As I wander about the indie web via the Internet Phone Book project, I find that some sites that I visit are scotch-taped together in their own quirky ways and others are quite refined and sophisticated. Richard A. Carter’s site – Agentia – is beautiful to wander around in.
This poetic corner of Carter’s website is an immersive poem experience, with music and sound, and visuals, and elements of a poem (with links to other parts or the poem) slowly unfolding as you use your keyboard.
As Carter notes: “Agentia is a work of navigable, generative poetry, examining the unfolding of the world through the encounters of animals, plants, and even objects. It is part walking-simulator, part-hypertext – an example of digital writing, rather than a game.”
I was quite taken by the experience of traveling my way through the poem. When I think of how artists and writers might imagine the full use of the Internet for creative expression, and how I have tried to some of the same experiments on my own with limited technical prowess, this kind of project by Carter is what I am thinking of. I can acknowledge the care and wonder that Carter put into this, how attentive he was to making sure a visitor has a certain kind of immersive experience. I am grateful there are works like this still on the Web.
Carter has many other interesting projects worth a look, too. One I wandered into was his Boid Poem, which allows you to interact with the flock of words.
Carter writes: “In this continually-generating poem … the movement of each boid is driven by a vectorised model of language developed from literature discussing this kind of emergent behaviour across technical, conceptual, and aesthetic registers. Each individual boid attempts to formate with others whose assigned words are topically similar, clustering and splintering as they go. These words change randomly over time, to keep the flock in a state of flux.”
Here is a video version he created for a journal he was writing for (Although I recommend interacting directly with the poem):
What a find for me – words like birds in flight. Carter’s work overall is quite inspirational, showing the possibilities of poetry, language and technology on the Internet and beyond.
In case you are wondering what I am doing here, this is one of what will be a series of short explorations of indie websites found in the Internet Phone Book project. My aim is to stumble upon things outside of the larger realm of the Internet, and maybe shout out some spaces, too.
Peace (within the poem),
Kevin