Deena Larsen

Technology beckons me in many voices. The ancient host of sirens have left their rocks by the ocean waves to weave the whir and flickering lights of computers into lilting melodies of irresistible madness.

The strongest siren, in a no-nonsense, even tempered voice, insists on inhuman levels of consistency. If you ask the same question in the same manner, you will always get the same answer--no matter what. Hers is the age-old voice of Euclid overlain with the intrigue of pi. If you agree that parallel lines never meet, you can create a consistent world of geometric axioms and proofs. And you can recreate your proofs again and again in countless schoolrooms, texts, and problems. While the complete value of some of these numbers continues to be a mystery, it's the same mystery--the beginning digits of pi do not change with the weather.

I love to play pente against the computer--because I know what moves the computer will make in any circumstance, I can create the same patterns in the game over and over again. This consistent voice is comforting in a world full of inconsistent faces and people. I never know how a person is going to react in pente. I can play the same game with the same person a hundred times and never get the same patterns.

Consistency's sister siren has the same comforting undertones, and holds forth in the lofty voice of logic tomes and software codes. If you put the correct words in the correct order (mind that you never leave out a comma or a space or any other important symbol!) you will get the same results, each and every time. These simple, elegant building blocks can be combined for ever and ever more complex, gorgeous structures of consistency. This ideal voice contemptuously ignores the little pitterpat of bug's feet that swarm into each inadvertent overlap, each trespassing countercommand.

"Aha, Watson! the game is afoot!" cries yet another temptress, who leads in a devil may care, let's try this and see what happens search for those little bugs. The joy of finding out what is wrong and having working code is overwhelming. I have to confess here that I often don't have the patience to follow this particular siren over endless tracks of code that look the same to me, nor to do the meticulous tracking and documenting she demands. Yet this, I think, is the voice that most programmers hear and learn to love, their spines quickening with the prospect of yet another chase.

A teasing siren's voice rings out with a child's glee, come play with me. This voice always has new toys to present, new amazing potentials. I must admit, however, that this child sprite reaches me mostly through the eyes of others. I smile with her as I watch people downloading MP3s to play just anywhere, or see them taking notes in their hands on tiny palm pilots and expounding on how the little thing has completely reorganized their lives. Yet when it comes to actually touching the new toys, I am at heart a Luddite. I resist the wiles of the new, preferring to let others experiment and spend hours figuring out the latest devices. Most of my friends pay to play in this never ending toybox, and I am content to hear about their fascinating adventures second hand.

No, the siren that calls to me the loudest has a commanding, preemptory voice. "You can't do what you want to without me," she says, tossing her arrogant long tresses of links and nodes, of images and words. "You fool!" she exclaims over my shoulder as I try to figure out a way to show relationships between characters and text. "You can't get there from here in a linear, paper world." And she grabs my hand and leads me firmly into the world that I have always dreamed in. Hypertexts--the words and images I want to write, the ideas I want to convey, the structures I want to explore--can only be read in her digital, nonsequential world. Within her world, we can show connections between ideas with links, images, and colored themes. We can create works where most of the meaning lies in the connections and relationships rather than in the words on the screen. We can explore the direct relationships between content and structure by mousing over the structure of a piece while words show in another screen. We can play with time and characters by programming conditional links and splitting works into frames. We can go beyond four dimensions with the flick of a mouse. The scintillating possibilities she offers are endless.

Deena Larsen has been following these sirens for over a decade. "Language of the Void" appeared in last issue of Riding the Meridian.

http://www.heelstone.com/meridian