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Fractured Temporality – Strings uses flash animations to present its material. The use of flash exemplifies a fractured temporality, that is a sense of time that is outside of the control of the viewer. While the viewer must still choose to navigate to the page (as they would have to similarly do when they choose to pick up a book) once they enter the site they loose control of the timing of the piece and are forced to experience the literature at a rate set by the author. Animations lend themselves to the manipulation of quickness, slowness and cycles, and indeed Strings exhibits all three qualities. The page titled HaHa starts with a single ‘ha’ spelled out in string but quickly multiplies as the string uncoils and recoils. The movement of the string works to distract the viewer from the fact that more ‘ha’s’ are being added until they realize that almost the entire string is ‘ha’s’. Youandme has a ‘me’ that flies across the screen almost too quickly to see, but a ‘you’ that seems to just float around in plain site. Finally all of the pages are set to automatically loop, which can not be accomplished through any feat in print media (the reader would have to start all over again on her or his own accord). Strings then removes the temporality of a normal work of literature and replaces it with a threefold fractured temporality that encompasses quickness, slowness, and cycles.
Strings by Dan Waber is a site that explores the elasticity of a single string to fight with itself both literally and figuratively through the creation of opposing words. Argument in particular starts with a straight line that coils and uncoils itself into the words yes and no. The string appears to be moving but in reality it is the illusion of motion caused by frame rates that refresh quickly enough to simulate motion.
On another level Strings represents the quickness of spoken rapport in that the yes and no fluctuate backwards and forwards rapidly. Furthermore, mental wit must be employed to understand that the metaphor created by naming the animation ‘Argument’ as the jump from the sign of ‘yes’ to what it signifies (a particular point in an argument) is not grasped without a certain level of intelligence.
Frame Rates. Undoubtedly over the last few years you have watched a computer animated film. Perhaps it was a Disney-Pixar Movie (or just Pixar, if it was long enough ago). There is a great possibility that the movie Toy Story has passed through your life. You saw how fluidly the motion was, but were you aware that you were staring at still frames? Did you know that the motion you perceived was created by entirely static images?
‘Whoa Now!’ you gasp, ‘How can that be?’ Simply put it is the illusion of motion. A screen will never move, but simply project whatever image it is fed, and so a static page like the one this text is on appears stationary, but when things are sped up, things become interesting.
A digital movie is really a massive amount of frames quickly shown one after another. The human eye can sense up to 70 different shifts in those picture per second, but beyond that and the mind eye connection begins to falter. Toy Story for example runs at 24 frames per second, that is 24 different pictures are displayed within a second to give the illusion of speed. Cartoons are often only 15 frames per second which is barely above the 12 fps that humans can perceive as laggy. Video games generally run around 30 fps.
Thus frame rates are an analogy for Calvino’s memo on quickness as they create motion through a process that is too fast for the human eye to catch using still images.
Calvino equates the story of Charlemagne to quickness by drawing the conclusion that its economy of events suggests constant movement (even when an event may span a longish time). He shows that the wording is directly concise, but other times quickness (or lethargy, or cycles) may be represented thematically as in stories such as The Wizard of Oz ,which as a story takes place over many days, and yet in the end ends up only occupying the space of a few hours. The telling of the story itself can be related to quickness as a story may be picked up or left off and thus a story with a narrative of a few days may be devoured in a night, or conversely a story of a night may be elongated over the span of weeks or even years.
Finally (although not exhaustively) quickness may be thought of – Calvino posits – through the emblem of a horse, a majestic beast that for a majority of history was the quickest harnessable animal. This physical speed then can also be applied to the quickness of the human mind. Although both are now outdated notions (cars outpace animals, and supercomputers can computationally put a humans synapses to shame) the meaning is still clear. Quickness comes in every flavor of the rainbow, from physical, to mental, to lexical, to thematic.
Striking Resemblance
Sonic the Hedgehog. Calvino’s use of quickness speaks of how the manifestations of quickness used to be horses but has evolved to cars and trains and other means of transportation. I found that in my life quickness always manifests itself as a spiky haired blue hedgehog named Sonic. Sonic is the hero of the self titled Sega Genesis series of games. Sonic exemplifies both lethargy and speed as real life hedgehogs move methodically (perhaps not so much as the infamous sloth) but in his adventures he has come to possess super-human (super-hedgehog?) speed; Sonic can run faster than the speed of sound!
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