“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

“The images in the Coda section assume the form of a hyperlinked digital quilt sewn together by the verses of the ballad. The Coda reading allows the reader to go beyond the literal meaning of the poem to the level that deals with forces, vectors and dimensions of human experience. The visual presentation of metaphors unique to various discourses of art, poetry, science and mathematics allows crossing the boundary that separates them from one another. If the reader takes the Coda pieces as the starting point of the reading and hops from images to verses and back to images, a shifting and changing narrative emerges that refuses to be congealed into a single perspective or a single meaning; instead it spills out in multiple directions. The center of the hypermedia is thus nowhere and yet it is everywhere.”-Odin

On a fundamentally basic level, the Coda is a dictionary of affordances.

How Don Norman defines affordances through a specific example:

“In product design, where one deals with real, physical objects, there can be both real and perceived affordances, and the two need not be the same. In graphical, screen-based interfaces, all that the designer has available is control over perceived affordances. The computer system, with its keyboard, display screen, pointing device (e.g., mouse) and selection buttons (e.g., mouse buttons) affords pointing, touching, looking, and clicking on every pixel of the display screen.” -http://jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and_design.html

The coda screen “affords” us to click through the links, because we infer that they are links and therefore should be clicked. As we subconsciously surrender to this robotic action, we discover something more: the links lead to new links (and so on and so forth) that contain and exhibit information and explanations. We now are armed and ready with the knowledge of the history of each image and animation that is used throughout the Ballad. By visiting the Coda page, we have now been given the many answers to the many questions we had by swimming through the poem’s many pages. Just as the poetic agent was previously defined as a legion–the fragments of the poem that are portrayed on each HTML coded page are also a legion by nature. (My name is Legion for we are many.) Each page leads to a new page which ultimately leads to the encyclopedic Coda at the end, which also leads to a multitude of pages about each artist, mathematician, etc. that was included in the image variety.

In regards to the images themselves, they very much coincide with the diction and style of the Ballad. This is resonant with Susan H. Delagrange’s article “When Revision is Design”, specifically the section on Disambiguation. Delagrange tells us that new levels of lucidity in regards to how an image (especially in a scholarly web article) relates to the text are preferred over ambiguous relationships between the two realms. Strickland’s Ballad is tedifously concerned with allowing the image and text coexist with one another effortlessly. The above screen shot appeals to this ideal; the “twirlies” associated with the second line are equally present within the swirling lines of the seashell in the image. Also, the coloring in the image are matched up to the HTML font color code in the verse.

Below is an example of something a little less “poetic”:

Even something as mundane as a metrocard is even visually represented in this hypermedia text.

By way of the Coda section, even the metrocard’s whereabouts are explained to the curious reader.

 

Title Credit: Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man”