Title: Uncontrollable Semantics, and others
secrettechnology.com/mouse/undirection.html
Detail: Interactive poem dispersed over 50 mouse followers.
While net-art becomes increasingly more complex, more database and programming centered, this project shoots for simplicity. ….Utilizing the basic mouse-follower, Uncontrollable Semantics pulls together over fifty dramatically different sound, image and interactive environments, all through the simple mouse follower. While a simple innovation, this technique allows the user/player/reader to create their own experience, to feel the work come from the screen. Each environment offers four directions to four terms, four semantics, four named creatures. Explore and play and confuse yourself.
I often reflect on that experience when I create new digital poems. I’ve always been inclined to create works that require readers to interact to do something. As I’ve mentioned previously, interactivity makes the user part of the writing process it, lures them into the experience of the digital poem. The mouse is one of the most basic, and most immediate of computer devices for interactivity. When the hand/wrist/arm moves the work responds in kind. There is a satisfying and immediate physicality/ responsiveness to the mouse movement.
With this interface, the writer becomes a painter, driving the mouse like a brush, each click changing the color and text and multimedia elements of the palette. Text overlays text, placed on the screen at the reader’s direction. The resulting digital poem is a reader built collage. And yet the interface is not limited to the single screen, with a linear progression of elements appearing as the reader goes deeper into the poem.
Layering Follow: Interactive Mouse Driven Poetry (http://www.netpoetic.com/experiments/npoem2.html)
Again title is five steps from terrible, if steps are the dirty fingernails of malpractice ready surgeons. The Layering Follow can be described as paint with poetry. The user must interact with the placement and sequence of text. Although at times this interface might seem to generate unreadable sections, it creates a nice contrast between individual instance and overall appearance, the artwork of layering and the deciphering of the connections between lines. I quite enjoy how the poems begin to merge after a few different click and paints, forming new intersecting poetic lines.
When playing with this creature think of colour and size. Create intermissions of image or blank space. You can even try moving lines, but then your computer might break its ugly over-heated, over-clocked heart. You will notice in this example I include a second stanza with only images. A product of laziness and example, I mostly wanted to share another range of options. Oh and there is no third stanza. Not yet, greedy.
