Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The Agneta & Frida system
From the web, we collected about 40 actual sites about film production, rep-
resenting small production companies and organizations as well as local film
production collectives. The sites presented information about present produc-
tions, production financing, manuscript sales, marketing of films, actors, co-
workers, profile of the company, premiers, etc. Some sites contained an exten-
sive body of documents, whereas others were quite simple in structure. Some
were professionally designed; others were of a 'home-page' character. All sites
were in English, except one, which was authored in Swedish. We created an
index of the sites and removed all outgoing links.
To this collected information space we added Agneta and Frida. These two
animated female characters - mother and daughter - would sit on the desk-
top, watching the browser more or less like watching television. With the help
of a professional graphic designer and the voices of two actors, we created a
library of short audio-visual animations or 'films' that would be triggered by
two sets of cues.
First, most comments and behaviors of Agneta & Frida were related to spe-
cific locations in the information space. Downloading a page, clicking a link,
dragging the mouse over an image or playing a soundtrack would execute gen-
eral everyday speculations to what something on a site could mean, what the
purpose of the site was, or if the design was likeable or not (see Figure 1). Er-
ror messages and browser malfunctions would be critically remarked upon.
We programmed all of these comments beforehand. There was thus no real
'intelligence' in the system. Often the comments alluded to Agneta and Frida's
everyday life and thus provided the user with their 'back story' (e.g., 'that looks
like uncle Harry!' [laugh]). Since we envisioned Agneta and Frida to be com-
puter illiterates, their remarks about computer technology and its male dom-
inance were fairly critical and often ironic in tone. In fact, one of the over-
all purposes of the system was to provide a non-transparent and self-reflexive
interface, making apparent the mechanisms by which it works and the socio-
economical factors lying behind its origin. Agneta and Frida miss no chance to
make visible and make fun of patriarchy, capitalism and techno-geeks.
In this way, we scripted the comments to reflect Agneta and Frida's person-
alities, ideologies, morals and sense of humor. Since both of them are strong-
willed individuals, they occasionally even got into verbal disputes. None of the
comments were scripted to be 'helpful', but to invoke laughter and sometimes
reflection on the information browsed. Although a user might come back to
the same location, none of these behaviors were executed more than once.
