App Design (for Ipad) / Personal Project
An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, 2020
An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, 2020
Project Description:
“An Anecdoted Topography of Chance” was originally an exhibition catalogue written by Fluxus artist Daniel Spoerri and published in 1962, which scientifically catalogued, in great detail, the objects lying on a table in his room to ‘exhaust the potential descriptions of a Parisian scene at a particular moment in time’. Over time, several other editions were published in 1966, 1968, 1990, and 1995. The Topo evolved into its most recent “Probably Definitive Re-anecdoted Version”, published in 2015 by Atlas Press – an anecdotal back-and-forth between Spoerri and his friends Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams, Dieter Roth, and Roland Topor (who also illustrated each object).
Throughout Spoerri’s descriptions of these objects, Filliou, Williams, Roth, and occasionally Topor interject often dense annotations to the text with their own associations, memories, and anecdotes evoked by both the objects and Spoerri’s descriptions of them.
This project focused on translating the printed book to the digital environment. The book was analyzed, reorganized and prototyped for a better reading experience in the digital platform.
The key challenge was to define the primary user persona and developing a structure that wouldn’t make the user fall in to the rabbit hole due to its dense layer of anecdotes. The user persona was one who have some background information or interest in experimental books and publications, who would likely explore this app freely with no definite purpose. To not make the user lost in the app, this project focused on making it available to track the user’s path and also setting a limitation to the depth of information the user can access.
“An Anecdoted Topography of Chance” was originally an exhibition catalogue written by Fluxus artist Daniel Spoerri and published in 1962, which scientifically catalogued, in great detail, the objects lying on a table in his room to ‘exhaust the potential descriptions of a Parisian scene at a particular moment in time’. Over time, several other editions were published in 1966, 1968, 1990, and 1995. The Topo evolved into its most recent “Probably Definitive Re-anecdoted Version”, published in 2015 by Atlas Press – an anecdotal back-and-forth between Spoerri and his friends Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams, Dieter Roth, and Roland Topor (who also illustrated each object).
Throughout Spoerri’s descriptions of these objects, Filliou, Williams, Roth, and occasionally Topor interject often dense annotations to the text with their own associations, memories, and anecdotes evoked by both the objects and Spoerri’s descriptions of them.
This project focused on translating the printed book to the digital environment. The book was analyzed, reorganized and prototyped for a better reading experience in the digital platform.
The key challenge was to define the primary user persona and developing a structure that wouldn’t make the user fall in to the rabbit hole due to its dense layer of anecdotes. The user persona was one who have some background information or interest in experimental books and publications, who would likely explore this app freely with no definite purpose. To not make the user lost in the app, this project focused on making it available to track the user’s path and also setting a limitation to the depth of information the user can access.
