spiral

"Consumição" ("Consumption") presents itself as a digital wordlyphagic variation of a sequence that has as its starting point the paradox between noise and silence that permeates language and communication. In a collision of centripetal and centrifugal forces between the excess of speech and the reduction of words to the (almost) silence, which at one time is exhausted and renewed, in the form of a spiral, in the curves that revolve around a certain point, moving away or approaching according to a certain law, space is opened up to the consumption of words, which are devoured, chewed, digested, and returned, to be swallowed up again.

Simon Biggs with Mark Shovman developed a virtual interactive artwork in response to a commission of the Poetry Beyond Text project. Tower is inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel. Inter-subjective relations are central to this work, which evokes the idea of first-, second- and third-person perspectives. Tower is an interactive work which creates an immersive 3D textual environment combining visualisation, physical interaction, speech recognition and predictive text algorithms. Viewers (or inter-actors) occupy one of three roles: as central inter-actor, wearing a VR head-display, as one of several inter-actors, wearing 3D spectacles, or as spectator, standing outside the interactive zone. The central inter-actor is located at the vertiginous pinnacle of a virtual spiral word structure. When the inter-actor speaks their spoken words appear to float from their mouth and join the spiralling history of previously spoken words. As the uttered word emerges other words, predicted on the basis of statistical frequency within a textual corpus, spring from the spoken word. The second-person inter-actors see words appearing from the first-person inter-actor's mouth and the spiral gradually growing, with the first-person inter-actor at its pinnacle, while the third-person observers stand outside the interactive zone, observing the tableau. As it grows the spiral comes to resemble a Tower of Babel composed of words, spoken and potential. (Source: Poetry Beyond Text)

The outer interface of this work is a spiral of buttons, each of which leads to an interactive screen. Beginning at the outside, the screens consist of overlaid polylinear skeins. Each skein has an “obverse,” which goes in the opposite direction. As the reader proceeds through the spiral to the center, nonlinearity emerges. The skeins become more concentrated and are then replaced by clusters; the clusters then clump together into structures, in which some elements are dominant over others; and eventually a full diagrammatic syntax appears, in which any element can be connected to any other using the full complexity available to networks.

(Source: Jim Rosenberg in http://www.giarts.org/article/travels-contemporary-new-media-art)