May 17, 2004
dynamic text and trees
I've changed my original idea for an interactive web project;right now I'm thinking of restructuring the graphical interface, so I'll try to explain what I'm thinking. My apologies if it doesn't come across.
I've changed my original idea, to something that would allow any users to add a single word at a time. The result would be a big labyrinth of words, with an infinite number of possible paths from word to word. And any new user could choose to add a new word or words at any point. In the space, this would be projected; my idea is that the projection wouldn't be of a user in the space navigating the site, but of someone else at some remote location navigating, so that people in the space would be seeing someone else's experience of the text.
So far, I've been planning a navigation like this: the word your mouse pointer is over is largest, with the words linked to it a little smaller and greyer. When you roll over the next word in the chain, that in turn becomes foregrounded, like this:
When you're over a word, you can click on that little plus sign to add a word leading off from that word. Thus you can interject your own poetry into the existing storyline, or what have you.
For a mockup of how the adding of elements will work, with circles instead of words, check this out.
The problem I'm facing now, before I go too much further with the technical stuff, is that this will very quickly become a hugely complex structure, possible difficulty to navigate. It occurs to me now that Chris' Shaker tree might be a good visual metaphor to use, to organize all the words.
But the tree and the Spirit message makes me think that there could be more than one dynamic text project going on. For instance, it would be technologically much easier for me to make a tree shape out of words, each of which could be randomly changing over time into another word drawn from a story or Biblical verse or such.
For what it's worth, here's a small experiment I did with fading text a while ago. It's a very big flash file.
Posted by seth at May 17, 2004 03:05 PMI am interested in the fact that image is created out of movement--a hand clicking a mouse button spurs on this web of an image (potentially endlessly complicated). But I also find the truncated control fascinating--yes, that image is propelled by the person with the mouse, but ultimately he/she is contrained by the way the program is written. Perhaps this is the painter in me speaking, marveling at someone else's medium. But I am always searching for ways that image happens as byproduct of our own passage through the world--what kinds of forms are made say, from a child storming into a china closet, spewing ceramic every which way? Do those very shards carry the remnant of the happening that spawned them--such an ordinary, though destructive movement.
Because those Shaker drawings carry more than just their image. So how does THAT tanslate in other kinds of images and image-making processes.
All this is exciting seth.