Upon hearing the announcement for the remediation project, I was a bit trepidatious for several reasons. Would I understand hypertext well enough to create with it? Would I be able to work in traditional artistic components? Could I truly make my project into a piece of artwork and not a series of gimmicky links? Suffice to say, I believe I have created something that address all of these concerns, but it remains to be seen what the audience will think. I began with the knowledge that what ever I created had to start with a piece of art created in a more traditional medium. I have long been a painter, and I chose to create one painting, and then write a poem based around that painting. I chose to paint two nudes in an empty landscape, in part because I wanted the painting to “pop” on screen once it was scanned but also to function as a symbolic component to the total piece. Because my poem is about a disintegrating relationship filled with resentment and confusion, I needed to reflect that in my color schemes. Thus, we have the two individuals done in very hot tones of red and orange, existing in a space that is devoid of anything except their relationship to each other. The poem is designed to be a compliment to that emptiness in that it fills in some details of the lives mentioned in it and of the painting itself. The painting was done on paper in a mix of acrylics and oils. It was purposefully rendered in a rough, heavy hand to suggest an amateurish, street-art vibe, but to also signal to the viewer that the piece is about primal emotions; love, hate, fear, dread, angst. I next turned my attention to the poem itself. I knew firstly the two characters in it would have to remain genderless and nameless, because of the hypertext design I was considering. The links on the painting are laid out in an invisible grid, numbered one through twenty-four, each square corresponding with one section of the poem. The reader, not knowing the actual structure of the poem will click on the “squares” at random, thereby composing their own piece of poetry as they actively move through the painting. If the reader desires to read the poem as the original author (myself) intended, he would need to move left to right, top to bottom, but since there is no way to see the logical order of the “grid,” the reader is forced to create their own story. In a way we do this all the time in our day to day lives-we see a “snapshot” of someone’s life, a moment in their relationship, and we create a whole life story based on that single insight we may have into their lives. I wanted to play with the idea of what the “known” world is, especially on the internet. The poem was composed in twenty-four separate stanzas, free form with no rhyme scheme or standard stanza length. The pieces of the poem are designed so that they all make sense together, even when taken out of order. The poem is divided into two sections, with sections one through twelve representing one view of the relationship and sections thirteen through twenty-four representing another view. The first section is decidedly bitter, verging on hateful, while the second section is more hopeful, and certainly less brutal in the employed language and imagery. Again, it is on purpose that these sections are neither assigned to one figure in the relationship or the other, and that they blend together to mimic real life. The technology employed was relatively simple, as I wanted the poetry and artwork, more than the hyperlinking, to be in the forefront of the participant’s mind. I began with a color scan of my painting, which I then shrunk down and segmented in Fireworks. Using Dreamweaver, I started with a frameset (gasp!) to split the screen into two sections. I decided to use frames because it offered a simple and elegant solution to opening various segments of the poem without using layers. On the right hand side I created a table and inserted the segmented picture into it. The right side remains unchanged; when you click on a part of the image it opens a part of the poem in the other frame. I had originally wanted to do something akin to having the participant build their own poem, but decided against it because of its technical hurdles-I came up with a conceptual strategy, but could not figure out a way to code it—perhaps knowledge of Flash may have proved useful here. I am just as pleased with the direction the project took regardless. I feel that the project touches on one of the main points of most of the reading we have done so far for the class, in that it illustrates the importance of textual interaction present in New Media versus a static reader/text relationship. By tying in oils and original poetry and hyperlinking, I think I have made a small step into the realm of the practical application of some of the concepts and theories we have been studying in the class so far.
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