User:MerielAllen/sandbox

= Trina by Anne Burdick =

Overview
Released in 2018, Trina is an interactive graphic story implementing speculative design created by Anne Burdick.

Creator
Anne Burdick is an American designer who acquired her MFA and BFA at the California Institute of The Arts after her undergraduate work at The Art Centre College of Design at San Diego State University. Burdick is now a professor at both the Art Centre College of Design and the University Technology Sydney. Some notable achievements in her career include being the design editor of Electronic Book Review from 1997-20121, author of Digital Humanities, designer of Writing Machines , and the creator of the graphic story; Trina.

Story
Trina is a 60-frame graphic story about a woman called Trina who uses a speculative software created by Burdick to decipher texts for military intelligence. Working with devices implanted in her eyes and hands, Trina uses physical actions to search through a virtual database. After exploring the gendered history of the typewriter, Trina assumes the hands of a female typist who had hidden a secret message in a document. Despite being occupied with technology, it is this new embodied relationship with writing which renders Trina a cyborg. The graphic relies on the viewer to use their keyboard to progress the story, which also initiates the next segment of the music sequence.

Production
Trina was released in 2018 by Burdick in collaboration with writer Janet Sarbanes and sound artist Casey Anderson. It was an exploration within Micro Mega Meta – a design driven inquiry into the future of humanities research through speculative design.

Key Influences
==== A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction by Jerome McGann ==== Inspired by McGann's notion of n-dimensional texts, the speculative software used by the titular character in Trina is a response to his call for a digital spatial textuality. The VR prototypes created by Burdick are designed to explore McGann's ideas.

==== Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions by Lucy Suchman ==== Drawing from Lucy Suchman's studies on how creating human-computer interactions involves configuring the "human" in conjunction with the "computer" the project investigates which conception of "the human" is most appropriate for the creation of technologies.

Photo Opportunities by Corinne Vionnet
Vionnets layered images of popular landmarks positions the subject as a combination of viewer perspectives. The speculative software designed by Burdick uses this approach so that the viewer isn't restricted to a singular perspective of the software.

Butterfly Software by Xerox Parc
The software developed at Xerox Parc informed the structural features of Burdick's speculative software. The virtual landscape used in Butterfly to access information is replicated in Trina's research software.

Speculative Design
Speculative design is a design practice concerned with future design proposals of a critical nature Burdick uses this method to explore the potential of future research practices, and the possibilities and restrictions which will follow such advances. Burdick’s interest in writing technologies is evident across her work (Writing Machines, New Variorum Shakespeare ), by using speculative design she has been able to further explore this topic without the limitations of reality.

Feminism in Typewriting
Burdick uses Trina’s research into typewriting to educate the viewer on feminist issues within the history of typewriting. The story emphasises the role of women in the development of type machines. Burdick proposes that the typewriter was a method of empowerment for women as it allowed them to join the work force and enter the office environment. The skill these women had for typing was of high regard but after the war this respect was diminished and talented female typewriters were reduced to just ‘Secretaries’.

The Body and Typing
Burdick created the speculative software in Trina in consideration of how technologies operate in concert with the body. In her reflective essays on Trina, Burdick describes how she came to understand writing as something that required eyes as much as hands, but with the invention of the typewriter, it became possible to type without looking. The physical programming of the body which takes place in learning to type is illustrated in Trina when the main character learns to type just by touching her fingertips together.