. First one is already mentioned WIKI. I really think it's cool if we set up a wiki where the users can generate and edit content. One of us will have to take care of it and moderate it. The other thing is about the stencil as in case of The Bubble Project mentioned before. As we agreed together, we will produce a stencil of an arrow which can be used by the audience to take pictures presenting the small things etc. that give them joy. The pics will be published at the website, also it would be cool if one of us takes care of receiving & placing them online. But I'm sure we will sort it out along the way.

That's it for now.

Best,
EB

ps. reference of the book:
Lucas, G. and Dorrien, M. (2006) Guerilla Advertising. Unconventional Brand Communication. London: Laurence King Publishing.

Selling Transcience

Sorry,

Juan and I decided to leave after we had waited for a while. We did however attempt to mould our ideas into a brief which we could use as a basis for our work from this point on. As we had previously discussed we are selling transience through the medium of a self destructing website. The website itself will have a logo which can be changed through user interaction (if a game could be made which allows us to do this great, if not no worries), and would encourage the user to create work which relates to transience and the benefits of transience therefore encouraging communicative interaction.
Simple enough.

I think we could maybe try incorporating some of our own short videos/photo's which play around with the idea of transience to demonstrate the multimedia aspect of the website. These could range from fairly simple pun based images like the piece of work we saw today or short films supposedly promoting transience, whatever, the point is that we may have to generate work through some other mediums to ensure we meet the criteria.

Found a piece on advertising called the seven sins of memory, one of which being.. The Sin of Transience, here is the link, the document lists ways to improve memory and recognition of adverts amongst consumers, in regards to some multimedia content we could create a set of rules which would decrease it in the form of an advertising advice document,

Hope you are all well,

Farewell Pilgrims..

M.A. Barrington

Changeable Logo

Hey,

Having read the handouts, looked around the various links posted on blackboard by Linda and reading your last two posts we seem to be close to determining what we are actually going to do. As Juan pointed out physical interaction simply appears to being pointing and clicking without affecting the meaning, which is evident here on the TalkToFrank website where nothing is challenged or changed. 

Including a simple form of physical interaction which allows the user an increased input and communicative interaction, seems to be the way to go. The magazine we looked at last week, Adbusters, has a website which encourages communicative interaction through grass roots subversive advertising, here is the link. The website mainly deals with culture jamming and invites users to submit their pieces of work which they then showcase. There is a lot of material on here some good some bad but it is worth a look. 

I looked through the links on your previous posts i.e. bubble project, postsecret. I liked the simplicity of allowing users to generate the content, however the effectiveness of such sites is limited to the amount of content their users generate as well as the quality of such content. If we to go down the route of a highly user generated content then getting it viewed and  used would be of high importance.

I think the idea of disrupting the link between actual and virtual modalities is an interesting one and would propose we develop the ideas of the changeable logo, advertising a concept and temporary website as they reflect a disruption of expectation regarding the practices of advertising.

Hope everyone is well, 

farewell pilgrims,

M.A. Barrington.

some thoughts on interactivity

hi, 

I think we should definitely go ahead with the changeable/interactive logo idea, as from a semiotic point of view even the smallest of alterations to an image can alter the potential meanings and values that image can possess. This idea alone seems quite subversive as the purpose of an advert or brand image is to convey a very clear idea about a product; to have as little possible alteration between encoding and decoding, where as we will want to be encouraging people to encode their own message, to shape the brand around themselves.

After reading the interactivity article it seems that most of what is considered to be interactive is merely physical interaction, that seems to come down to point and click selections that don’t often have much of an effect on the communicative interaction, i.e. it doesn’t affect the meaning of the content. All of the innovation and development of computers and interactive media just seems to be bringing the virtual/digital world in line with the real world, so that there is a unity with how things might react to you on a computer and with more tangible objects. I think this even applies in a tactile sense with how our understanding is shaped by how things are associated with physical actions; deleted files going into the recycling bin etc.  It might then be fun to play around with physical interaction in counter-intuitive ways, especially if we are looking to brand something such as chaos or confusion.

I guess what would be required is the separation of our experience of actual and virtual modalities, or at least to confuse the meanings that connect and coordinate them, in order to play around with the potential of digital interaction. By making something interactive in this way it should able to highlight the constructed and arbitrary nature of our project and advertising/branding in general, disrupting the normalising and naturalising association between product and cultural meaning and values that most advertising aims for.       

