On vectors, I explored Shi Jian – a project by Mark Hansen. The project aims to look at time and memory in their own components, dwelling on its tangibility, lapse, and functionality in our lives. More importantly, the site aims to explore digital image and how our uses and classification of it nowadays on digital platforms plays with the concept of “time”.  Nowadays, there are so many images and algorithmic structures on the web that some of which, can be debated whether or not it still conforms to our own “human scales of time and memory”. In this project, Hansen archived six months worth of personal images and videos in Beijing. These images are lifestyle-based and are snapshots of familiar tourist scenes. What the user can do on this site is look at the image in different scales of time: Date, Place, Quality of Light, POV and Type of Time. Instead of viewing in albums or virtual tours, the image stands as a piece and function of time.

Navigating the site, I was not immediately clear on the statement until I had read the editor’s introduction. Perhaps it is because we are so used to the social media way of organizing images and videos – into albums. The site did well in offering different conceptual way of viewing images and it became easier later on to look at images in different ways. I would have liked a better homepage on the site so that I am guided into this concept of looking at photos in a different way. The home page was more theoretical and included more philosophy of the topic – something that might be a little too hard to grasp for someone coming onto the site for the first time. The timeline concept was also an interesting visual for the site, however I did need more guidance on the significance of the images since sometimes it seems as though they had been chosen randomly. Overall, the site has an interesting idea that got me thinking differently – I just feel like I needed a little more guidance in the interface of it.