Thankfully, my muse is back in full swing. I spent a good part of the weekend finishing up Synergy pieces for the “Recovery” poems. When I have about half of them done I’ll finally launch and actual portfolio site for them. It is nice to spend my days in photoshop and my code editors. I’m happy to be back to doing multimedia pieces as they thankfully work on multiple speeds. Coding, and finishing touches can easily be done with videos playing in the corner of the screen, and bits that require deeper thought go well to music.
Truth be told my creativity scares me a bit. It’s like falling into a void of intense emotion, for me it’s often like an altered state I fear I’ll never come out of. I want it badly, but at the same time don’t want the repercussions. I’m hopeful this project will get me comfortable again, and help me learn more peaceful ways to be creative.
On a geeky note:
While doing the piece for “Mirror Phase“, I knew I wanted a particular bit of code. Back in the old days there used to be this “revolutionary” bit of script that scrolled screen content while leaving the rest of the page intact. As time went on more sophisticated code came out which actually created functioning javascript scrollbars, replacing the silly up and down arrows that seemed so new and shiny the year before.
It’s amazing how hard it was to find a similar code a decade later. After an entire episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I had only found one candidate, and it had obnoxious licensing requirements, and a stupid alert box that popped up whenever the page loaded. I was not paying $40 for something I used to be able to get for free.
I hadn’t bothered to look for versions of the code I had used in the past as I had made the assumption that they would no longer work. 2001 was the year of Internet Explorer, and coding ridiculous shit that was hopelessly broken within the next 2 years. However, as my search was going poorly I went upstairs and grabbed my backup drive. After about 30 minutes of searching, cutting and pasting I had a version ready for a test drive.
The code from 2001 works just like it did in 2001. Not 100% smooth, though that is part of the charm, especially for this piece. It was meant to be raw, a little bit ugly, and a lot vulnerable. Exposing the dark parts that are clearly in the poem though are easy to ignore with all of the nature imagery.
I’m anxious to keep working on these multimedia poems. However the experiment shakes down is going to redefine how I maintain this site. There of course will always be a blog, though I hope to recapture the surrealist whimsy of my pages of old.
