Activities for Children

(use headphones!)

Description

This work is an ongoing collaboration between myself and Professor Shabnam Piryaei. In this piece, we are exploring the unfolding of poetic form through the expansion of childhood imagination. Shabnam wrote a poetry series called Activities for Children, and in this piece we broke up the poem into lines that correspond randomly to childhood doodles from her son, myself, and my sister. Each doodle is clickable and leads to another doodle deterministically. Shabnam recorded different lines of the poem and gave them to me as sound files to play around with. Each time someone loads the sketch, the correspondances are different, leading to a different experience of the audiovisual poem and harkening to the playful randomness and free association of childhood imagination.

Design Process

The unfolding of the poem was inspired by some previous sketches I did here:
(buttons and silence).
and here:
(sowing).

In these sketches, the poems unfold through a process of random determinism. The process of clicking the same button creates repetition, and the viewer of the webpage participates in the creation and unfolding of the final poem.

This collaboration was done during the course of my time at Parsons, and I decided to use this instead of my original game idea involving 3D scanning, which I will complete at a later time.

Reflection

I was happy with the results, as they reflect the autobiography of myself, my sister, and Shabnam's son. It also reflects a more minimalist direction that I am attempting to push myself to explore. The unfolding occurs in different ways each time, ensuring that the