Gridcosm OOMM - April 22, 1997

The Art of Zoom

Ah, finally I can talk about what's making me cheery lately. I've been playing in a newish art collaboration called Gridcosm, a telescoping art grid thingy that goes in and out, rather than up and down, and enjoying it tremendously.

It's not really so much different than HyGrid, my old favorite playground, but we've been communicating more, both by email and by pixelgram, and that gives me a large charge. I've made some goodish pals out of SITO in general, and I like to hear chitchat, occasional whoops and catcalls from the fellow collabers.

("Collab" is a verb in Edspeak, the lingua franca of SITO. So is "contrib". "Articipants", of course, is the formal designation of the SITOIDS.)

In any case, Gridcosm is damn cool. Perhaps it is the newness, the fact that I was invited in from the ground floor during its test & debug phase (it does have a ground floor, by the way: Level 000; one can catch the express elevator to the top by 2xclicking the "LVL" before the level number). But somehow, the idea of a picture within a picture within a picture ad infinitum has seemed a cool concept to contemplate since I was a kid.

We have been playing nice, to tell the truth, on our best behavior. On level 11, I started with a giant tiger snout, hoping that people would help me by making the rest of my tiger. I couldn't count on it - they could have blended my tiger into a pile of butter, but instead they built me a handsome beast.

The SITO rallying cry is "the Operative Term Is Stimulate", which is backwardsly how SITO got its name (long story). I do feel stimulated - by this project and by the whole SITO thing. I had a big old graphics program that I never used before I was introduced to SITO, didn't have a clue how to get it to do anything, thought it was mostly a worthless waste of disk space. After a year of trying to keep up with the people pushing pixels around me, I can make it do all sorts of wonderful things - and I'm still learning new ones.

I just went and had a look - the newcomers are going nuts, some of it's good stuff, too, but I feel possessive and maternal about the thing, "Now y'all play nice!", so silly. If HyGrid is any guide, I'll soon be bored stiff with looking at my own contributions and dying to see a new face in the mix. In the meantime, I may worry over the thing like a mother hen, checking many times a day to see what's happening. I can't help it.

Feed | Hosting provided by ~~TOONLET~~ :( scribble co.