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- Narratively, if one could call what is presented here a narrative, I like the ambiguity of how the audience is cast in reference to the material. Are we captains, brigadiers, colonizers, cartographers, castaways, or something else entirely?
- There is a definite meta-text at play here, as one of the central paragraphs details in various ways. This is, in part, an experiment in referentiality and context. Paragraphs are literal and figurative islands, that are meant to stand on their own, within their own contexts, yet the collective of isolated texts is connected by the interface. So the various ways in which each isolated paragraph comments on that isolation and reconstruction of convention connects the piece as a whole.
- In contrast to DAK0TA's forced time and perspective in which the piece is viewed, the author here completely (and pointedly) abandons the conventions that Krug might insist on. There is no evident order of operations, no obvious task to fulfill or guidance in terms of order in which the piece might be experienced/experimented with.
- While this might risk making the user think, it also places the experience of reading the piece entirely in the hands of user.
- From the central starting point, there is no direction given, leaving the order in which paragraphs are read, re-read, or not read completely up to the reader.
- The reader can also choose to let each paragraph cycle naturally as it has been programmed, or manually click the islands to control the speed at which each paragraph changes.
- Additionally, Carpenter gives the user the option to toggle the viewing window, the only real instruction for navigation on the page. Thus, even the viewing window is not under the designer's control. One can choose to "explore" the page, or forgo this sense of adventure/wandering and view the page as a whole, and move straight and confidently to the paragraphs one desires.
- This, I believe, affects the tone and pace at which this piece is experienced, something that the user can format to their liking, placing a sort of authority in the user's hands.
- This piece is also a fascinating commentary on the nature of revision and re-seeing a text. Each paragraph changes at short intervals, often with repeating taglines, but with vastly different content in each iteration.
- This might raise the question of truth or relativity in this piece. Is this a paragraph that morphs, transforms over time, never quite settling on a single truth, or are these separate possible truths, none of which more or less true than the others?
- Or in other words, is each island a separate narrative built over an infinitely generated series of texts, or is this a whole narrative derived of multiple texts that can be viewed in infinite ways? I have a sense this ambiguity is part of the purpose of this piece. It is at once both, either, and neither of these choices, left completely up to the choice of the user.
- When I was first inundating myself in the conventions of this piece, I interpreted the the cycling nature as one lengthy piece I was reading one paragraph at a time. When I realized that I was seeing a variety of repetitions in each paragraph, but never coming back around to the original paragraph I had first seen, I then began to see each iteration as contextually separate from its fluctuations, yet thematically interconnected and dependent on this changing nature.
- This is present tense writing. Or writing presently being rewritten. Each revision seems to represent a finite number of written texts, combined using some type of algorithm, written in such a way that they can be predictably, infinitely combined in innumerable unique paragraphs. In terms of the whole piece, this means that no user, not even the designer, could experience this piece the same way twice, nor like any other user. Making each read unique and individual, an entirely new piece every few seconds.
- On the other hand, this also sends a message about the inherent value of each of these isolated contexts. I found that as I progressed, I could care less if the paragraph changed before I could finish reading it, I would just read the next, unperturbed, fully confident that the next and the next paragraph would give me an equally satisfactory representation of what the author was trying to get across. I found myself taking samplings, skimming, clicking relentlessly through various revisions, just to see what stayed the same, and how often certain portions of the text would be reiterated.
- This might also be part of his point here, when the possibilities are infinitely many, each isolated context is equally valuable as an artifact as it is disposable for new, more salient, information.
- In connection with the seafaring motif, this makes an excellent commentary on the ephemerality of modern user attentions, our wandering internet nature (as according to Krug), and the inherent value of written work in reference to a global writing community.
- As a reader who came to this presentation under the pretense of analyzing it objectively, I was struck by the sheer amount of variables that had to be written for each paragraph. I would click on an island twenty or thirty times, and still be seeing new sentences, or final tag lines to some. Carpenter, if anything, is certainly a dedicated designer in desiring to give the illusion of infinite possibility.
