de Stijl and New Media

Less than four weeks till the end of the semester. Whew. I'm working on getting the imagery just right for this project. I had to stop and think about it for a while actually. I had an image in my head, but it didn't quite feel right at the time. So I waited, patiently, for inspiration to come. It came in the form of a reading from the book Screen that I mentioned in an earlier post. The author was talking about de Stijl as an outline for New Media.

"... an effort to resolve the relationships between structural form and transient content, between cyclical time and infinite space, and between a message transmitted and a message received."


















Jessica Helfand explains that de Stijl is "controllable precision" because of it's geometric nature, the purity of the x/y axis, and it's focus on the simple form of line and color.

The philosophies of the de Stijl movement can be applied to new media to bring together the "static and kinetic, variable and constant, and the universal and unique."

This was an absolute revelation for this project, as I was struggling to find a structure for the whole thing. I have the things I learned from the reading, but they can be hard to apply to an image and even harder to relay to a viewer. Having the structure of the de Stijl movement has given me an excellent outline to further apply what I've learned without compromising the viewer's ability to actually understand what I'm talking about.

I have a rough outline for how my page is going to layout:The whole size is 600 x 1600px, side scrolling. The black parts are where the images will go when I build them. I have some really excellent ones via Dave Morris on Flickr, I'm just not quite sure what I want to do with them yet. One of the things I'm contemplating is starting out the image library with some rigid architectural imagery and moving to more organic free flowing imagery that I'll "break out" of the rigidity of the grid. Too pretentious and contrived? Maybe. But it makes for good visuals. I'll play with that and see how it goes. I'm planning on having the website in some shape or form up this weekend, even if its just a rough working model.