I N T E R A C T I V E  O B J E C T S  &  W I S H I N G  W E L L S

look wishing well
The low stone wishing well has been placed in the
center of the park. Looking over the edge, the
water seems very far down, and very dark. You
could almost believe that if you gave the well a
coin (give well=1) and said "I wish " ,
your wish might be heard.
Give wishing well=1
You paid 1 Ducat.
You drop a ducat into the well.
"I wish Karen would arrive


To: Alan Schwartz
From:artists@somewhere.org.uk (Nina & Karen)
Subject: ideas from the wishing well
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 1998

... in light of our experience with trying to create drawings of MU**s and
from the ideas you gave me from the wishing well in M*U*S*H we now think
it would be interesting to start by basing the desciptions on images which
have occurred over time in our work. We'd like to try this for a number of 
reasons, to see how the reverse process of drawing text spaces might work,
and to give the space a sense of 'belonging' to the rest of our work; but mainly
to enable us to experiment with more diverse ways of collecting 'data' from
our 'audience' or 'users'. I mean by this that we would like a number of
the objects or spaces to function like the wishing well in your M*U*S*H
where people can leave messages, requests, stories, wishes etc. We like
these more interactive aspects of the text based environments, and we are
interested to see how this approach may extend our past use of 'interviews'
within our practice. We've also been thinking about the potential for using
the fact objects and spaces could appear differently to different users -
for example if people defined themselves on entry by different criteria (ie
other than gender) like visual/literary  person (artist/writer) could we
then present them with different 'views'?