Reading Response B -- Conversation 1, "art.yale.edu" (2017)

Dan: The site actually relates to themes Tamara was thinking about as a grad student more than me. Her thesis was called Detourism. She was really interested in nonlinear systems that describe how people move in the world. Almost like dérive or something—the ways people take paths that are known only to them, or that are surprising. Of course, they might be influenced by authority or government in some way, but people find ways to make their own unique paths.

An open-ended system, like the wiki Sheila mentioned, could be re-combined in so many ways with its kit of parts. You might say it’s like a little box of toys or something—there are trillions of combinations that you could build. That has taken place. You can imagine the sort of map of what has happened with this site. If you tried to draw it as a flowchart or something like that, it would be the craziest Guy Debord diagram ever.

One can even relate this web-like structure to many editable social media sites. Everyone has their own take on the content whether that be pictures or text and the underlying structure holds it together so that it is easily accessible by the user. In this sense there are infinite combinations of information as new media continues to be poured into the site. A video game "Disney Infinity" also takes advantage of people's creativity and this toolbox notion where users can build their own world much input in the same way one plays with legos.It would be really cool if the web-like architecture of creativity could be visualized better.

Although art.yale.edu is very collaborative and tactile website, I found it difficult to find relevant information when all of the pages were so vastly different than anything I had encountered before. It is more of a piece of digital art rather than an informative site where students can access content they need. I wish that the main pages, the homepage in particular, was structured to visually highlight important links such as "Summer Programs," "Admissions," etc. while keeping the liveliness of the site. Right now I'm drawn backward into the page via the background image and it is hard to pull back to the surface to read the text.

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