phreakhead /Doodler
Doodler
The image is a pure creation of the mind.
It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.
The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality...
- Pierre Reverdy (Nord-Sud, March 1918)
The Surrealists created imagery by pitting two peoples' creative powers against each other in a twisting together of their subconsciouses like different colored strands in a rope. Once the twisting was completed, the resulting image was one that no one planned but everyone invented in separate, yet connected, contexts. Doodler is a social space that realizes and connects these contexts with a variety of systems and interface structures. It is designed to facilitate and encourage appropriation of not only content, but interface as well. In this way, it becomes a platform open to user-created games emphasizing collective drawing and multi-authored narrative.
Doodler provides a space on which to put all the elements of the web: text, pictures, multimedia like sounds and videos, and windows into other pages. It also provides a simple drawing mechanism, so anyone can instantly doodle, sketch, or render drawings on any page at any time. The goal is for users to be able to quickly and easily contribute to existing pieces that they find by browsing the social network, with little or no previous knowledge of HTML or web design. This spontaneous editing capability encourages users to collaborate, appropriate and communicate with each other in the private time of their own browsing or in real-time, with multiple users drawing concurrently in the same space.
Since Doodler basically emulates an infinite piece of paper on which to draw, place text and images, or add hyperlinks, it lends itself naturally to playing Surrealist games of spontaneous collaborative creation, such as Exquisite Corpse. In traditional Exquisite Corpse, each player draws a continuation of the last drawing and then folds the paper down to cover most of his drawing. By hiding the drawing before the next person continues it, the Surrealists believed this would encourage autonomous creativity: a tapping of the subconscious’ tendencies of symbols and flow.
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