From a current ITP student…
April 15, 2008
Dear ITP Alumni List,
I recently received a commission for a web based project and am
looking for a Flash Developer / Programmer who might be interested in
working with me/collaborating on this project. I have a modest
honoraria to offer. The project would involve some image live
processing, the implementation of RSS feeds and some data base work.
I am happy to share credit and open to new ideas and your input about
the project. I would like to begin work this Summer as the needs to
be finished by the end of 2008.
Please send me an email if you are interested and I can explain a bit
more about the piece.
A description of the project is below, To get an idea of what the
site could look like please visit:
http://www.jodyzellen.com/without_a_trace/index2.html
Thanks for your interest.
Sincerely,
Jody Zellen
jzellen@gmail.com
www.jodyzellen.com
310-463-3819
A bit more about the project:
TITLE: Without A Trace
Without a Trace will be a project that brings together my daily
rituals finding a permanent home for them as a constantly self
updating webpage. For Without A Trace I will create a webpage that
randomly juxtaposes an altered image from the comic “Real Life”, a
scan of a trace drawing I have created, the computer’s trace of a
current news image, live text drawn from the internet that fills in
the empty thought bubbles, and a live headline from the NY Times’ RSS
feed.
The purpose of this project will be to dynamically juxtapose live and
saved imagery and texts to comment on the changing nature of our
daily communications. I will collect and create images on a daily
basis (for the duration of one year) amassing a total of 365 images
for each collection. These images will be uploaded to the server and
a program will be created that displays a different configuration of
images each day. This work will be about that daily experience and
its subsequent re-presentation.
The website I create will consist of a single page. I do not expect
people to linger on this page but rather to visit it periodically to
see how it has changed. The image and text feeds will be live so if
breaking news occurs the text feeds will change, otherwise there will
be a single montage created for each day of the year. A program will
also be written that saves a screen shot of these pages creating an
archive of the site. These images will be collected and visible as a
visual calendar to viewers who choose to investigate the projects
history.
The title Without A Trace has multiple meanings. A trace references a
memory. It is what remains when almost everything else disappears. A
trace is an action. One traces an image or traces over something.
‘Without a trace’ is also the phase we use to refer to something that
has disappeared leaving no record. The news is ephemeral, as is the
newspaper. It has a given structure yet its online content changes
continually. I will take these disappearing elements and bring them
together for the time they are viewed on the webpage. However, like
all web content these juxtapositions will disappear when the browser
is closed. Only to live in memory