Nine Attempts to Clone Jason Nelson: Attempts 1-3 - Page 3© Lewis laCook
Page 3
Dec 6, 2001
the wheel, swathes of the Poem drape across the ground, highlighted by a translucent
off-white background. "I want the user to interact with the work, the poetry....I
want them to be forced to do something..." This Jason murmurs when I make
mention of the almost Pavlovian aesthetic of some of his pieces; buttons and
links never proclaim themselves as such...you must find them, and when
you do, you're usually rewarded with either voices or more poetry or more animation
or all of it at once (in Heliopods, a smoking orb trails along the motion
of your mouse, and when you find the large green spheres in the dissolved geometry
of the grid-like interface, a voice intones "questionable things"
at one point, "existence" at another. "The web seems built for
short attentions...and for the reader to be a part of the project...so much
of my work is centered around this interaction...the sound, the images, the
words are mine, but the reader is given the chance to create their own experience...otherwise
they are just watching something...they have little stake in the work....and..
I find....they very quickly click away...."
Attempt 3: Scary Noises
Of course, I'm not listening at this point. The distorted voices of Poem 5
hammer at me, a fuzzy, somehow tropical undergrowth for Jason's words: "They
whirl firm./Hoop in equalling/in digit veering." This whirling is represented
in our present clone by a huge colored circle, see-through, flashing up, down,
up, down. Jason, noting my alarm, chuckles. "About a year and a half ago...when
I was meandering into programs like flash and banging against html and dhtml
and javascript...I had to download trial versions of programs on the computers
of an English department grad lab...each trial program lasted thirty days and
there were seven computers there...so I figured I had a bit more than half a
year to learn and create...slowly moving from the window to the door ....often
the room was filled with poets and fiction writers....I'd be recording my voice...playing
with music clips....yanking out words or parts of words, notes and other such
oddities from sound files...and playing them back on these little mono Mac speakers...you'd
hope that in a room of creative types, writers and the such, the response would
be curiosity...that they would shuffle over and explore...instead they always
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