Navigate the chaos and destruction of modern life with your touchpad in Jody Zellen's Lines of Life, a collage of photography and digital sketches representing a global sampling of society's ills in which the myriad elements of disharmony conspire to caricaturize themselves.
Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/13Fall/editor.html
Joseph McElroy shares field notes and reflections from Mount St. Helens.
Nearly two decades after the great eruption of May, 1980, a slow, remarkable regrowth of flora as well as a massive human involvement feed back to me old questions about the ecological order and our place in it. “A mountain bounces back,” I read; Mt. St. Helens has struggled “to be born again.” That’s not it, I think, but I am moved by the reappearance of plants and trees and animals and fish at Mt. St. Helens - the symbiotic reaching out of fungus filaments to plants roots deep beneath the volcanic ash, the herd of Roosevelt’s elk returning to feed on grass sprouting from the earth of an apparently unwelcoming ashy, silica-infused but now media-hyped “miraculous mudslide.” This blast equal to 2500 Hiroshimas the environment did, not us. But what is the environment? I search the abstracts of some of the more than 500 vineyard-laboring, exact, and specialized field studies that have provided “an excellent baseline for tracking ecosystem reassembly here.” I puzzle the human significance, if any, and will make a few field notes of my own to locate among these phenomenal events the voice and place of my species too. I take for granted here that the human organism finds itself in an ecology humanly social and political with all that that, from Plato to Bateson and Schumacher and the Bureau of Land Management, tries to comprehend; but I wander here in a specifically volcanic wilderness and in the presence of the psyche.
Joseph McElroy shares field notes and reflections from Mount St. Helens.
Nearly two decades after the great eruption of May, 1980, a slow, remarkable regrowth of flora as well as a massive human involvement feed back to me old questions about the ecological order and our place in it. “A mountain bounces back,” I read; Mt. St. Helens has struggled “to be born again.” That’s not it, I think, but I am moved by the reappearance of plants and trees and animals and fish at Mt. St. Helens - the symbiotic reaching out of fungus filaments to plants roots deep beneath the volcanic ash, the herd of Roosevelt’s elk returning to feed on grass sprouting from the earth of an apparently unwelcoming ashy, silica-infused but now media-hyped “miraculous mudslide.” This blast equal to 2500 Hiroshimas the environment did, not us. But what is the environment? I search the abstracts of some of the more than 500 vineyard-laboring, exact, and specialized field studies that have provided “an excellent baseline for tracking ecosystem reassembly here.”
Paul Harris hybridizes the terms of hypertextual discourse and takes it to a higher power.
The spirit or at least pervasive desire of our age revolves around a sort of transparency: a desire to project ourselves as a surface of permeable traces, to exfoliate, let the inside become the outside, to become fully visible like the meat and bones of a Cronenberg character, while remaining invisible like the little hacker ghost (Turing’s Demon?) that tracks text in the Random Access Memory banks of the machine onto whose screen we splash words. In large part, the attractive force that transparency exerts is an effect of media culture; simultaneously, however, transparency marks a limit of im-mediacy - an unmediated, collapsed sensation where we can see the neurophysiology of our brains or the shapes of and linkages among our words. This is an immediacy of the sensory that never shades into the tactile - it is rather the immediacy of sensing the medium itself, of clicking tracks around the computer screen or dredging up hidden treasures on the Netscape of our lives.
“network” is a promiscuous and ubiquitous term, serving many functions in describing our modes of conduct and perception of the world: network serves as a structural design principle, modus operandi, technological environment and constraint, as a textual space and psychological model all in one.
Urban Fragments is an interactive website that functions as a repository for ideas about the city and how the urban experience can be translated into an online experience. From the opening users can peruse numerous avenues each accessible through a different vertical fragment pictured on the home page. Animations, processing sketches and images are gathered together within the site and open in individual pop up windows creating random juxtapositions and eventually chaos on the screen.
A poem where each line is superimposed on a video of a man putting an oddly shaped box on a table and slowly unpacking it. The poem describes the box as containing chaos, bought at a shop and well packaged. The work is entirely linear, but after a few lines of poem and 10-15 seconds of video the image pauses and darkens until the reader touches the screen and thus makes the poem continue. A certain momentum is achieved simply because the reader does not know what is in the box until the end of the poem.
Images: Anders Bojen & Kristoffer Ørum
One challenge of General Education is that of finding ways to develop student interest in, and enthusiasm for, reading written texts or critically viewing visual texts. CHAOSity was created to address that issue. CHAOSity is a collaborative, original cultural work that involves individual readers as co-creators. CHAOSity questions the "linear, rigidly logical development of plot" and the "facile interpretation of life's complexities" that strict adherence to linearity, what author Carole Maso calls "the tyranny of narrative," can imply. The resulting multi-threaded story, told in text, animation, images and sound, permits both linear and nonlinear reading. CHAOSity includes 49 prose/poems Flash movies, 49 event sounds and legend.
(Source: ELO 2002 State of the Arts gallery)
The scrambled, fragmented diary of a man going slowly insane, featuring cinematic cut-sequences and interactive texts. This project was the very first online project by 'Dreaming Methods' - a fusion of writing and new media.
Requires Flash Player 5 or higher.
An emotional and complex narrative carved into a scan of the authors own face.
Requires Flash Player 6 or higher.
A diary of chaotic thoughts, ramblings and doodles from an imaginary author trapped in a cyclic relationship, featuring bizarre, mouse-responsive and interactive/animated texts.
Requires Flash Player 6 or higher.