Artwitter : the reinterpretation of social networks

Abstract

Ant farm was a collective group of architects established in 1968 in San Francisco. Through critiquing the reversal of TV and automobile, Ant Farm reinterpreted television into Inflatable Architecture and Inflatocookbook, and reinterpreted automobiles into the Media Van and Truckstop Network. Ant Farm created a techno-utopia for "nomads" in the 1960s. By bridging their designs with the media theories from Marshall McLuhan, I develop a method from McLuhan's Laws of Media, called Media Interpretation, to decomposed Ant Farm's design process. The Media Interpretation contains four processes: taking advantage of what the media enhance, rejecting what the media reverse, redesigning what the media retrieve and participating in what the media make obsolete. Based on the background research, my thesis shifts its focus on the pervasive media from 1960s to today and applies the method of Media Interpretation as a design and critical tool. My thesis chooses social networks to critique, from which I reinterpret social networks into an application Artwitter. Through combining social networks with augmented reality, Artwitter enables its users to post their moments as texts, graffiti or virtual objects in the physical world. Artwitter extends the mechanism of social networks to offline social awareness to engage its users into social interaction in the physical space. Artwitter also releases the power of crowd-sourcing physical spaces to explore the potential of reconstructing the physical world with virtual objects.