Near There

O'Sullivision, 1996

Project Description: 

This is a web application where one person creates a collage using color, circles, squares, lines and text. As an individual makes their collage on the left side of the screen, the most similar collage of previous users shows up on the right side of the screen.  As a user begins to intuit the matching mechanism, they alter their drawing deliberately to place their drawing near another person.  They then begin to navigate through the vast space of all possible drawings by making one of their own. 

This is an interface experiment accommodating applications where many individuals are making contributions.   It tries to make the act of contributing a drawing also an act of navigation towards other people.

In addition to standard browser functions like bookmarks, histories and searches, the application also allows people to see who has seen (matched) their collage, and to send email. 

Technical Notes: This was created with Beta Shockwave software and Perl/CGI programming using Unix DBMs.