While I understand the importance of the iterative design process and coding of a website, I will not focus on the functional or technical aspects. Instead, in my brief overview, I want to focus on the website’s aesthetics, its overall look and feel.
The layout, color scheme, and other visual elements are influenced by 1980s cassette culture and the show’s title, ‘Material Girls’. Madonna’s pop music may be recognizable in the color choices and general mood of the era, but otherwise has little to do with what was presented in the exhibition.
My initial design sketches attempted to adopt a sense of garishness (on par with Bravo covers featuring pop icon Madonna); later toned down to streamline the layout to include only necessary components that would suggest cassette tape covers (with the ubiquitously lined slipcase as a guide for handwritten titles, etc., see PDF above). The color palette is reduced to the use of magenta (in various shades), black and white. The layout of the landing page and subsequent pages includes title, subtitle, and category, e.g., Monologue, as well as a media player with the corresponding audio content, in this case, a narrator’s monologue. In addition, the audience is presented with a site menu (‘thematic nod/tes’) and the web interface includes graphics (forward, backward and reset buttons) to enhance the user experience. For example, if the user selects the theme ‘Cultural Toads’, the audio player will automatically start the thread with the narration ‘Flash of Insight’; the stream can vary from 9 to 13 or more audio fragments. As the user chooses to move forward or backward, the audio thread will change its content mix, switching from monologue to dialogue, quotes to music, etc., as described above.
It should be noted that the sketches here present a solution that includes the transcription of the narration (and other features). However, time constraints required that the final output of the work be stripped down to the bare essentials to ensure a generative podcasting experience, but still with a style attuned to a minimalism that provides enough information to allude to a particular auditory culture.
On the whole, the interface (and its design) proved instrumental in producing complex (‘entangled’) sonic fictions that have the potential to challenge and alter established perceptions of reality.