Some tech info on the making of this image-driven site: addressing itself to the virtualization in and of architectural social theory, this site presents itself as the equivalent of a seminar paper. The House of the Future was taken from an old Disneyland postcard, © Walt Disney Tomorrowland. The Cave Man Room was taken from a Madonna Inn postcard, © Madonna Inn. The Tomb of Ramses VI was taken from an Egyptian postcard... And then I threw them out.   The documents presented here compile readings from various sources; to a large extent, it evolved out of texts written each week for the graduate seminar on Architectural Social Theory, held by Prof. Roger Friedland of UC Santa Barbara, Fall 1998. The citations from Italo Calvino, Walter Benjamin, Paul Virilio, Anthony Vidler and others remain in the publishers' copyright and are marked as such throughout. The hypertext markup, site design, and image processing was done mostly on Apple PowerMacintosh G3, using BBEdit 4.0, Photoshop 4.0.1, Poser 2.0, GifBuilder 0.5, Mapper 1.0b2, and Smart Dubbing Pro. It was tested in Navigator 3.01 and Explorer 3.0.1 for Macintosh, and uploaded to the UCSB humanitas web server with Fetch 3.0.3. Sitemill 2.0 will be used for maintenance. Please refer to the table of contents or the index map in order to explore the different paths through the site.

The site (3MB) consists of 21 text files, three animations, 22 images and a sound file. I figured that while most documents are laid out so that the browser would switch between them frequently, this one is so boring it needed an ambient noise while people decide where to go. The audio loop behind this document, from the coldcut disc "Boot the System" (1997), was recorded with Peak 1.53 at 44k, filtered with SoundEdit 16v2 as selection for web-use, and flattened with Quicktime 3.0. It should run in the background as you read this; if you experience trouble with the streaming, here is the file (387k).   As seen above, I replaced the skull of the skeleton in Poser with a link to the stairs to create various effects through inverse kinematics and lighting, since for this topic I was looking for something abstract yet three-dimensional. In Photoshop, I like to use the Extensis Phototext plug-in and the Intellihance filter. The reason for using both GifBuilder and Smart Dubbing Pro for the animations is that one created the transitions, and the other helped me to save over 70 percent on the file size for gif animation. The status bar annotations for the index map may work better in Netscape. I have to thank the University of Konstanz, Germany, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as my parents for the use, at various times, of scanners, software, and hardware.

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