Definition
r i v i e r a consists of a large number of hypermedia information units, being as many blocks of a polysemic "text" which the reader/ viewer/ navigator/ player has to link together. Each information unit appears on a single "text card". It can be codified as still images, video (Quicktime movies), typographical text, spoken information, musical information and ambient sound/ noise. The reader / user will have to utilize the waiting time for information retrieval to make sense of the information. The electronic network waiting time is the artistic material, the poetic motor of r i v i e r a.
Structure / textual strategy
The information units are the elements of the authors personal hell. Each unit allows to "branch off" in six different directions, thus reaching/ retrieving the next unit. The six branching directions are signalized by six click zones at the bottom of the card. Each clicking zone bears a different colour. The colour is the only information about the direction you are choosing, so you will never know in advance where you are going to. I classified my demons in six different moods: flowing, hot, loud, destroyed, free, quiet. The six different moods are not codified according a stable pattern of clicking zone colour distribution ...
r i v i e r a is built along the lines of the surrealist game of the "cadavres exquis" - the exquisite corps. Each "player of the game" received a sheet of paper on which he/she wrote part of sentence, after which he/she folded the paper and gave to the next player. And so on. In the end, "the audience" had a series of chance-based, non-linear poems. In surrealism, poetry can be brought forward by chance, by "the meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine of a surgical table" (as Lautréamont wrote 1867 in "Les Chants de Maldoror"). Poetry happens in the act of meeting, in the gap in between two informations. The user of r i v i e r a does not know where he/she is travelling to and will have to utilize the waiting time in between two information units to develop a poetic strategy. The waiting time in between two information cards is the actual creative motor behind the hypermedia text-strategy of r i v i e r a.
