Wishing Well Beta

The Wishing-wellBeta: 11 October 2007

• Content and navigation has been finalised• Users to register with ipernity.com, which will allow them to upload sound/video/pictures • Website will be up-and-running within the next five days, ready for testing• Testing will involve making changes according to user feedback• The next step will be to let users generate content, after which Zunelle will start putting together new mash-ups for the sound installations

Project status

Collaborative partnership

Rat Western• Layout / navigation /

content development for website

• Visual aspects of the wish

• Sourcing server for hosting

Zunelle Cairns• Content / concept• Aural aspects of the

wish• Setting up and

registration of domain name

Project design / aesthetic treatment

Introduction

Interact

- Public drinking fountains

- Swimming pools

- Bathrooms

Wishes

- Public drinking fountains

- Swimming pools

- Bathrooms

Remixes

- Public drinking fountains

- Swimming pools

- Bathrooms

About Us

Research and development

Technical aspects• Streamlining user-interaction (both online

and during the recording/editing process)• Currently piggy-backing on Rat’s homepage,

http://www.ratwestern.com/wish/index.html• Ipernity.com and flicr.com feeds• Ipernity.com offers a Creative Commons

licensing option, which allows the user to choose what to share and under what terms and conditions

• It also allows one to create groups, and to invite others to join these groups

- Public drinking fountains

- Swimming pools

- Bathrooms

ipernity.com: My home

- Public drinking fountains

- Swimming pools

- Bathrooms

Album: Wishing-well

- Public drinking fountains

- Swimming pools

- Bathrooms

The downloadable clip

- Public drinking fountains

- Swimming pools

- Bathrooms

Download options

Concept• The website as a “site” in its own right, and

not only as a means of documenting the sound installations

• Rethinking and applying the wish as both an utterance and a token (aural and visual)

Remixing and Web 2.0: • Some people use the Internet to express and

experiment with various aspects of their identity. This act of dissociation allows us a modus of control over the same kind of wish fulfillment that fuels dreams.

• Life in cyberspace tends to disrupt factors that support self-boundary, as the physical body no longer plays as crucial a role as it does in face-to-face relationships.

• What online users know about each other is not always clear, and the idea of a linear past, present, and future becomes more obscure as one moves back and forth through non-hierarchical forms of communication.

• As a result, this altered state of consciousness in cyberspace tends to shift or destabilise the manifestation of self-boundary. However, the boundaries that distinguish the “self” from the “other” sometimes overlap. A person who suffers from psychosis, for example, may believe that his/her thoughts are being broadcasted to others, or that others’ thoughts are being inserted into his/her mind.

• While this may be pathological, other examples of loose and overlapping self-boundaries are not. One such example of overlapping is empathy, which relies on the individual’s ability to extend his/her own awareness into the realm of the other's experience.

• In our interpersonal dealings, empathy often survives side-by-side with – or even as a result of – the looming possibility of psychosis.

• The Wishing-well is therefore an experiment in exchanging one’s own intimate offerings with a host of perfect strangers, and allowing these offerings to overlap, become re-appropriated, remixed and reapplied to become a record of either empathy or psychosis, or perhaps a permutation of both.

Project plan

• Website up-and-running: 15/10• Testing and user-feedback: 15/10 -

19/10• Monitor and manage website (daily)• 22/10 - 31/10: Generating user

content• 1/11 - 9/11: Set up sound installations

at various sites, and post recordings to ipernity.com

Testing plan• Send link (www.wishing-well.co.za) to a

group of friends on 15/10• During the week of 15/10 - 19/10, we will be

adjusting the content/navigation according to users’ suggestions (although this will be an ongoing process throughout the project)

• This is important, as the project is ultimately a collaboration between all its users

• 22/10 - 31/10: Generating user content• 1/11 - 9/11: Set up sound installations at

various sites, and post recordings to ipernity.com