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May 22, 2006

OZONE TERRACE 1997-1998

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Online Apartment Building

OZONE TERRACE Background: Developments in interactive media technologies have created a new role in broadcasting, the programme designer; a cross between programme maker, artist and author. We were commissioned by the BBC television series 'The Net' and Illuminations television to design a programme which was a hybrid between a website and television documentary.

What we did: We made an experimental website which uses simple graphics to construct a virtual skyscraper – the framework for an evolving, multithreaded narrative that occurs when authors of interesting and slightly exhibitionist web sites are invited to 'move in' to the web-building and contribute their stories. After the building had been 'live' and populated for a few weeks, we made an animated documentary about the lives of the building's inhabitants.

The project grew out of an equal interest in both in the content – exploring ways of generating interactive narratives – and in form – how you could use the things that are easy and fast to do on the web, such as block graphics, in elegant and effective ways. The website, which was intended to be self-generating, in fact needed a lot of cultivation – it needed weeding and fertilizing with encouragement if the tenants were to be persuaded to keep contributing. There were several strands in this project: one was to try to understand what made things engaging, what made people want to contribute their stories initially, and then to continue or to stop. Another strand was to try to make a self-generating interactive narrative which, because it was being generated by many people might have qualities of surprise and interest that it would be difficult for one person to generate. The structure needed to be light enough to allow variety and invention but strong enough to give coherence to the potentially very disparate contributions. A third strand was to do with craft: of the web graphics, carefully tuned to the web's limitations, and the final animated film – with its own contrasting set of conventions and possibilities.

Project team
Chris Downs and Ben Hooker

Posted by jo at May 22, 2006 09:53 AM

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