Windows and Mirrors

: Interaction Design, Digital Art and The Myth of Transparency

Jay Bolter and Diane Gromala
MIT Press, 2003
Translated into Japanese, 2004

Chapter 1. Text Rain : The Digital Experience

TEXT RAIN is not simply an expression of the artist's personality. (That romantic notion doesn't fit digital art well.) Rather, the experience of this piece comes from the interaction of the viewers with the creators' design. TEXT RAIN is as much an expression of its viewers as of its creators; it is what the viewers make of it. Without them, the piece is incomplete, for there is nothing on the screen but falling letters. In fact, "viewers" is not an entirely adequate term; they are participants or users at the same time. TEXT RAIN is a text that its viewer-users help to create, a text that they write in the process of reading. Like the other digital installations in the gallery, TEXT RAIN is about the process of its own making. (p.13)

Chapter 2. Wooden Mirror : The Myth of Transparency

Before there were computers – indeed, before there were media of any kind – people were just in the world. People saw things as they really were: there were no pixels, no aliasing, and no need for Web-safe colors. Objects were present to people; the rays of light reflected by objects entered their eyes undistorted by any intervening medium (other than the air itself). Today, a good computer interface gets the user as close to that original experience as possible. (p.49)

Chapter 3. Nosce Te Ipsum : Seeing Yourself in the Digital Mirror

The layered images are more complicated than single textured images offered by Wooden Mirror, and more complicated than the combinations of letters and video images of TEXT RAIN. But like both of these other pieces, Nosce Te Ipsum turns out to be a mirror, because it reveals its viewer behind layers of self-dissecting images. Nosce Te Ipsum is a digital collage, or "decollage," as layer after layer peels off as we move toward the scrim. (p.61)

Cover
About the book
Contents
Chapter 1, 2, 3
Chapter 4, 5, 6
Chapter 7, 8, 9
Colophon

ⓒ Diane Gromala, 2007