Functional Overview
River functions on five levels:
- It is a geo-tagged, photographic database of the river valley area.
- It is a persistent online “message board” for “search poems” composed and left by visitors. Such search poems create an oblique poetic dialog surrounding the city and present day concerns.
- Its search poems resolve to database “assemblages” of website information about the city. This allows visitors to locate information related to the subjects of their search poems (or the search poems of others) vis-à-vis the city; it is possible to browse amongst these websites, opening them as needed in a separate browser window for detailed inspection and surfing.
- Fourthly, an interactive soundscape built from a combination of recorded ambient river valley environmental sounds and other appropriate samples embodies the alien agency of the River itself. Through such agency, the River is aware of visitors to the piece - sometimes indifferent to them, sometimes observing them, and sometimes tracking or stalking them as they navigate the photos in the river valley. Such (re)actions embody the river’s constantly changing flow, reacting to each visitor's interactive choices and photographic “trajectory” during their session. No visit is ever the same – we really can’t step twice in the same River.
- Fifthly, visitors are able to propose new additions to the River database of civic information and its photographic database. Over time, incorporation of such additions (as mediated/edited by River’s webmaster to remove the possibility of spam or other unwanted activities) will result in a “living” database that evolves, changing in response to the interests and knowledge base of River’s visitors. Thus River is a “living” artwork, changing and reacting to its visitors as time flows on.