/issues/7/totality/ http://vectors.usc.edu/xml/projects/totalityforkids_v1.xml http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/backgrounds/wark.jpg inc/css/screen_pastel.css projects/icons/wark.jpg 0 0 0 0 0 0 Understanding Comics as a kind of bible for visual communication in the digital realm.]]> Vectors is their exploratory attitude to this.]]> The Arcades Project entirely of quotations.]]> Legends have their uses, as distillations of the wisdom of events, as ways of passing on a knowledge of situations. History as a discipline dissolves the event back into the archive, turning history (event) into history (text), consigning it to the past. The legend is a way of making the summation of past events present to future ones.

This quotation from one of the comic book annotations in McKenzie Wark's Totality for Kids sums up the grand aspirations of the project, to make the ideas behind the Situationist International not only legible, but meaningful in a culture poised for submersion in the cynicism of neoliberal corporatism. Created in collaboration with designer Erik Loyer and comic artist Kevin C. Pyle, Totality for Kids forays into the pre-history of the SI, beginning in post-war Paris with the group's predecessor the Lettrist International, and continuing through the apotheosis of political radicalism marked by the general strike of May '68.

Wark's project is also cognizant of the dangers of academic treatments of movements that are predicated on rejection of institutional establishments writ large. "Like any glamour," he notes, "it is elusive, it slips away as soon as you try to grasp it. Exegesis kills it, this exegesis as much as any other." As an inoculation against prospective charges of academicization, this disclaimer rings slightly disingenuous, as Wark, Loyer and Pyle have clearly been at pains to avoid the type of exegesis that would reduce Situationism to simply another quixotic social movement that was too extreme for its own good. But the result remains intoxicatingly pleasurable - the kind of intoxication that brings revelation and flights of association far beyond the academic mandate.

The written texts of Totality for Kids exist in gentle conversation with Pyle's richly stylized illustrations and a lyrical yet energetic musical score performed by The Love Technology. The written passages perform a deep interweaving of annotation, quotation and allusion, perhaps a subtle homage to Walter Benjamin's desire to compose his final work The Arcades Project entirely of quotations. Like Benjamin's Arcades, Totality for Kids remains an open and arguably unfinishable project, illuminating both past and future through awareness of our situation in the present.]]> Totality for Kids turned out completely differently to what I actually proposed. I had just done the Gamer Theory site with the Institute for the Future of the Book, and the Vectors people were interested in the participatory side of that. But things evolved. The Vectors team had a really nice way of creating a visual interface to an underlying database, so that seemed the place to start. The idea was to present Kevin Pyle's art as something like a comic strip, but where the reader could dive down through two layers beneath it. One layer would be explanatory text, and the second would be documents. These could be a sort of Easter egg for anyone who spent some time with the site. I wanted the whole thing to use freely available non-copyright material, so I commissioned The Love Technology to perform a traditional French folk song relevant to the period. (France in the 50s had a folk revival not unlike the American one). Likewise the art is all drawn from historical material but freely recast dtourned as the Situationists would say so as to be available in the public domain again under the Creative Commons license. The text of the strip is also all dtourned from the writings of Guy Debord and others. One aspect of the Digital Humanities that I think tends to get neglected is the aesthetics of presenting research material, and what attracted me to Vectors is their exploratory attitude to this.]]> Understanding Comics as a kind of bible for visual communication in the digital realm. At first blush this may seem a bit odd, since the book doesn't make any great effort on its own to address digital technologies (unlike McCloud's later work Reinventing Comics). For me, however, and I think for many interactive media designers, the appeal lies in the way McCloud reveals that latent within comics is a ready-made, compact language for rich visual storytelling that, in its iconicity, lends itself to the symbolic languages of computers, not to mention low budgets. Unlike in a AAA video game, compelling storytelling using the affordances of comics doesn't rely on photorealistic rendering, sophisticated artificial intelligence, legions of production artists, or other accoutrements typically out of reach of the individual designer. Instead, we find a set of simple, accessible, and powerful tropes for defining the shape of time, space, and perception.

The potentials that emerge when comics go digital have been a longtime fascination for me across multiple projects, and so when I learned that McKenzie Wark's project on the Situationist International involved a retelling of the history of the movement in comic book form, I immediately wanted to work on the project. Though our digital adaptation of the comic commissioned by Wark is more of a gesture toward these potentials than an in-depth exploration, I think the way the project makes digital objects of comic book visual language fundamentals like panels and dialogue bubbles, linking them to further explications of their content, hints at fruitful future directions. What happens when the content and characteristics of a panel in a digital comic become truly data-driven and responsive?]]>