Technologies of History, authored by Steve Anderson and designed by Erik Loyer is an interactive site that presents film, footage, and video game clips of the assassination of JFK. It is intended to analyze and bring into question the “entangled relationships among media, history and memory.” The project brings into question our reliance and trust placed on film or photography in the creation of histories through the close study of the JFK’s assassination, chosen for its pervasiveness in American culture.
When opening the project, you are presented with the title of the project, author, and designer, along with a series of flashing images that seem to be from the second half of the 20th century, but they flash too quickly for one to actually comprehend what each is depicting. To enter the project itself, there is a Begin button at the bottom of the page.
As one enters the project, each page plays the audio of a series of videos that are accessible and related to that page’s topic. For example, Digital History plays clips of video games with the audio playing off each. Each of the clips of audio and film are related to a piece of text that does not necessarily illuminate the film but draws into question what we gather from it.
The website itself is not difficult to navigate, but it does take piecing together to understand the
purpose of the project because it is obscured through the process of accessing the text through these film clips. It is ultimately gathered from the author’s statement on the vectors’ original site
which provides a direct statement on the project’s intentions. The presentation of the website itself is not clear because as you enter in the introductory page you are presented with an ever changing graph that appears similar to a network graph. In the author’s statement, this is described as the “’Analyzer,’ in which media elements are subjected to a process of tracking and fragmenting designed to simultaneously reveal and obscure the contents of a film or video clip.”
This navigation is ultimately successful because it intentionally plays with the questions that the project itself is attempting to address and question. The project is designed to question the authority of media and the site itself plays with obscuring and presenting information. While it is effective, I personally would have preferred a direct address of the project’s intentions within the project itself.