Virtual worlds made of language.

Digital media poetics

Within digital media, language extends beyond words, images and sounds to include icons, spaces, processes and systems interconnected to form hybrid languages. This research maps and explores new media ecologies that emerge from electronic networks, virtual worlds, digital games, cyberculture and the symbolic realm of the digital, and how it shapes culture and perception.

It focuses on the ‘language of computers’ — the endemic forms and structures of electronic space expressive of the unique properties and characteristics of digital media that blends a multitude of ‘natural’ data forms such as codes, glyphs, geometric primitives, links, networks and topologies of information. Inspired by the sonic landscapes of electronic music, the aesthetics of rendering artefacts, and the plastic reality of simulation, this language investigates a ‘new iconography’ that draws on the history of the icon in pre-linguistic cultures, and its function in digital media communication strategies.

The digital languages the emerge from this process are expressed through the construction of virtual worlds and personal spaces that are particular to my own intuitions and experience. Each world functions as index, an interface and digital media ontology. Interaction—the possibility to give players agency within the digital space in order to facilitate a direct experience of computational process—is essential. I aim to create experiences where meaning embodied in the logic and structure of the world emerges through play and interaction.

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