Page 118 - The Black Box Book

CONCEP TUAL BACKG ROUND

The Black Box / Černá skříňka project was a challenge in terms of
the circumstances in which it was created, its thematic focus, and
its design. During the Covid-19 pandemic, external circumstances in
the form of recurrent and lengthy lockdowns necessitated the usage of
the internet environment for communication among the creative team as
well as the public presentation of the project’s outputs. It was therefore,
clear, from the beginning that the project would be presented on a spe-
cially designed website. However, the website’s layout, UX design, and
visual conception had not yet been decided.
The website’s graphic designer, Alina Matějová, began by analyzing
the task, which involved defining fundamental terms and concepts and
the imaginary boundaries and driving forces for the web design. During
the team’s first brainstorming sessions, it was clear that the goal would not
be to bring the physical gallery space online literally. Instead, we focused
on leveraging the specific nature of online curating and were inspired by
the characteristics of the World Wide Web and the properties of pro-
grammed digital media in designing the site. “Archive, data collection, new
curator, adaptation, rawness of materials, online environment, long-term
development, association, connection, network.” These concepts have
shaped our thinking about the design of the web.

HYP E R TE X T: S TR U C T U R E

THROUGH VISUAL LANGUAGE Figure 1: A panoramic view of
Then, we inquired about the specifics of the online environment postulated hypertext from Ted Nelson’s
1965 paper on the subject. Retrieved
in terms of information organization and how we could apply them to from https://www.notion.so/blog/ted-
the design of a website that will serve as an interface to a digital ar- -nelson
chive containing documentation of selected art projects reflecting the
experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our search led us, among other
things, to the hypertext scheme that Theodor Holm Nelson had been Referring to the aesthetics of technical drawings or drafts, the fun-
working on since 1960 as part of the Xanadu project (Figure 1) (Nelson, damental components of web design are hypertext arrangements and
1960, https://www.xanadu.net/). Nelson’s proposed rhizomatic structure schematic visualizations of the relationships between the various pieces in
for organizing information is generally considered to be a precursor to the online archive. The acknowledgement of the hypertextual structure of
the current form of the World Wide Web and an elaboration of an idea by the web at the visible level of the user interface has become a fundamental
Vannevar Bush, who designed a device called Memex, which was intended means of expression while challenging web users to read non-linearly, to
to be a technical extension of human memory (Bush, 1945). The schema follow free associations as they navigate through its content, and to link
created by Nelson (Figure 1) depicts a non-hierarchical structure con- items in unforeseen arrangements.
sisting of blocks of information (called lexies) distributed in space and The principle of an open structure is emphasized on the web
connected by electronic paths (links) to provide users with the possibility by the fact that each time the page is loaded, its layout changes, as
of non-linear keyword-based search among the information stored in this the individual clusters of information related to the works of specific
respective manner. artists are rearranged each time into a new constellation, representing
a different chain of associations and network of relationships. In this way,
the database’s architecture and the web’s visual language have been
brought together into an inseparable whole, in which the symbolic and
structural levels merge and are inseparable from each other.
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