Monday, May 25, 2009

Phase 4 - Infinity's Interface: The Analysis

Incredible. This is Big!
Less than a day after the collaborative interface goes up it has 9 public artists and over a page of content.

I purposely wanted to put my phase 4 on the web to give it the advantage of being available to anyone at anytime. I can just sit back, and watch the piece seemingly make itself. most of my peers have had to spend time managing their project's flow of control from person to person.

Infinity's Interface can be found here.

Its has become very long and detailed. So heres a summary of the piece so far. hope you enjoy it.
Each new paragraph signifies a change in author.

The story starts off with a young boy digging through the rubble of his home. The story is set in a post apocalyptic world and told from a third-person perspective. The boy's mother was killed during the destruction of his house; cause by an evil force simply referred to as: "The Machines".

After crying over his mother's death, the boy begins to wonder the streets aimlessly. He encounters a small kitten looking for food.

The boy remorselessly devours the cat. He had not eaten in days. While eating the cat he reminisces about the past:
He remembers the news articles about secret government testing on household appliances, they had gone horrible wrong. One day his iPhone had crawled out of his pocket and attacked his family. He believes the machine murdered his parents after mortal wounding him.

Because of the attack doctors were forced to replace his limbs and a portion of his head with mechanized enhancements, supposedly to save his life. However, the boy now resembles a machine himself.

After eating the cat, he skips down a brook where he meets a small brown man named Pablo. Strangely, the two agree to work together to survive the threat of a mechanized apocalypse.

The story jumps and the boy is apparently staring into the eyes of the cat once more. Pablo is nowhere to be seen. He tries to eat the cat, but this time fails. The kitten bites his neck and the boy fall unconscious.

The boy awakes to find both Pablo and the cat at his side. Hilariously, this author decides to name the young boy "Marc". In a surprise twist, Pablo feeds Marc a battery while stating that Marc need to recharge. It is revealed that Marc is more machine than he thinks.

This new artist decides to explain the story's plot holes by stating that: Marc loses touch of reality when his energy level gets low. The strange cat from before is actually Marc's pet named Miko and neither of them ever tried to eat one another. Additionally, Pablo is a Mexican refugee who aids Marc in his quest to stop the Machines.

In the last part of the story to date, Marc can remember the truth behind his mother's death. He was the machine that killed his mother a long time ago, not his Iphone. This implies that Marc never did dig through the wreakage of his home earlier that day. Marc is shown as unstable and in constant self-conflict. He has difficulty coming to terms with the fact that he is just like the machines he dispises.

End for now...

Things to point out:
  • Its interesting to see the power struggle between artists. New events and revelations seem to rewrite history or render its accuracy questionable.
  • The part where the story jumps and the cat comes back was a mistae i believe. Two artists read the story at the same time then began typing. However artist 2's post envolves the cat that artist 1 moments before had killed off. I think such gliches in the system add to experiance. Its a by-product of this projects abilitiy to be worked on in deferred time.
  • No artist wants to break the mold and change the story into something new. Perhaps they believe doing so may hurt the project's collaborative nature.

I look forward to how this thing evolves...


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