Facebook: Romeo Montague
In this second pass at revealing the cliche nature of never actually knowing someone on Facebook. I used Shakespeare’s tale of Romeo & Juliet. Specifically creating a Facebook page for Romeo Montague and using the factual events of Romeo’s hidden love affair leading to his unknown death — having no one who was truly close to him know the reason why he has died.

Propelled by the short comings of the original Facebook Overlay exercise I was compelled to overcome the failure. Using a tactic discovered in the “Mary Worth” (which can be found below), I was able to create a compelling layer of strange ambiguity and familiarity. Requiring the reader to take note of the missing information and realize the structure of the story and how it lends itself to the very nature of social networking — you can never really know someone from being friends on Facebook.

Icon Manifesto
This exercise was tailored to reveal the importance of taking a position on a specific message. Owning our own words and staying in character throughout a whole piece of written and designed work. This exercise has proven to be helpful in more ways than one.





Grotesque Security
An exercise in taking an existing object and repositioning it to create a new meaning. This exercise also relied heavily on developing a context in which this message can live. As well as the details of image creation; composition, lighting, color, objectivity, juxtaposition and so on. Relying heavily on the constructs developed by Surrealists.





Worth, Shakespeare, & Harvey
A play with words, we were asked to remove and replace the text in an existing piece of literature, in this case a “Mary Worth” comic strip. By chance, a conversation between PJ Harvey and Shakespeare was created. This was my first instance of going into an exercise not knowing what to do but just making as much as possible until I found something worth submitting. Essentially and unknowingly embracing the poetic method.





The intention of this interface/overlay was to communicate the personal point of view of my existential value within the world of Facebook. That no matter how hard I try to work on my Facebook page my social value doesn’t help me in the physical world or in the digital. Expressing the notion that Facebook is an avenue for losing one’s self and only germinates a deeper feeling of, in my case, non-existence.

In review of this project it was revealed that my execution was too literal and could have used a more compelling layer. It was also unclear to me how literal I could have been, and the ability to use external information was also not apparent. I was always under the impression that what we overlay had to be our own content. I could have used a more compelling gesture to communicate my point of view.

Some concepts to consider:
• the idea of altering the identity through intervention
• transformation
• the injection of external information, which is related, can alter the present
• recasting
• multiple layers of meaning from a single gesture but not too vague for loss of interpretation

In conclusion my gut instinct the night before was on point. After having finished the project, and even minutes before the critique I had felt that the message was not strong enough and could have been explored in a different and deeper way. It could have helped to execute the project by a faster means and not be too involved with the technological aspect. Where by working faster and analyzing multiple concepts I could have uncovered a more fruitful solution.