Apartment

From Marie-Laure Ryan's article "Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps":

The map created by this project, which operates on the word level rather than on the level of lexia, is not only dynamic, but animated and interactive as well. Literalizing the idea of textual architecture, the system asks the user to input words or sentences, and it creates the floor plan of an apartment to accommodate this verbal furniture. Words are assigned to rooms on the basis of semantic content. Twelve types of rooms are paired with twelve semantic categories: living room is themed around the idea of group, dining room needs glamour, kitchen holds food, closet is a place of secrecy, hall suggests motion, foyer stands for change, bedroom means intimacy, bathroom caters to the needs of the body, library is associated with truth, office is where one works, and windows afford vision. (Dillon, Writing with Pictures, ch. 6, p. 9). The various rooms are created as they are needed, and their size and the thickness of their walls increases with every new piece of furniture that needs to be brought in. Different inputs will consequently generate different floor plans. The system ignores the words that it cannot categorize (mostly articles and prepositions), and it tries to pair new words with old ones into meaningful phrases. When the components of the resulting expression come from different rooms, these rooms are made adjacent to each other, the wall between them is taken down, and the group of words floats in the area where the two rooms meet each other. The same rearrangement and tearing down of walls occurs when a word hovers between two categories. Matching the fluidity of the architecture of the floor plan, an architecture undergoing constant transformations, the fluttering of the words and phrases around the rooms suggests the polysemy of language and the impossibility to immobilize its words into rigid semantic categories. We can read the result as a kind of aleatory poetry, or as a story of daily life, with different episodes taking place in different symbolic locations.