E Project winners present their work

Presentations of winning projects showing usage of digital technologies gathered more than 80 people in the Commonwealth Ballroom on Wednesday.

Host Richard Fine, professor of English, introduced the winners and provided them with the jury’s feedback on each project. Fine said the idea behind the contest was to provoke student imagination in creating a project with digital technology.

“We didn’t want to specify what we were asking for because we wanted to see what we might not have known about,” Fine said. “We wanted to see what students were doing in terms of using different media.”

The first of five winners, each receiving $500 from the Honors College, was Patrick Scott Vickers, presenting a circle trigger with an arrow circling counter clockwise. “The Aphasia Machine” lets users drag different-shaped dots, each representing a word, read aloud as the arrow goes through it.

The idea, Vickers said, first came to mind while he was driving and thinking of similar triggers often associated with cars, with the arrows always circling in clockwise direction.

Andrew Vo, a photography and film major, presented a video piece telling the story of a student who found the bone of a human finger and tried to find out the significance of his finding. Vo carried the camera and showed scenes of campus, when he finally took a carefully framed picture of the bone to a biology student. After a few seconds, the student asked Vo why he had framed a chicken wing. The unexpected solution to the mystery made the audience laugh and applaud the piece and its producer.

Another interactive computer project won the jury for its interesting design and deep meaning. Kinetic imaging senior Deven Langston presented his “war_machine” and explained what the different parts of the machine represented. Langston zoomed in the image and showed how society consists of the generations that go through different stages.

Langston said the flash currently consists of 600 layers of animation ,and he plans to test whether it could hold 1,000 layers after adding new features.

Zooming out again to show the whole image, Langston said it represents an American flag. The whole system is driven by money, symbolized by the dollar sign on its left side.

The next award recognized a graduate English hypertext project by Thomas Minnick, Josiah Bancoft, Katie Elliott and Juliette Highland. The project was an electronic version of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.”

Winners

Patrick Scott Vickers The Aphasia Machine Flash movie http://www.scotrick.com/aphasia.html
Andrew Vo Phalanx Video not online
Deven Langston war_machine Flash animation http://www.djlangston.com/war_machine/index.html
Louis Handler Anthro Pictorial Volume II Video not online
Thomas Minnick, Josiah Electronic edition of “The http://www.courses.vcu.edu/ENGL624-nf/rubaiyat/home.htm
Bancroft, Katie Elliott, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”
Juliette Highland

The group members said they wanted to deliver a representation of the text that would be respectful to the text itself and to the reader. To maintain the image of “bookness,” the group put the text on a picture of an open book.

The hypertext allows the reader to jump through the text and easily find words with common themes.

Judaic studies major Louis Handler received the fifth award for his video collage on skateboarding. Handler said he had more than 60 hours of video, and he used pieces of it to create a smaller movie, in which he shows him and his friends cascading on skateboards.

Fine said the video may have seemed amateur, but it won the jury for its high quality and photography.

“(The project) would have been easy to overlook, but there is some amazing work,” Fine said. “There is a lot going on, other than just people skateboarding.”

Fine said some projects came from classes and revealed much faculty help, while others represented students’ rich imagination and digital expertise.

“In some circumstances faculty did help, but in many cases students were well ahead in their abilities to use new technologies,” Fine said.