Bingo
Word: Universality
Method: A One-Page Website
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After the dice decided my faith I was once again left with total confusion. “Universality“ – why did I even decide to write this vague term down? How am I going to tackle making a one-page website (hint: I’m nowhere near knowing how to code) about universality? Where should I even start? I could fill this page with literally anything..
One thing I knew was that I didn’t want to make a website just for displaying information. My website should become a tool for generating or collecting data. But data about what? Universality?! – certainly not..
Once again looking back to my previous project I decided to go back to one of my all-time references – the good old Golden Record. One of the first messages sent out into space in order to reach out to potential extraterrestrials. After looking at the transmission of the Arecibo Message and the simplification of information and how that influences the original information and the interpretation by the receiver, I was still interested in the content that was chosen for these messages. The way we decided to portray humankind to present ourselves to our potential cosmic neighbours. Our curated and fabricated identity.
A representation of humankind through a collection of images, music, sounds from earth with actively leaving out images of war, famine, violence etc.. should depict life on earth as a utopian way of life. The curator behind the Golden Record was Carl Sagan and his committee of the Cornell University for NASA. The record should capture the diversity of life and culture on earth and is targeted towards any intelligent life form that may encounter and be able to decipher it. The content, selected by a small number of people, tries to capture life on earth in a very universal approach which makes the message very one-dimensional.
This universal approach to condensing human identity into one message made me want to collect different views on identity. Views that are not just translated into text but also depicted by some kind of imagery the user can create themselves through using the website. A system with simple geometrical shapes and a few facial features should restrict the user to generate their answer to the question „What does identity mean to you?“.
Some of the answers I got from a couple of participants. I noticed that most of them used the face features instantly to build something that should resemble a face. Also I got feedback that several wanted to rotate or scale the shapes in order to use them in a certain way. Plus, it was hard to utilise the rigid systems with shapes in order to portray their thoughts on a loaded and very broad term like “identity”.