On Wednesday we broke Harold down into its narrative parts, which we could follow from the slides into which we’d cut the book, moving the “pages of the book” to Powerpoint slides, illustrating Harold as he exists in one kind of material, paper, to another, digital.
Digital is another kind of clay.
Anyway, Harold, as we know, creates a world that responds to him in ways that he often doesn’t foresee. A student in class asked whether the water represented a virus. The water, rather, may indicate what we call a random element in Harold’s “world.” Harold responds to these elements with reason. But back to the world itself.
Harold’s world isn’t comparable to software, but Harold compares pretty well to the creator or writer who becomes writer and reader, building an experience of the world, much as a user builds their experience of a digital book retailer. There is an expected narrative structure to Amazon but the user can also veer from that expectation (look for, find, purchase book) and chose alternative paths (look for, not find, purchase related book). It is this kind of “world” we wan to learn more about. The open network spaces where choice has been anticipated by the artist.
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