Annemieke van der Hoek

Final Project: EpicPedia (www.epicpedia.org, april-july 2008)

EpicPedia is a web script that renders Wikipedia articles and their revision/editing history as a theater script, taking inspiration from Bertolt Brecht's estrangement effect that he used in his idea of Epic Theatre.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is one of the world's most used sources of knowledge, but also one of the most criticized. There is a paradox in the way Wikipedia presents its articles that intrigued me in creating this project. On the one side Wikipedia wants its users to be aware of how older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles more frequently contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. With this awareness they can obtain valid information and avoid misinformation that has been recently added and not yet removed. On the other side, the way Wikipedia presents its articles now cannot create such an awareness.

Bertolt Brecht
Brecht was one of the first dramatists to use estrangement techniques. He wanted the audience at the same time to view a theatre play and be aware of the situation of being a spectator of a theatre play. So that they could enjoy the theatre but also think and criticize the society that is being showed at the same time. He therefore used for example film or projections to display chapter titles, definite gestures of showing, transposition into the third person in order not to give the audience a chance of identifying themselves with the character being portrayed (which also includes the actor), transposition into the past where the actor must play the incidents as historical ones, musical interludes and speaking the stage directions out loud. So in order to explain something about a medium itself (Wikipedia) you can estrange a user or viewer from it by using another medium (a theatre script) to achieve the explaining, while still being online (in my case) or while still being in the theatre (Brecht).

EpicPedia
A theatre script is an explanatory document that I used as a model to explain the mechanism of Wikipedia, outside of Wikipedia. It can show for every Wikipedia article how it is constructed, when it is constructed and who its contributors are. Users are able to show and hide the original Wikipedia window that lays on top of the theatre script. This gives the opportunity to view and edit a Wikipedia article and to view a live rendered theatre script based on recent made edits to the article. Users can adopt an attitude of inquiry and criticism in their approach to Wikipedia by using EpicPedia.

download Final Essay: here

My telephone @ the Spacecell @ the Spacebar @ Salle Demain
@ Museumnacht 2008 (march 1st 2008)

MAKE AND DO: thematic project III (april-june 2007)

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click on image to go to my MakeDO blog for the process:

WIKKE.nu (november 2006-march 2007)

Portfolio webpage for Wikke van Houwelingen, scenographer. WIKKE.nu is the output of a cgi script. Whenever you click on an image, the script will run and an html page will be generated and displayed in the browser. The advantage of this is, that for maintaining and updating the page, you only would have to upload the new files into one directory. The names of the images determine the categories of the images. By entering the page for the first time, the entire structure is already visible, but small. When clicking on an image, you zoom to a single file at the top of the page. You can see clearly now to which project it belongs, to which category the project belongs and so forth. This was my first experiment with creating a page that would be quite easy to maintain by its new owner.