Description
Second in a series of experimental media-art “data portraiture” pieces by Will Bauer, River brings multiple online participants together to witness and interact with a 3D, audio-visual/spatial media “portrait” of the city of Edmonton. River can be experienced by anybody with a PC/Mac computer and high-speed (e.g. cable or DSL) Internet connection. Participants enter the River experience by simply clicking on the "Visit the River" button on the sidebar at the left of this page (or click here Visit the River).
River provides an unusual and artistically idiosyncratic interface to what is normally a very mundane task – that of searching a database for information about a series of subjects. By so doing, it brings alive and reinterprets/recontextualizes multiple information-dimensional views of the city. This interface is characterized by the use of poetry to make search-term enquiries of a database – a sort of real-time poetic enquiry into data. Provision of “up-to-the-word” search results as the poem is being composed creates a very unusual database interrogation experience; one more similar in form to live “jamming” of musicians or spoken-word poets than traditional “query/response” database searching.
Further, River allows (albeit abstractly) “publication” of other participants’ thoughts/views (their “Search-Poems”) into a sort of dialogue about the city, one that is persistent over time (not just during one session with the piece) and viewable by all River participants.