With Beast(TM) I am approaching two themes which have dominated my interest for some time as a writer and programmer: the possibilities of hypertext, and the nature of our conditioning by technology and its growing banality.
The medium that has emerged on the Web, and that continues to dominate commercial esthetics in general and through it a large part of ourselves, is one that fosters, and depends on, utter transience of attention. Extending television's effects through its much-vaunted interactivity, the Web has served to render writing into "content"--something to squeeze between flashy interaction and absorb any drops of attention that might spill. (It is no coincidence that this is the same, already proverbial, position that humans have come to occupy vis-à-vis machines.).
Beast(TM) relies on a hypertext system which I designed as a humanizing alternative to Web-style links. Instead of jumping from text to text and barely absorbing any, the reader can direct the progress of a single document by interaction with it and with its interior, illustrations that can be seen through a magic window floating within it in seeming 3-D. (Since these illustrations are always directly related to the text and determine it back, they are more than a mere effect.).
By this means the interactive possibilities of the hypertext medium are tapped without compromising the meditative nature of reading, which depends on the text being seen as a whole, allowing the eye to be a hypertext engine far more sophisticated than any that could be devised. .
This potential for a meditative approach is purposely subverted by the incessant appearance of initially jarring warning and status messages of all kinds, sometimes taking up the whole screen, and by the system's periodic takeover of its own functions. The hypnotizing interior which never ceases changing, and the profusion of sounds caused by user interaction and text generation, also serve to distance the user from the core of the piece.
On this level Beast(TM) calls attention to its medium. A nightmarish, superficially dehumanizing system, Beast(TM) is a decoction of much that is terrifying and unpleasant about computer technology, and about society and ourselves as the computer has built us. But this microcosmic Web has a humanizing core--the text--that allows the attention to focus as the system-produced anxieties recede, and that speaks to those very anxieties.
A related dichotomy in Beast(TM) is that while it highlights the ugliness of computer technology, it also leads the user to see the harmony in it, since the profusion of images, warnings, sounds and tyrannical acts on the part of the system have an ultimately pleasing rhythm. By that seeing, the user is inducted into understanding his or her own complicity in this state of affairs. Beast(TM), like the Web, is ultimately very human. It is called Beast(TM) because it calls attention to that animal part of each of us which is reactive, mindless, and defined ((TM) is a brand) by the powers of commerce.
This animal soul may be, as one might think, our most ancient part, but paradoxically it is most deeply branded by the most modern part of the commercial environment. And far from being the mere dreck of obsolete ways, it has a vitality and beauty that call to mind the medieval. .
Archetypes and symbols are even more evident on the Web than on television, and the connections they forge are probably deeper because of the participation they demand: one's interaction with it becomes a vulgar and powerful dance.
This is one of the primary themes of the text of the piece: the archaic and authentically primitive quality of this Web-wide world which has erected itself so suddenly, and which has so little to stand on besides the amoral forces of power and our own need for dominance by them--forces now perhaps more economic than political, but with little else to distinguish them from the medieval in the manner they define and sustain us.
The texts in Beast(TM) (currently all quotes from mostly obscure works) are linked by category. They reside in several files which are parsed by the Java-based system and brought forth when the user indicates interest in one of their categories, through clicking on a different text with that category or by pausing an image representing it. (All of the images are borrowed from alchemical works and old magazines.)
The current text/image categories are alchemy, architecture, the crowd, death, fear, the future, pain, the pastoral, symbols, systems, and war. These are meant to call to mind the categories of tarot cards--and in fact the initial screen of Beast(TM) contains five cards, representing five categories, which will determine to which category the initial text will belong. In an upcoming version, pausing images will bring up the image displayed as the emblem of a tarot card, with a text underneath describing it. (Many of the borrowed images currently in the piece have interesting stories behind them.)
Beast(TM) is data-driven rather than depending on constant Java reprogramming for its development. New categories can easily be added by the artist: this involves writing texts for the new categories (or adding the categories to texts that already exist), and adding directories named for the categories. In each of these are subdirectories for the interior's background and floating images, and, optionally, interactive sounds and warning texts that appear when the system decides. There are also default directories for sounds and warning texts, so that in the early stages of construction, one needn't provide for a given category anything but its images.
While Beast(TM) is intended to be nearly opaque, revealing itself layer by layer, here is a quick way to get to the most visually interesting part of the piece. From the index (http://www.quake.net/~jacq/Beast), click on the title, then on the Mind(TM) or BeastCore(TM) option, then follow the links to the page with the five categories arranged like tarot cards; the card you select will determine the start category for the document that will then appear.
Single-click on the starting text and a related text will appear (each text has one or more categories, and clicking finds a text that matches as many as possible); if you do not click, the text will slowly extend itself as if you were clicking.
You will soon be instructed, opaquely, to double-click on the page. If you don't, the system will take control and do so itself. At this point an infinite floating world, seemingly three-dimensional, will open up as a magic window into the interior of the text. Its images serve as illustrations: the floating images are in approximate proportion to the themes of the text, and the dominant category is illustrated by the background. You can navigate around this world with the cursor, click on illustrations or on the background to encourage the text to follow the categories they represent, click and pause one or more floating illustrations to combine their sounds with that of the background and influence the text's progress, drag the world around to see the text in front of it, and double-click on the world to close it. The system will not allow you to keep the visual window open indefinitely.
Beast(TM) is currently best viewed on a Pentium 120 or faster. As Beast(TM) becomes more efficient, any Pentium or PowerMac will do.
Within the next month Beast(TM) will evolve in the following ways: