As the web becomes more and more dynamic, thinking about it in traditional terms is insufficient.
The goal of this site is to show that to the user by subverting their conceptual model.
I want the user to feel as though they are not in complete control of their browsing.
I do this by using generated html to replicate the style of a standard website, while retaining
finer control of the user experience. The site uses React for generating html and Sass for stylesheets.
I used grunt imagemin for optimizing the images for the faster download. I override the browser's navigation
by pushing fake states to the history. Most actions are probabilistic, so clicking a link could send
you to the intended destination, or it could send you somewhere random. Source code can be found here.
Here I allude to the Robert Frost poem. The user will begin to form a simple conceptual model. There is a fork in the path leading to two pages. In reality the links more than likely lead to the same place. So a percieved choice might not actually be a choice. This idea was explored in depth in the game "The Stanley Parable." Tellers of interactive stories often employ percieved choice to make the user feel empowered. In reality, the storyteller (the webmaster), has the final say.
Here I connect Duchamp's found objects to user generated content on the web. In particular I think of Reddit as consisting almost entirely of found objects. Thus another attribute of metadata has been added to the work: "Submitted by." /u/unidan was a well known redit user prior to being ousted for using fake accounts to inflate his popularity. When we browse reddit, which describes itself as the front page of the internet, we are browsing a democratically curated collection.
This node reinforces the potential shortcomings of many conceptual models, as explained by Kolko. The user has information about the site, but their knowledge might be lacking. My hope is that seeing this node will prompt the user to step back and consider their knowledge about the site or lack thereof.
Vannevar Bush's memex exists as a precursor to much of the internet. The primary difference between the early days of web and Bush's vision was that users were unable to make their own trails. With web 2.0 that changed. User-generated content, in particular curations, are trails through the web.
Here the user sees a sign marking a crossroads and a number of paths. One choice in the labyrinth. Like Borge's garden, the labyrinth of the web is much more complicated than a physical garden. The sign is deliberately unhelpful. In a similar manner, the link preview I emulate on the site is not always helpful. Sometimes it previews the wrong link, sometimes it doesn't show anything at all. On most websites, the anchor text is informative of where the link leads, but it could be entirely misleading. See: Google Bomb.
One way that we can think of hypermedia links is as portals. We may or may not know where those portals lead, but we can tell that they are portals. I think portals (as opposed to crossroads) are one of the most apt metaphors for hyperlinks. Portals allow for non-linear storytelling and consumption of hypermedia. Many of these ideas and terms were introduced by Nelson.
This monolith is reminiscent of those in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey." It represents many of the juggernauts of the web that control so much of the browsing experience such as Google. To the average user Google is a monolith. They have no idea how google serves them content and how that content may or may not be filtered. Just as the monolith directed humanity in the film, those web juggernauts direct those who browse the web. The monolith node appears as though it provides choices, but those choices fade away. There is more to the web than what your browser/search engine may be showing you.