Objectives

Understanding and skill for enabling users to navigate two dimensional and simulated three dimensional spaces and manipulate virtual objects as a means for experiencing, discovering, understanding and recalling information and knowledge.

Our challenge
Now that new media has liberated us from the limitations of the physicality of paper, its costly space demands for page and paragraph structures and the finality of the finished printed piece, how do we communicate using digital technology in which text, image, sound and motion are selected, paced, navigated in multiple directions and modified by the end user?

Limitations
Freed from the restrictions of one medium, along with new expressive power, we face the limitations of another medium, or several all wrapped up in one.

Skills
How well do we apply the skills and insights gained in studying more traditional media now within the newer process of creating, appropriating and importing images and sound by re-combining them through writing scripts?

Of traditional structures, forms and values Which should be retained?

Which should be abandoned?

Prosumership & DIY
coined by Alvin Toffler in "the Third Wave"
How comfortable are we with prosumership and the computer enabled “do it yourself” culture, that flux between producer and consumer, creator and viewer, artist and audience, designer and client, all made possible by the ubiquitous personal computer?

Quality projects
The best of our projects, though varied in approaches to information, structure and purpose (practical or impractical, mundane or profound, personal or public, entertaining or challenging) will have much in common:

Conversation mode: Awareness of the medium's conversation mode in which the developer (artist, designer, creator) responds through the medium to choices made by the viewer (user, customer, player) by pointing, dragging, clicking and typing.

Multi-directional access: Flexibility with multi-directional access to information and navigation for meaning with links that are logical or illogical, hierarchical or associational, with or without beginning, and usually without end, because this immaterial and impermanent medium invites creator and viewer alike to keep on adding to it.

Boundless information: Willingness to deal with the boundless nature of information in its time and space, by exploring its myriad connections.

Between the lines: Understanding that meaningful connections, are discovered "between the lines," between image and text, between doing, hearing and seeing – not in any of these alone.