Chapter 10: Interfaces

The two sites My Body and Depression Quest use interactive media to convey their artist's themes, with the websites having hyperlinks attached to an artist's dialogue to the viewer. Essentially, both the sites convey their themes by presenting the viewer with clickable "choices" that creates new media for them to click on until all the site's content has been displayed. This is both a highly interactive and invigorating way to display and interpret art.

In chapter 10 of our coursebook, within the first paragraph explaining interfaces, there's two quotes used from outside sources that seek to introduce the idea of "the internet of things": "While we tend to think of interfaces as screens, they also include the peripheral devices such as the mouse, touchpad, joystick, and voice-activated tools, as well as smart devices (Norman 2010). The “internet of things” has extended the ways in which systems are connected to each other through interfaces (Burgess 2018)." Through the overwhelming power of the internet, the exact definition of an interface has begun to lost it's meaning, as interfaces merge with the internet to create entirely new ways to convey ourselves. We are in a entirely new era of expression, as our technological pursuits have mixed together with our emotional expression, and this has left the world of art, one that for millennia was about physical, earthly expression, in a bit of  a chaos. There are artists like the creators of Depression Story that accept the digital age and it's strange blend of our emotions with our technology, and create art that comforts this new relationship, and there are artists like the creator of My Body, that express the more uncomfortable emotions that come with this new era. Both websites are tackling similar emotional issues, but Depression Story seeks to directly explain the exact nature of their issues through a dark yet oldy comforting html style and shorter text that removes your sense of choice to illustrate feelings of depression. Meanwhile, My Body uncomfortably displays all their issues upfront, as somewhat jarring art is accompanied by pages of text, with hyperlinks named after body parts leading to stories that explain the emotional issues that effected those body parts. Both websites use html art and hyperlinks to guide the viewers through their artistry and accompanying stories of emotional turmoil, and as art has always done, these new-age artists seek to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.