New Web Proejct: Timeline

Timeline:

http://www.room535.org/Timeline/

There are many reasons why the metaphor of the timeline appealed to
me for this project. First, there are the obvious associations with time and aging, and this work began as a poem about getting old. But the timeline also embodies a particular kind of time–that is, it lets you replay, much as we replay for ourselves the images and words that
make up our lives. On the one hand there is the sense that there's a
continuous flow, a whole video that makes up our lives, but on the
other there's the sense of the fragmentary and the random. "Timeline" is a metaphor for this contradiction. The user creates a poem out of random acts, i.e. by selecting images from a database of images each of which is associated with a few lines from the original poem. The associations are not known in advance. But more importantly, one doesn't know the shape of the original poem which, like our ideologies and abstractions, may turn out, in the long run, not to be relevant to the poem that one creates out of the particulars of one's own experience. So, the poem is in effect many poems, which you can play and replay in their various combinations of image and text, which through their interplay have the potential to create new meanings.


Myron Turner
http://room535.org