Author description: An interactive poem-fiction hybrid exploring unexplored taxonomies through a touch focussed 3-D depth experimental interface. To understand, to translate the world, the objects and creatures and geographies around us, into meaningful (meaningless?) symbols, shareable concepts, we developed language. Them to further understand the differences and similarities of everything around us, to narrow down and dissect function and association we created labels, categories and systems of taxonomy. And while these developed taxonomies and hierarchies are useful to organizing and departmentalizing our complex land/city/culture/art/literary-scapes, they can also hinder new possibilities and understandings. What if defining the function of the lung or leaves limits alternative and possibly powerful uses, keeps us from exploring what some might call “fringe” science? A Nervous System explores these alternative understandings of biological organisms, systems and organs. Through interactive ficto-future stories, poetic diagrams, it examines narratives arriving from chance situations where the mundane turns extraordinary, and what we understand about how our bodies and creatures work is altered, in the most extreme ways.

Technical description: A Nervous System uses an interactive depth interface, where the user must move in and out of the 3-d levels (34 of them) on the screen. An additional layer, moving up and down adds poetic diagrams and abstract associations. And the entire work is peppered with multimedia and secret areas inviting even more exploration from the reader.