Document:Q11118

High : Rise was a project created for Robert
Ascher's Visual Anthropology class at Cornell
University during Spring 1998. The purpose of
the project was to profile a person, real or
fictional, through a visual medium.
By choosing the World Wide Web as my
medium, the project's conceptual
framework parallels the philosophical
aspect of J. G. Ballard's 1975 novel,
High-Rise, from which this project was
loosely adapted from.
Ballard's novel served not only as a
socio-cultural commentary on the state of
the human condition in an environment
accelerated by technology, but it was also
the starting point to which I began a
theoretical discourse on the ideology of
progress and what that meant for us as a
culture at the end of the twentieth century.
Technology has always been the emblem
of human advancement and civilization,
and throughout history, it has become the
signifier of progress, enlightenment, and
power for a nation or a group of people.
Ballard's novel fundamentally questions
this notion of forward movement by
suggesting that man lives in an illusion of
"civilization" created by technology's
phantasmagoric appeal.
My project documents the protagonist's
experience in a high-rise building during
a period of about three months. The
trajectory of the narrative and concept of
the project is always upward. One is
forced to read upward and navigation is
entirely limited to the upward movement.
This forced habit is antithetical to our
natural visual orientation to read top-down
and the constant requirement to reorient
oneself when a new sentence flashes on
the screen simultaneously question both
the user's dependence on this kind of
technology for the unveiling of the
narrative and the protagonist's
transformation in relation to the building.
The layering of the text throughout the
narrative progression becomes chaotic
and disorderly - the threat of a text that is
unfamiliar, threatening, and resistant to
knowledge is also something I consider
as a pivoting point to not just the narrative
mapping of this project but also to the
web as a tool of text-based
communication. The text begins
singularly but becomes congested and
disorienting; knowledge becomes
multiplied and in a sense distracted by the
technology.
Isabel Chang
http://www.doxa.net/highrise/