Perhaps the most interesting and interactive site viewed thus far is The Bomar Gene, an intellectual visual and sound experiment that constantly prompts the user to make associations between the organic and the technological.
From the abstract: “The Bomar Gene…is a new media, digital fiction hybrid that explores the speculative concept within us, the codes governing our bodies, is a single unique gene. This speculative gene gives each person an individualized ability, a singular talent. The work’s nine sections chronicle through ficto-biographies how these abilities separate/isolate us from our cultural/physical landscape and yet reside us within those spaces the gene impacts. With each story and the accompanying interactive elements, the project explores how these genetically derived abilities consequently adjust our internal and external geographies. Through game, video, sonic, and interactive interfaces, the ways these genes both locate and dislocate the characters are recreated/translated into aesthetic hypertexts. Our genetics build personal layers and our cultural response adds dimension. The Bomar Gene utilizes the layering of meanings, fiction over code over user invited exploration, to situate the user within the character’s lives and genes. And the result is a space within spaces, the story of how our genetics affect the larger spaces around us. This project isn’t as much about the science of genetics, as it is about human attributes and how those talents and internal deformities, reconfigure our relationship with ‘where we are’” [1].
The premise of The Bomar Gene is organic, in that it is based on a singular gene that is present in each individual described. On the intro page, the cursor cuts through the banner text much like a solid displacing liquid molecules. The banner text reads, “The Bomar Gene: Inside our codes are unfinished thoughts, ideas half formed, lives existing as brief and unsolvable equations.” This is reminiscent of Gregory Ulmer’s homesickness. [develop this] Like Einstein’s compass, the individual has yet to find the unique potential of their gene: “It is extremely rare however for someone to recognize their gene’s influence.”
Once in the site, the user can scroll along what appears to be the base pairs of a gene. Codes line the base pairs in no apparent order, corresponding to unique scenarios.
One scenario depicts a girl, Rosario Buena, who “read[s] photographs as texts, recogniz[ing] that each snapshot is half an equation, that the moment and place captured has another match somewhere in an attic or basement. And within these matched photographs [are] unexplainably connected lives.” The user is then prompted to a challenge of memory. It’s a game we’ve all played. Photographs are arranged face-down on a grid, each having its duplicate somwhere else on the grid (pictured above). As the user flips each snapshot (by a click of the mouse), he is challenged to find its counterpart on the very next flip. If he flips a different snapshot, both flip back to the face-down orientation. If the counterpart is flipped, both snapshots disappear, leaving the remaining pairs to be matched; all the while a counter records the number of flips.
[How can I bring Barthes into this?]
[Does this scenario reinforce Ulmer's 'homepage' journey theory? -- two halves make one whole... beginning and end...?]
In another scenario, a legally blind boy by the name of Cain who can only see “creased shapes and slanted lights” undergoes experimental eye surgery in exchange for one of his kidneys. Once his eyesight nearly returns to normal, his brain interprets “all two dimensional shapes not as objects but as strings of text,” in which the texts are “poetic translations of objects and geometry.” As the user scrolls over various symbols on the screen, blocks of text pop up, corresponding to the associations in Cain’s mind; all the while ambient sounds and music play in the background.
More on The Bomar Gene later…
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