sex

The Right Number is a projected three-part online graphic novella about math, sex, obsession and phone numbers presented in an unusual zooming format.

Part Three was delayed due to severe hand strain problems on my part a few years ago and delayed again when I began work on Making Comics. I do still hope to finish the third and final chapter and make it available at some point in the future. Part Three will also be offered free through this page. (Sorry for the delay!)

The Right Number was originally presented in June 2003 using a micropayments system offered by a company called Bitpass, sold for 25 cents each. Since Bitpass ceased operations in January 2007, I'm offering Parts One and Two for free now.

Although the The Right Number was an experimental story in an experimental format (originally using an experimental payment system) I like it as a story and I hope you will too.

(source: http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/trn-intro/index.html)

This work is set up as a fake hotmail account where the reader is positioned as though he or she is peeking into someone else's email account without permission. The reader sees all the emails that the fictional protagonist sends and receives. The story is a soap opera about love and sex, set in India.

Life 2.0 is a playable version of a poem originally printed in Ole-Petter Arneberg's collection of short prose, MEPÅNO, which was published by Flamme forlag. The playable version of the piece allows the player/reader to "play" at living by using keyboard commands similar to that on a game controller, where each of the key combinations causes a word to appear in the background of the screen as it is simultaneously read aloud. The content of this "life 2.0" is very bare, centering on basic needs: primarily sex, food, drink and sleep.

Indra's Net III

Collocational procedures applied to three related texts, generating a new work which explores strictures and constraints associated with both sex and language.

(Source: Author's description)

This poem is constructed around an erotic scenario between two recurring characters in Sondheim’s writing: Nikuko “a Russian ballet dancer” and Dr. Leopold Konninger. From the loading frame in this Flash piece, we are provided a point of view as if we’re the computer and are about to enter Sondheim’s imagination, and the audio doesn’t set this up as a comforting prospect. The poem seems to be designed to disturb as images of fragmented, objectified human beings gaze at one from positions of powerlessness and empowerment. Nikuko herself is portrayed as a kind of geisha dominatrix, particularly when juxtaposed with Dr. Konninger’s post-coital supine body. Subsequent images of a pile of heads and body parts and phrases like “carnage and extasy” create an unsettling mix of death and “la petit mort.”

(Source: Leonardo Flores)

Miles away from your average Valentine’s Day e-card, this poem superposes pithy language about sex and love on a video of a large black fish breathing through its gills as the words float before it. The sounds and image are not in the least romantic, yet reinforce the idea of embodiment, put forth in such beneficial terms.

(Source: Leonardo Flores)

This piece places a purported text by Kim Jong-Il in conversation with Nina Simone’s “See-Line Woman” in perfectly sexy YHCHI fashion. Whether the text is real or not is beside the question (I would like to believe it is) because the “Dear Leader” of North Korea provides a speaker and frame of reference that shapes how we understand the text particularly when juxtaposed with the music and lyrics sung by Simone. The text displayed on the screen is mostly by Kim Jong-Il, interspersed with some “Oh”s by Simone, creating a dialectic where male and female, communism and capitalism, North and South Korea, East and West, meet. Consider how the contrast between the seductive, commodified sexual politics sung by Simone’s and the political propaganda of sexual liberation offered by Kim Jong-Il’s text come together to help us rethink the granting or denial of sexual favors as a type of currency.

(Source: Leonardo Flores)

The work was published on Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries' webpage in 2003 according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.