Quickness Tie In

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.

Quickness Elit

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.