Shifting Language
web, interactive application, 2017Shifting Language is an interactive website prototype that contains a piece of text from Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian novel Player Piano which analyses the societal effects of workers being replaced by machines. The audience is invited to replace the words with images, thus playing with the degree of interpretability of the text, and creating new meaning through juxtapositions.
The website is part of an extended research about the transition between communicating with text to communicating with images in online conversations and the use of animated GIFs as rhetorical devices. The goal of the research is to investigate the potential of GIFs to counteract problematic effects of media-based online communication, like shaping an environment where objective facts won’t have much influence in shaping public opinion.
Go to the test website here.