On Vectors Journal...

I have been following an online journal named Vectors Journal. A link to it is here.

My journal is actually very interesting. It took me a while to realize how to work with its structure, but now that I’ve gotten into it, I really enjoy it (unfortunately they only seem to come out with one article a year).

It starts out with a main title and has an introduction to this month’s article. Then it has a group of links to the right that link to different “Projects” (which is really what this online journal is all about). Once you click on the link, you are brought to another page in which you’re given another introduction for the project, an author’s statement, a designer’s statement, Peer responses, Credits, and a link to view the actual “Project.” There are five of these projects for each article. The “Project” usually consists of a flash based page and, in most cases, interactive. They usually focus in on one current issue and orient the project around all aspects of it. Most of the projects I’ve looked at do not make concise arguments as one might usually see in articles, but instead present evidence in a somewhat bias way. The interactivity aspect of it, however, captivates the viewer, making them want to dig deeper and deeper into the project in order to discover some sort of “evidence.” The evidence is placed there by the author, but the viewer has the feeling they are discovering it for themselves (and I guess, in a way, they are).

Because of the way this journal is set up, I will be writing not about the entire articles in the blog but about the specific projects. It would be very difficult to write about the articles in their entirety, and makes a lot more sense to write about the individual projects, which are much more specific to one issue and easier to draw conclusions from. Because of this, I will be writing about the projects in this journal.

Another thing that is interesting about my journal is how little it actually talks about art or the artwork it’s showing. The art seems secondary to the social issues these projects are addressing. Because of all of this, it is hard to write about the questions posted on D2L that we are supposed to address. I guess I shouldn’t say it’s hard – it’s just not straightforward. There is no clear-cut answer to any of the questions in D2L about this journal, though it is easy to infer a lot of these answers.

So I guess this is a disclaimer then, telling you reading my blog that this discussion of Vector’s Journal is not going to concise or based on hard, concrete evidence, but instead based on my own inferences, biases, and educated guesses. Though, in my opinion, that’s all knowledge is anyway.