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March 21, 2005
You Are What You Eat: a Final Project
A rough proposal of my final project
The pervasive advertising that colonizes our minds in our day-to-day life tries to sell us on many things, perhaps most critically the notion that we build and maintain an identity through our consumption. Even the biggest cynics among us buy into this on some level. Its even become ritualized in the creation of profiles on social networks like friendster or myspace where typically you enumerate your favorite music, movies and books to show off your cultural literacy and form some kind of composite sketch for others of what you must be like based on your tastes in various things.
Anyway, for my Self-Portrait I'd like to explore the ways we forge these consumption-based identities and make fun of it at the same time. At this stage, I'm imagining some kind of Flash-based interface where there is a catalog of items that have some kind of significance to me. Each item has a bit of text associated with it that imagines what owning this item says about me (which might be silly, sarcastic, whimsical or all of the above) and perhaps its true significance to me. Additionally, each item would have certain attributes (descriptive terms, adjectives) associated with them. So from here, the user uses this interface to choose the items that make up the composite me. I guess I'd institute some kind of limit on how many items you'd be able to use so you would only be able to define me with a limited amount of items. After assembling your items together, the text of the various objects would combine to give a summarized idea of what I'm like based on my consumption tastes and the attributes would be put together in a sort of RPG fashion. Yea... thats what I got so far.
Posted by adm at March 21, 2005 10:39 PM
Comments
This has a great Ad-Buster's sensibility. What happened to your surgery? When I read your title I thought I was going to read that we take the scalpal, slice open the abdoman and....there's an iPOD, a TAG watch, a coke can nestled in by the spleen. In any case, you can ask the question - are you more than the sum of your stuff? Your "captions" and mode of presentation will make the impression.
I'm curious about your limit. If you've supplied us with an object, it seems fair game. The more interesting question is how I get to know that you like, say, Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. Or maybe you'd only share that in certain circumstances or to certain individuals. Maybe I'd find Last Year at Marienbad instead. It would say something about your personality if you supplied me what I wanted to see or what you wanted me to see... If that doesn't fit, you might make a viewer "earn" your confidence, your willingness to show something of your insides. However you solve it, it will be part of the process of putting together the portrait and the personality.
1)Work on defining your interface and logic and
2) Start to generate a list of actual items, and set a schedule for actually getting them (and associated text) into some sort of digital/presentation form.
3) Start writing the text.
Posted by: pweil ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://interactive.usc.edu/20041/ctwr518/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 22, 2005 08:52 PM
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