Juan PdR

interactivity ideas

Hi,

Here's Ewa and in order to differentiate my posts I will use this tasty colour of olive oil. Few notes to keep up.

1) I like the idea of a temporary website and appreciate the link between transience and temporariness of the website. Fun!:)

2) I'm still reading about the interactivity to grasp the essence of the concept. I borrowed a book on Guerrilla advertising and I am full of hope to find some inspirations; expect some entries soon:)

3) Just wanted to add a useful link if you feel like watching some ads in spare time. http://adsoftheworld.com/ It might be useful in expanding "the visual library" and ideas.

4) And I genuinely like the postcards from the postsecretblog, they're aesthetically appealing to me. Maybe we could also try to encourage our audience to produce something, for instance their version of logo of our brand and then it would be published (as we discussed it recently).

5) Or maybe we could present a stencil/template that audience could use and send their pics/videos? I found such idea on www.thebubbleproject.com. People can download a comic-style bubble that needs to be printed and cut. Then folks can write their commentaries in the bubble and make a photo or create a video which can be posted on the Bubbleproject blog by submitting a facebook/flickr/youtube link. The Bubbleproject.com is integrated with these tools and in my opinion this is a goood example of real interactivity. As so far I have used Facebook in a fairly limited way, I will research into groups and other features which might be useful for our project.

6) We should also think of using a wiki we could embed in our project as well. This could help us in achieving a satisfying level of interactivity. WIKIPEDIA is probably the biggest wiki in the Internet and it defines wiki as a "a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or
otherwise edit and change most content very quickly and easily via website."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki)

I think we can benefit a lot if we learn how to embed an HTML file into Flash and place a wiki in our product. Of course, this is just an initial idea and I will work on it to present some possible directions.

Anyway, that's it for now.

Yours sincerely,
EB

The End is Nigh

hello,

i really like the idea of a temporary web page. perhaps we could advertise transience; something advertising relies on quite heavily, it could be argued. not really sure what form that could take though. 

i think what really makes something interactive is the ability to allow people to contribute in their own way. it might be interesting to see what people come up with on a site they know is going to disappear soon; pictures, short stories even secrets, who knows. 

for an idea of such potential content you may want to check out these sites. 

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

http://foundmagazine.com/

Juan PdR 

Gotta Love Google!

Hello,
I am aware I have posted something on here today already but I have allocated this period on Wednesday to the Multimedia module so have been researching through various Internet resources as well as the many links under the Multimedia module sectioned starting on my sketch book, but anyway during my Internet research I stumbled upon this link. I haven't really looked into yet but it could be useful, or not. It appears to link the destruction of a website to a timer rather than based on a counter however I'm sure that could be changed.

Farewell,

M.A. Barrington.

New Pepsi Logo

Hello,

from now on I will signature all of my future blog entries with my initials, as it will make it easier to tell me apart from the other members of our group.

I have also taken the dramatic decision to type my text in green.

This is a link to a document which claims to represent the thinking behind the new Pepsi logo, which for anyone not in the know as to how the new logo will appear, above are a few images of the new Pepsi bottles and cans.

I really doubt this is an authentic document, it claims to have been leaked from a "freelancer in the industry", however as a hoax it satirizes the elaborate processes and absurdities of logo design.

M.A. Barrington

Some ideas for the opening of the Gherkin

Despite our name (Gherkin) we do not sell vegetables or salads or any other type of foods. What is more, we do not want to sell you anything apart from our ideas. We simply want to get you interested in what we are offering to you. We want YOU to get involved in our interactive campaign. (if we had an audio option here, we would play a sound of gong or something similar to underscore the significance of this statement).

As my colleague wrote in his post, we would like to create a sort of spoof campaign that would promote war. But later I came up with some other things we could advertise. Things that you would not even think someone might be interested in. Like some abstract concepts such as mediocrity, chaos, botch.. But this is just a loose suggestion.

OK, I am getting down to read the text and will post some further comments afterwards.
EB

The First Entry onto the Gherkin!

Just wanted to sum up the comments and ideas made in todays class,

1. Of the three briefs we decided on Culture Jamming & Interactive Branding.
2. We wanted to create a website which focused on the idea of selling War.
3. To represent Interacivity and to represent the theme of destruction we wanted to attempt to have users contribute to the destruction of the website.

So glad I was able to make the first post!

M.A. Barrington