Case Studies: Stolen Time Archive and Totality for Kids
In Stolen Time Archive, Gambrell’s historical and critical analysis is buried beneath a routinized interface, providing access to a layer of archival materials. Before being allowed to explore the archive, each visitor is required to engage in a brief exercise in shorthand “practice.” The shorthand tracings are automatically “graded” for precision and any departures from the correct character shape are noted as mistakes. In contrast with the celebration of plenitude and simultaneity often associated with new media interfaces (Manovich 2001), Gambrell and Kelly’s interface insists on highly disciplined input from users. Gambrell’s Author’s statement provides a further sense of this project’s formal difference from contemporary works of electronic scholarship:
As Gambrell notes, at the conclusion of the project, it is revealed to visitors that the software has been tracking their every move – both in the creation of a sub-curated collection of archival materials presented in the form of a scrapbook or ‘zine (again, referencing unpaid and easily overlooked “women’s work”), and also with a screen that reveals that the Flash application has been tracking and logging each movement of the cursor. This final revelation of an ongoing system of surveillance extends the discussion of tracked movement in the workplace to the experience of the project reader. It was this type of affordance – the explicit, critical, affective linkage of project form and content – that inspired much subsequent Vectors work.The files are sorted by subject under three main headings -- "forms," "personnel," and "production" -- and you may examine them in whatever order and to whatever duration and extent you choose. Your own research process, in turn, will be tracked and recorded in the form of an evolving, cut-and-mixed collage through which idiosyncratic sets of meanings and alternative modes of access to the archive will emerge. Then, when you are done rifling through the files, you will be asked to activate a series of copying functions that will leave you with a ghostly remapping of your own interaction with Stolen Time. These screen-based 'photocopies' will gradually disclose abstracted layers of information: about the archival objects that you have examined, about their rapidly receding histories, and (finally) about the recent movements of your own hand on the mouse or the touch-pad (Gambrell, 2005).
Completed nearly a decade later, McKenzie Wark’s “Totality for Kids” may be considered the last project to be created by Vectors’ in-house production team. Designed by Erik Loyer, the project bears certain structural similarities to Gambrell’s project. Although it was originally conceived as an archive of materials by and about the Situationist International (SI), “Totality for Kids” evolved during production to take the form of an interactive comic book based on the history and writings of the SI. The images and quotations presented in the comic panels are annotated by Wark and these annotations, in turn, reveal yet another level of primary sources published by the Situationists themselves. The project’s layers thus invert the sequence of Gambrell’s, but both invite potentially varied tiers of engagement from reader-users. Just as a visitor to Stolen Time Archive might be content to explore a collection of archival materials without choosing to dig into the author’s analytical level, readers of Wark’s project could choose to read only the “surface” of the comic book without engaging the underlying annotations or primary sources.
In his author's statement, Wark describes a transformation from his expected mode of authorship to one that took advantage of Vectors' design orientation. He writes,
Wark worked with a team that included designer Erik Loyer, comic artist Kevin C. Pyle, and the musical group The Love Technology, who were commissioned to record new versions of French folk songs to be released into the public domain. In addition to its departure from academic vernaculars, the comic book form and refusal of copyright reflected the Situationists' radical rejection of "intellectual property." In the conclusion to his author’s statement, Wark notes that, "One aspect of the Digital Humanities that I think tends to get neglected is the aesthetics of presenting research material, and what attracted me to Vectors is their exploratory attitude to this" (Wark 2013). Although Wark’s project does not take advantage of many of the affordances of a database-driven interface – access to content is not varied or withheld based on user actions or sequence, for example – the compositional form of layered and nested annotations emerges directly from the logic of the database as a critical and metaphorical Z-axis to the flat surface of the comic panels on screen.‘Totality for Kids’ turned out completely differently to what I actually proposed. I had just done the Gamer Theory site with the Institute for the Future of the Book, and the Vectors people were interested in the participatory side of that. But things evolved. The Vectors team had a really nice way of creating a visual interface to an underlying database, so that seemed the place to start" (Wark, 2013).
