Project 5:
Visionary Selves and Virtual Gainesville

Purpose: For this assignment, you will work in groups to produce a "visionary" hyptertext tour guide of Gainesville. Each group will be assigned sections of Gainesville (which may include sites in downtown, the University, the "student ghetto," the Oaks Mall, areas of "urban blight," Paynes Prarie, and the Devil's Milhopper). Your object will be discover and evoke the relationship between self and space contained within these various sites.
Part One:

 Each group member will visit the area he or she has been assigned and choose a specific site (i.e., a building, a bench, a store, a tree, etc.) to write about. The group member should begin by recording his or her obeservations on both the "real" built (or natural) setting and the emotional or psychological effect of this environment.

In a critical evaluation, you should consider the forces that constitute your experience of this space (both from the outside world and in your own mind): who has the place been created by and for? what is its purpose? what in your own experience governs your response to it?

Part Two:

 Write a description of the landscape which is a re-vision from the visionary self's point of view. In other words, merge the "real" and the "virtual" (the ideological, the personal, the political) in a radical reconstruction of the space and the subjectivity it entails.

The description should:
1) be written in the form of an encounter using one of the three types of encounter described in project 2.

2) explain how this vision is a "line of flight" as described in project 3.

3) destabilize the existent social setting as described in project 4.

4) relate the location to specific passages in the texts we have read this semester

5) be about 700 words distributed across multiple screens.

Each group member will link his or her project to a central group screen and to other group member's projects, so that a fragmentary and monstrous virtual Gainesville begins to emerge in the intersection of links. You will change the actual Gainesville to fit your visionary self's perspective of a Gainesville that is both in our actual world and in a utopic or dystopic world.

The Screen:

You will use your Web skills to help facilitate the creation of this virtual world by employing multiple screens and a montage of images and links. Your design should put into performance your visionary description of the site. You should:

a) use multiple links in each screen to prevent a linear reading of your text and to shuttle between different levels or modes of discourse (description, analysis, citation of texts, critique).

b) play on the idea of the screen as a place both where things are revealed and hidden. What is being projected on the screen? What does the screen hide or make "invisible"? The invisible can be an-other world, an-other psychic state, an-other possibility.

c) use images not merely to double the verbal text but to add a unique pictoral commentary.

Schedule: Group 5 will present to the class on how to do the project on 12/9. You will be on your own to work alone and with your group to finish the project no later than 12/17. The final project should be online, linked to your homepage, and with a hard copy to be turned in.