ReComposition: Variations on a Digital Poem

I got a bit obsessed yesterday with making variations of my poem, I Think in Ink, that I shared out as a looping Vine piece yesterday. I played around with some image apps and then, taking a cue from Terry, began to explore a site called Zeega, which is another media-combining site that is interesting to use.

Here’s how the poem came out:

I also turned on my audio recorder, taking notes as I went. These may or may not be of any interest to you. I paused in between things. It was more of a way to get me “thinking out loud.”

And here are two of the image renditions of the poem.
The first one uses an app that is a poetry wordcloud generator. I noticed that you could import an image as your background, so I did, taking a shot of my computer screen with the original poem in the center focus point.

Think in ink

The second one uses an app that takes an image and reconfigures it as another kind of word cloud. I took a shot of me, holding an ipod, and then tinkered with the main words from the poem, and spent quite some time toying around the with settings to get the design that I wanted.

Think in Ink 2

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin

Walking the Web: The End of the Line (for now)

And so, it ends. Sort of. The boys in my comic — Walking the Web — have made it back home. I wanted to reference the movie, Looper (and if you know the movie, you know how this last comic could have gone), but could not bring myself to go that far. So, I do have the boys meeting themselves, and left it at that. But it made sense to have the soundtrack of Timbuk 3 running in your head as the series comes to an end. (Depending on your interpretation of the lyrics, that could be good or bad.)
Walking the Web Comic 17
Peace (on the web),
Kevin

PS — I have one more comic to run tomorrow. It’s not technically part of the series, and yet … it is.

Walking the Web: Oh, Those Darn Portals

If you spend enough time reading articles or watching interviews with the folks behind the major sites in the Web’s history (most of which lines data ghost towns), you realize that one phrase keeps popping up in the mouths of the site leaders, and often, it spells the beginning of the end of the site. (Are you there, Friendster? AOL? Yahoo? MySpace? And will you survive, Facebook?) The boys in my comic — Walking the Web — notice it, too.
Walking the Web Comic 16

Peace (outside those portals),
Kevin

Walking the Web: That’s Ruby

I won’t claim to know all that much about programming but clearly, the Ruby on Rails suite of web developer tools has opened a lot of doors for interactive web-based ideas. So, it made sense to introduce a personified Ruby to the boys in my comic, Walking the Web, as they explore the history of the Web.
Walking the Web Comic 15
Peace (on the rails),
Kevin

Walking the Web: Mozilla Enters the Fray

The boys in my comic — Walking the Web — think they see a dangerous creature. It’s the open-source Mozilla, springing from the ashes of Netscape, and gearing up to launch Firefox. Google Chrome can’t be too far down the road, right? When you think of it, the browser wars have been an interesting, and unexpected, development, right?
Walking the Web Comic 14

Peace (in the browser wars),
Kevin

 

Walking the Web: Internet Explorer and Bill Gates

I admire Bill Gates for his push into philanthropy (but not so much his push into education). The boys in my comic meet Gates right at the moment when Microsoft realized, a bit too late, that the Web was the place to be, not the desktop. Oh well.
Walking the Web Comic 12

Walking the Web Comic 13a

Walking the Web Comic 13

Peace (in the strip),
Kevin

Walking the Web: Marc Andreessen and The Mosaic Browser

Before folks launch into me here, I know that Marc Andreessen has done other things since he and his partner, Eric Bina, created the Mosaic browser (which became the basis for Netscape). Ning is just one of Andreessen’s many ventures. But the boys in my comic, Walking the Web, only see his role in history as helping to develop and release Mosaic because, in historical terms, that is his one great achievement, and all done while still very young and living on pizza and cookies and milk (according to various bios).
Walking the Web Comic 10

Walking the Web Comic 11

Peace (in the browser),
Kevin