#auttrickster

Despite our modernity, we are still living in plain sight of this mythology. Our name for the boundary-defying shape-shifter metal element is mercury. ‘Mercury’ signifies the open road (Mercury vehicles in the USA), We call the interpretation of hidden meanings ‘hermeneutics.’ The ‘winged messenger’ remains a symbol of communication (early newspapers were called mercuries – and still are in Tasmania). After printing was invented, publishers soon appropriated the role of Hermes as he who waters the Tree of Knowledge:

Trickster: The Poster

This is the project poster for Root Directory. It’s intentionally sparse on some of the details, since the project is so deeply-rooted in linear story that revealing too much would dull the actual exhibit. The entire poster is in-character, and I tried to make it make sense as an explanation of the meta-purpose of the project itself, while still making it meaningful within the project’s universe context as well.

Trickster: Root Directory - The Exhibit

This is the final exhibit layout for Root Directory. You’ll note that it looks rather bland, and that’s intentional.

You see, I chose to strike a balance between the original “used-industry” look and a more realistic “nuclear power plant control room” look, since the original plan to age everything on the table by about a thousand years became a little tough to do under these circumstances. Though you can’t really tell from the photos, everything is set up to look like it was used as a workstation, hastily abandoned when the facility closed its doors for good, and then left to sit for a thousand years in the very climate-controlled environment that a semi-autonomous medical facility would have. It’s not as aged and old as I would’ve liked it to look, but it still fits the bill enough to suspend some disbelief. The labels on all the items were printed using an old embossing label maker instead of a digital one, so as to give off that “factory machine” feel, and the specific mouse and keyboard were chosen to emulate control panel setups in power plants and elsewhere, which often use trackball mice and very basic keyboards. Finally, the labels themselves give a little incidental backstory of their own, from the licensed ID of the workstation (QGBO03), to the company that built the workstation (Lancaster Solutions, a fictional company), to the facility that the workstation is currently in (AGRI’s Oregon Facility). Through this, I tried to give out little tidbits of info as discreetly and realistically as I could, rather than the more blatant alternative of just writing a “these are the facts” exposition page.

The software side of the exhibit was tedious and boring to set up, but thanks to Unity, most of the hard work was modular enough that the code only had to be written once, and could then be copied into every other place that could possibly need it. This saved me weeks of work, but because of the design of the whole exhibit, I still had a bunch of work to do.

The plan for the exhibit has always been, as per the roadmap, an overarching linear story made of several shorter stories put together. As I progressed though, I began to realize that the universe is more coherent and easier to follow if I focus more on a single character’s story and the events around her. Eventually, this meant that all the different short stories evolved into “pages” in the same book about the main character: Lauren Goddard. Each step on the roadmap became either another thought from Lauren, or an ulterior event related to what Lauren said previously. This way, I could build one really fleshed out story, rather than a dozen half-baked ones.

But then a new problem came up. While designing the layout of each page, I realized that there was no way to fit the stories I had already written onto a single page, and there was no real way I could make a scrolling page with the time I had left at that point. This, coupled with the fact that most of the stories didn’t really fit the storyline anymore, meant that I had only one real option: re-write all the stories from scratch, shorter and better. After that, the roadmap changed a bit as well, and ended up looking like this:

Last week we had a formative assessment with Maggie and a guest moderator named Steve. After presenting a series of our work including a short two-minute clip from the doco, the basics behind our Google Maps interface, and some neat visual mockups of what our final app could look like, we received some good feedback. 

With a few minor details such as not folding my arms during presentations, and having slight background noise in some audio clips, the majority of our feedback was focused on the overall presentation of Coffee and how we want to present it at the end of this semester. While the feedback wasn’t negative, it allowed us to come together as a group and think about our madness for a bit. We all agreed that we want Coffee to be engaging and interactive to users that pass by. The tricky part for us is figuring out exactly how we will execute this. We are currently aiming to edit the documentary in such a way where users  are able stay for as long or as little as they'd like and still be able to understand the idea behind Coffee. We understand people don’t want to stand and watch a 15-minute video on our project, so we really need to captivate them in the shortest amount of time possible. We are currently planning on adding a reoccurring sound in between each story as it acts as a distinctive end and beginning to each clip.

Aside from that, we need to think of ways to allow users to interact with our Google Maps interface and fully browseable mockups. In order to do that, I suggested that we head into the Art Gallery to experience other kinds of exhibits and see the different ways people tend to present their work.