Project Details
Sydney’s Siberia is an infinitely zooming interactive work understood in the field of
electronic literature to be of the form ‘combinatory poetry’. It is not technology
making our wires, nodes and swimming data streams, our ever growing networks, beautiful.
Instead it is the stories/poetics, the forever coalescing narratives that form the inter/intranet
into a vitally compelling mosaic. To explore, simply mouse-over/navigate to an appealing square,
click and click, read, contemplate connections and repeat.
Sydney’s Siberia recreates how networks
build exploratory story-scapes through an interactive zooming/clicking interface. Using 121 poetic/story
image tiles, the artwork dynamically generates mosaics, infinitely recombining to build new
connections/ collections based on the users movements. The images/texts are a patchwork, a
complex mix of architectural tendrils, whose stories extend.
Using the same artistic engine, I’ve created numerous of these interactive image/text based poems.
After Sydney’s Siberia went on to win awards and accolades, I was commissioned to create similar
works for the Queensland State Library around the Brisbane Floods and the Japanese Media Assistance
Team around the Tsunami among others.
Published & exhibited
Newcastle Artist Residency, The Lock-Up Gallery, Newcastle, Australia.
Drunken Boat #12, Electronic Journal of the Arts, Online Exhibition.
Select press
Article in New Scientist:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827891-400-digital-poets-and-programs-free-verse-from-the-page/
Article in Huffpost: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/just-playing-around-why-e_b_2879392
Select documentation
Playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=sN1YdYJE4tc
Playable version: https://flashmuseum.org/sydneys-siberia/