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Donna Leishman |
Jason Nelson |
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Donna, can you say how you regard the interface to your work—as the site of what the reader sees and what the reader does? Do concepts of 'navigation' play any role in your work?Interface is very important to my work; it represents the symbolic plane by which I do most of the narrative communication. Some of the interfaces I create are intentionally anti-navigation, in the sense that web or gaming standards are usurped. For example, in Deviant, there are extended series of rollovers that yield no definitive Click/Press, thus no action and response; whereas other interfaces create specific navigation systems often built around subtle changes to the visual graphic depicted.  |
Interview QuestionsBiographical BackgroundReception | Role of the ReaderInterfaceWork ProcessElectronic Literature CommunityFuture WorkSecretsSpace | StateConnect Digital | MaterialGamesPotentials of the FieldEssaysThe Artists on Each Other's WorkTalan Memmott's Commentary on Each ArtistLaunch the ArtworksDeviantLeishman SitePandemic RoomsNelson IndexBiographical InformationStephanie StricklandMajorie Coverley LuesebrinkDonna LeishmanJason NelsonTalan Memmott |
Jason, you say that in a number of your works you are concerned with "screen morphology" and with creating an "alive" interface. In your NetBehavior Online Residency, you said that you aimed specifically to play with ideas of interaction and interface. Can you talk more about this?Sometimes I think of interface as grammar, as the cousin-on-cousin union of punctuation and italics and geography. And through this inter-familial procreation comes all sorts of broken chains, genes for the most change stomachable. In my creative process (ignoring that I just used the horrible yet accurate term "creative process"), I often approach new work from the interface side first. My folders, my hard drive(s) bleed interfaces. I collect ways of organizing data; of enticing interaction, or offering up poems, words, content, button heavy alters. I suppose much of my interest is connected to my background in cultural geography. In the same way that architects craft structures to cause obesity or pour concrete walls to arouse tension (such smooth nodes), I use interface to fish words, aquarium glass lines, snails rising to coax readers into crawling into the fountain, coins slipping beneath their feet.  From Between Treacherous Objects As far as the Netbehaviour Residency, imagine you had three weeks to make an unexpectedly diverse collection of dishes to last the militia for three months. And then imagine you had a medium-sized silo in Rome, Kansas, behind the abandoned gas station, and across the street from a much larger silo. And within your silo you had the corn you need, bushels and bushels of fairly fresh corn, relatively pest and pesticide-free. Sure, you could go grow all new vegetables, building large hydroponic vats and diverting water from your neighbors' muddy, catfish-filled pond. Instead you use the corn to make corncentric dishes, from tortillas to tortilla chips. The Residency was my chance to use up all that stored corn, to explore, to apologize for the previously over long and largely inaccurate story/analogy. In summary, I love interfaces, and often amaze friends and friends' friends with my pull an interface out of what you see in the landscape tricks. I just wish I could draw worth a damn. |
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