Diagrams Series 6: 6.4 and 6.10

Diagrams Series 6 is the latest in a life-long series of Diagram Poems, the earliest experimentations for which began in 1968. Although I have been making interactive works since 1988, Diagrams Series 6 is actually my first work written in a fully interactive way: from beginning to end in one interactive environment where the word object is playable at every stage of its development, from temporary unassembled scrap all the way to its final location in a finished piece. This environment is part of an ongoing project which I call Hypertext in the Open Air, implemented in a programming system called Squeak. It allows the works to be played on all popular computing platforms, including Macintosh, BSD, Linux, and Windows. Diagrams Series 6, consisting of the works 6.4 and 6.10, strives to return to the intense diagrammicity of some of my earlier non-interactive works, Diagrams Series 4 and Diagrams Series 3. The diagram notation acts as a kind of external syntax, allowing word objects to carry interactivity deep inside the sentence. Interactivity, in turn, allows for juxtapositions to be opened so that the layers in cluster can occupy the same space and yet be legible. A problem we all have: a multiplicity, we must all occupy the same world space, do no harm, and yet be free. Carrying multiplicity inside the thought, inside the sentence: the thought as world. At a time when our world is in deep painful need of more multiplicity of thought.

(Source: Author description, Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1.)