“You might see something strange. But these are only fragments of reality.” Fragmentation Era is an interactive web application based on a prompted language model. It is designed to dive into conversations on the most banal topics from a fictional social media. Inspired by Web 2.0’s impact on different levels of society, especially socially, this is an alternative artistic interpretation of these platforms and a reflection of the user’s experience on social media.
Web 2.0 is the era of user-engaging platforms — content, ideas, creations and experiences spread faster than ever. The issue with these centralized platforms is that users are placed in an imbalanced position of power between them and the few entities who control the platform. Networked information technologies should fundamentally democratize cultural production; instead these platforms limit online participation for profit-driven purposes, moulding internet culture into a fast-food restaurant that prioritizes snackable content with commercially motivated algorithms.
It is extremely difficult to abandon these platforms because of the network effect. You use one app to talk to family, another for schoolmates, another because everyone is on it. Since they all use different protocols, users cannot communicate across platforms. We are suffering from information overload and message bombardment; escape is hardly possible.
During development, even though the text should be the focus of the application, I still wanted dynamic elements. I imported the face-tracking model from P5.js and used it to trace the landmarks of the mouth, so the text input box follows the user’s features.