Sydney's Siberia: new digital poem.
Sydney's Siberia: Infinitely Zooming
While on a recent arts residency in the curious city of Newcastle, I soaked in enough local lore and culture and hidden secrets to create a large scale digital poem. Sydney's Siberia is an infinitely zooming, mosaic generating, entirely interactive artwork that explores Newcastle through 121 poe
tic image/tiles. As with most digital poems there is no accurate way to describe the experience, and instead these works demand play and exploration.
So go play and explore and lose yourself within Sydney's Siberia. And the first person to guess the title's origin might win a prize (or great admiration).
ARTWORK LINK again just in case ARTWORK LINK
I am curious as to what others think of this work and interface, as in some ways this is a departure from my past work.
cheers, Jason Nelson
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6 Responses to “Sydney's Siberia: new digital poem.”.
Botany Bay: where histories meet
Maria Nugent
Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005, xiv+256pp, ISBN 1741145759
Not another book about Botany Bay, I thought. What more could be said about a dull low-lying stretch of sand and low scrub surrounding a shallow bay, rejected as a home by the European invaders and generally regarded as the ugly duckling to Sydney Harbour’s swan. Hadn’t the author realised that Botany Bay or at least its foreshores were used as Sydney’s Siberia; where every unwanted human activity and group was exiled to? Well, yes, she had and tells us …
I enjoyed this piece, Jason.
“In biology and game theory, the Sir Philip Sidney game is used as a model for the evolution and maintenance of informative communication between relatives.”
Sir Philip Sidney, author of Apologie for Poetrie.
The title first brought Sidney to mind to me although your title is ‘Sydney’, as in Australia.
Ah, the obsessive attractions or attractive obsessions of infinity… there’s always one more… just one more… oh, and another… i recognise all these… no, there’s another… oops, just missed one …ah, another… and another… and… and… now really, no more… no more
no, more!
There’s some really nice writing in here. For example, a photograph of a road sloping down to the sea, with a white zig-zag going down the middle of it, is accompanied by the following text:
vibrations divert on memorable angles
less than straight to the ocean
and the wrestling concrete is too strong for such drunken forces
That’s really good! And there’s lots of other good writing here too – sometimes whimsical and funny rather than serious and poetic like the lines above, but using the pictures this piece is made out of as jumping-off points for the imagination, rather than attempting to describe them in any straightforward way.
On the other hand there’s a frustrating aspect to this piece, which becomes more apparent the longer you look at it – like a lot of non-linear new media art, is suffers from the problem that the more of it you’ve seen, the more difficult it becomes to find your way to the bits you haven’t seen yet, and the more difficult (eventually) to make up your mind whether you’ve seen it all or not. The other problem, which goes hand-in-hand with this, is that if you’ve seen a bit you particularly liked, and you want to find your way back to it, it’s very difficult to do so.
Which begs the question – why is the “infinite zoom” structure an appropriate one for this particular work? What about if all the pictures-with-texts were just laid out in a flat pattern, say a square grid, which you could find your way around by use of the up, down and sideways arrows on your keyboard? Wouldn’t that be just as good? Wouldn’t it, from the navigational point of view, be better?
Well, that depends you much weight you attach to the “infinite zoom” itself as part of the work’s content. Because of course the main thing we notice about the work at first is not the pictures and texts themselves, so much as the experience of zooming from one “layer” to the next – you pick out a particular square section from a picture, and you zoom in to discover that that square is made out of lots of smaller pictures, so you pick out one of those pictures and zoom in, to discover that that picture in turn is made of lots of smaller ones, and so on and so on. The “infinite zoom” seems at first to be saying that each layer of details or meaning we perceive, if we examine it closely enough, can be found to contain infinite further layers of detail and meaning, and that these layers go on indefinitely like the layers of an onion… but it also seems to be saying that this infinite regression eventually becomes a cycle, because as you explore it you start to rediscover the same images over and over again. There’s a mystic quality to it. It’s mandala-like. But you also have to ask yourself whether this same point could have been made with layers of pictures without any texts. As is often the case with Jason’s work, I’m left with the question of what makes these particular texts appropriate to this particular navigational structure?
I do like it, though.
Edward says, “like a lot of non-linear new media art, is suffers from the problem that the more of it you’ve seen, the more difficult it becomes to find your way to the bits you haven’t seen yet, and the more difficult (eventually) to make up your mind whether you’ve seen it all or not.”
To my mind Sydney’s Siberia doesn’t “suffer from the problem” of the infinite zoom, but rather benefits from it. This form of reading and navigating, for me, is a metaphor for the way one becomes familiar with a place. After a while you feel you know a place, you’ve seen parts of it over and over again, you think you’ve seen all it has to offer – but then, a surprise, something you hadn’t spotted before. You explore that and the cycle repeats – except it never does, not quite, because the familiar is also infinitely variable (or seemingly so?).
The “problem” of knowing whether you’ve seen it all or not becomes analogous to the question, when do you leave a place (or a situation), when do you move on? More pragmatically, it’s also like visiting an art museum. Do you have to look at every exhibit before you leave? Or do you leave some unseen knowing you’ll visit again? Non-linear new media induces a new way of reading.
Alan,
thanks for finding the Botany Bay review…. I was writing an entry and was about to start sniffing around for the phrase “Sydney’s Siberia.” But when I searched for it… I found your comment. Thanks.
Davin