Autobotography Intent – JamesA

NOBODY’S LOOKING

My phone is a part of me. On it, I share things that I think accurately represent myself. However, when I pull out my phone, I’m looking to laugh. I’m not looking at any deeper part of myself. I would never ask my friends on Facebook what they think their most significant, formative childhood experiences were, or whether or not they believe in the existence of the soul. My most recent Facebook status is “@DonaldJTrump I challenge you to a bare knuckle boxing match.” Amusing? Yes. Is this post a part of me? Yes. I do feel a deep connection to this post. However, it’s not intellectually challenging. Furthermore, it’s only representative of a small part of my personality. And if all my posts are this, or something like this, is that an accurate representation of me? More importantly, is the quick, reactionary nature of social media conducive to self representation in the first place? I would say it’s not.

But enough of this banter. My idea has less to do with human nature on social media and more to do with humans’ inner nature. I want to make a website of poetry, with an interactive element. On this site, certain sections (either words, sentences, or perhaps entire poems), could be moused over. This would put a black box over the words, making them unreadable. At the same time, the words would be swapped out for another set of words, an entirely different poem with a similar structure. Maybe there would be a delay of a few milliseconds – not long enough to actually read anything, but long enough to suggest that a change had taken place. The swapped set of words would be a deeper, blunter, more honest interpretation of the subject at hand. The idea here is that someone’s inner world is often many degrees more intense and interesting than their outer world, but it will never be seen by anyone other than them. I’m also into the idea of art that the viewer isn’t actually meant to see. Who is the actual intended audience of this art? Is it me? What is the role of the viewer in this scenario? To simply not know, or to try and find out?

I really like the idea of forcing viewers who really want to see that blacked-out text to open the inspector and look at the guts of the web page. I want them to feel like they’re breaking my art piece. Like they’re doing something wrong. Because they are, kind of. You can’t just look inside someone’s head to see what they’re thinking, no matter how interesting you think it might be. These concepts are important and fascinating to me, and I suspect they will be to anyone else who realizes the true nature of the site.

I expect this piece won’t take terribly long. I wanted something simple and elegant, impressive without actually being too demanding. I think it would take me about 2 hours to write the poetry, and possibly 10 or more hours to code the website, as I’m not an experienced web designer. Possibly as few as 5. I’m not sure.

For the sake of full disclosure: this idea was partly inspired by a game called The Beginner’s Guide, from the creator of the much more well-known Stanley Parable. If you’re interested, here is the scene in question:

https://youtu.be/DatJlgN8ZqE?t=10m54s

Keep in mind that these games were allegedly designed by one person, who never intended for them to leave his hard drive. He never wanted anyone to know about this hidden outer world. The Beginner’s Guide is an amazing piece of electronic art in it’s own right, worthy of a long dissection. But this is neither the time nor place for that. I’d highly recommend playing it, if you’re interested in games, art, or human nature.