netVerse

This netVerse universe can be explored by clicking and dragging its background. When it first opens in a web browser, or is refreshed, the view is centered on the last recorded edit.

Virtually anyone can edit netVerse by clicking on a falling snippet of text to catch it, then moving it into position and clicking again to place it. Edits are permanent and transmitted to other participants viewing netverse in real time.

This netVerse installation aims to explore:

• Some of the virtually infinite potential of artificial autopoïetic creativity.
• Emergent phenomena in anonymous collaborative interaction and distributed intelligence dynamics.
• Questions about the efficacy and limitations of participation and democracy.
• Web 2.0 and its 'Architecture of participation'
  

Where original, concepts and techniques are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 South Africa License.

Grateful credit is due to author Je'anna L Clements for invaluable assistance in generating netVerse's extensive vocabulary word lists.

A special thank-you to every visitor and participant who helps to expand this, perhaps sinfully self-indulgent project.

Source code available by request.

Please email André SC with your impressions of netVerse or join the netVersation email discussion list.

'Step back' involves loading and rendering increasingly larger areas of the virtual composition which in turn require increasing computation resources. This may cause a warning message with the option of 'terminating' the script. In most cases it this message can be safely ignored (i.e. choosing 'No'), but proceed with discretion. Alternatively use the browser's refresh/reload function.

The numbers in the top right-hand corner represent the horizontal and vertical coordinates of the current view. These help to find interesting areas (you can 'drag' the background, bookmark functionality is high on the 'To-Do' list) in netVerse, e.g.:

• the graphic 'eye' at 1242, -617
• an interesting composition at -720, -1745
• scorpio at 2360, -2000

Conceptual and theoretical points of reference include:

• Magnetic poetry including the original commercial product invented by Dave Kapell (1993).
• Feral Hypertext: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control.
  by Dr Jill Walker, Dept of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen.