This strangely emotional work weaves finely tuned aesthetic formalism with polemic. Unusually for Internet-based media works (though not for much of the generative Shockwave work made by collaborators Kate Southworth and Patrick Simons of GloriusNinth), after an initial cascade of data, the piece unfolds at an intensely slow pace, inducing a mesmeric state in the viewer and winding down the desire to click, for the next feature.

To the left of the screen, the word [R]evolution builds layer on layer, becoming bolder but more disrupted, threatening to blot itself out through reiteration. In the right-hand column, smaller texts emerge and fade imperceptibly in falling fields of high colour, visual interference like every bit of news information ever displayed on any screen through history, atomised, appropriated and reworked by a new mechanical order. The tenor of these texts is that of disrupted and upset internal dialogues sparked by bewildering, morally fractured world affairs. These act in combination with the full title of the work World#—saved 10.10.01 to suggest a reference to another historical date- 9/11/01. What was saved on this date? The work or the world?

Over time, the work unfolds quiet, crafted layers to the riddle with a deliberate subtlety that suggests a kind of inspired fanaticism in its creators, a refusal to draw conclusions. This work’s intangible (or non-existent- I can’t be sure) interactivity challenges and proliferates notions of individual agency within social [r]evolution.

Link to GloriousNinth