Idea-ON>! Is a manifestation of fragments of personal reality in what appears to be a living, breathing world. This approach to multimedia rejects traditional flat user interface design, and offers the user many different forms of engagement through four new realities, each prototyping different aesthetic, structural and communication-based approaches to virtual space. It is interactivity for interactivity's sake, experimentation with what is possible, experience-based as opposed to information-based. Things may happen without user interaction, more exploration may be required to find hidden places, or responses given by the objects and beings will vary, often following a surreal kind of logic.
Visiting the Idea-ON>! World can be likened to visiting a sacred site where spirits and myths reside. The information space inside the computer becomes a dreaming or meditational space, a manifestation of the subconscious where the objective contents of thoughts are stored for others to explore and experience. Similar to the way pre-linguistic societies would have a shared body of myths and legends which make up their perception of the universe, a world like Idea-ON>! Jumbles together elements of popular culture and virtual language. The end result is a prototype of a dreamlike, surreal, communal cyberspace in which the perception of synthetic media reality is reconstructed/mutated.
Each Idea-ON>! World has a unique set of digital agents and creatures who often form an integral part of the interface. These creatures and forms are often intended to represent information structures or ideas in each world, and most forms will contain some message, sound, or further interaction inside their bodies. An overview of the five worlds represented in Idea-ON>!, outlining themes and structures, follows.
COMMUNICATION OVERLOAD DATA SPHERE:
Television, movies, plastic toys, magazines, satellite communications, street signs, and samples from mass media build up in layers of chaos to fill the screen.
Sound is a mix of electronic beeps and screeches, electronically processed voices and samples. Inside the world you rotate through eight pathways leading outwards in all directions, intended to reflect a three-dimensional graphical information system. This system is constantly expanding outwards with the eight paths of information branching off into further subsets of each theme.
VIRAL CORRUPTION ZONE:
Navigate a space which is constantly restructuring itself as icons and interface are attacked and randomised by Idea-ON>! Viruses. As you move throough the space, iconic gateways are entered, containing a mish-mash of strange electronic experiences. As the icons shift around the space you are also constantly relocated, turning the simple grid-like structure of this world into a maze.
TECHNO GARDEN:
An electronically grown world that is very deliberately synthetic. The classic "smooth sphere/specular highlight" computer graphic style makes this a very artificial garden. As time passes more buttons sprout and grow from the organic landscape, backed by an atmosphere of organic sounds and strange computer noises. The garden is mapped out like a series of islands linked by small bridges floating in the black void of Cartesian space. When exploring this space the structure seems chaotic, with many things linked back and forth in various directions.
CYBAROQUE WORLD:
A palace of flesh and body expansion, muscle building and health diets, gold and luxury, money and power, sex and material wealth. It uses aesthetic seduction to entice interaction with it, much like contemporary advertising, with samples of classical music and seductive voices throughout. Beings in this world are made of gold and luscious flesh, patterned with intricate swirls and decorative motifs.
CELEBRATION OF THE ICONBODY:
In this place all things are communicated with gesture and symbol. Interaction occurs through fragments of a dance, which moves through a series of iconbody positions - positions of the human body that symbolically represent an emotion or human state of being. Varying beats play with chanting and electronic rhythm loops. The Celebration of the Iconbody is mapped out like a spiritual diagram of a deity, each location appearing as a coloured energy sphere.