Jellyfish

Carolin Horn, MFA ’07

project

Jellyfish visualizes an encyclopedia of the arts. The project should be seen as an experiment, which deals with a dynamic interface. The purpose was to remove a static, conventional design and to achieve a playful interface. The application was developed in Processing and uses an XML database to update content.

The encyclopedia of the arts consists of six big families of jellyfishes (depicted with different colors) representative of six main categories: visual arts, design arts, performing arts, literature, film and music. Each of these families is comprised of several family members – the subcategories. The family “design arts”, for example, is composed of the jellyfishes architecture, furniture, graphic design, interactive design etc.

Besides a color-coding of the different families, the behavior of a jellyfish indicates the affiliation to its relatives. All jellyfishes can freely swim around during the running application. By touching one, the relatives (the jellyfishes of the same main category) swim next to this jellyfish, while the remaining jellyfishes move away from the chosen one. At the margin of a jellyfish the artists who have worked in this certain subcategory are represented as dots. By rolling over a dot the name and picture of a certain artist will be shown. This way one can find, for example, artists like Michael Thonet and Charles Eames inside the jellyfish “furniture”.