flagrant world*








Flagrant World was a generative, multimedia artwork that inhabited the space between poetry, digital media, performance, and visual art. Built as a self-assembling, database-driven experience – the design metaphor employed was a web-based electronic book – the work invited audiences into a fluid narrative environment where images, sounds, and language coalesced to form shifting constellations of meaning. Unlike linear artworks that present a fixed sequence of events or expressions, Flagrant World was a living, evolving system. It engaged the viewer not as a passive recipient, but as an active participant in meaning-making, each encounter was unique, emergent, and unpredictable.

The project operated as a kind of poetic engine, one that reflected an ongoing exploration of the relationships between place, memory, language, and technology. It functioned as an archive of sensory and emotional experienc, a terrain that viewers navigated intuitively, following the contours of association, intuition, and resonance. Flagrant World was not a story told; it was a world entered.



Thematic and Conceptual Framework

At the heart of Flagrant World was a meditation on fragmentation and recombination. The piece reflects the disjunctive and often nonlinear ways in which human beings recall, interpret, and re-contextualize experience. Drawing on themes of dislocation, memory, longing, and identity, the work embraced ambiguity and open-endedness. There was no singular narrative, no definitive interpretation. Instead, Flagrant World proposed that meaning emerges from relation — how one moment leans into the next, how one image casts its light on another.

The title Flagrant World was deliberately layered. “Flagrant” connotes something exposed, undeniable, impossible to ignore. But the word also shares etymological roots with “conflagration”: a burning, a blaze. In this way, the title subtly evokes the image of a world on fire, not just metaphorically, in terms of emotional intensity and inner reckoning, but also politically and environmentally. The work operated as a response to that condition, capturing the heat, chaos, and strange beauty of a world in flux. It asked: What truths emerge when we relinquish control? What becomes visible when we allow meaning to ignite and burn in unexpected ways? Can there be beauty in a world on fire with spectacle?



This layered interpretation reflected a broader concern with how personal and cultural histories reveal themselves, sometimes despite efforts to contain or organize them. Flagrant World didn’t aim to resolve contradictions; it held space for them. It leaned into the friction of complexity and spectacle, trusting the viewer to find coherence in chaos, and beauty in fragmentation.

Interdisciplinarity and Media Integration

Flagrant World was inherently interdisciplinary, drawing from traditions in literature, painting, performance, sound design, and new media. Each element was treated not as ornamentation, but as an essential component of the whole. Poetic texts operated as voice and structure; lens-derived images became landscapes and emotional weather systems; audio served as narrative bridges and emotional cues; performance gestures appeared in video and audio form, signaling presence, ritual, and movement.



The visual elements referenced traditional documentary traditions, painterly techniques, and the aesthetics of digital collage. The sonic components served as temporal anchors, guiding the viewer through an otherwise nonlinear experience. The language throughout was lyrical, associative, and fragmentary, drawing inspiration from contemporary poetry, dreams, and diaristic narrative.

All of this unfolded within a digital architecture that was itself an artistic gesture. The database and the procedural logic that drove the self-assembling structure was not merely functional—they were conceptual, poetic. The code became a kind of choreography, determining how content was revealed, sequenced, layered, and juxtaposed.



Audience Engagement and Experience

Flagrant World encouraged presence and attentiveness. The piece resisted the hyperactive scanning behavior typical of digital consumption and instead rewarded slow looking, deep listening, and a poetic mode of attention.

In educational contexts, Flagrant World functioned as both an artwork and a model for interdisciplinary practice. It has been used in university classrooms to inspire students working in creative writing, media arts, and digital humanities. It served as a springboard for discussions about authorship, collaboration, interface design, nonlinearity, and digital poetics. Many students responded not just intellectually, but emotionally, drawn to the work’s vulnerability, openness, and formal innovation.

Cultural and Artistic Significance

Flagrant World spoke to the present cultural moment in which information is fragmented, media is hybridized, and identity is increasingly understood as fluid and relational. The work resisted the oversimplification of complex experience and challenged the idea that art must present a coherent, singular message. Instead, it offered a space for reflection, ambiguity, and the multiplicity of truths.



Its relevance extended to conversations in the fields of digital art, literature, and emerging narrative forms. As artists and audiences continue to grapple with what it means to tell stories in the 21st century — how to honor multiplicity, how to resist linearity, how to ethically represent experience — Flagrant World offers a working model. It demonstrates how technology can be used not to flatten or commodify meaning, but to expand and deepen it.

Flagrant World was an experiment in form, a meditation on memory, and a gesture toward new ways of seeing. It invited viewers into a richly layered world where fragments became wholes, where systems became stories, and where art becames an act of assembly. The goal with this work was not only to create something beautiful and resonant, but to offer a platform for ongoing discovery, an experience that unfolded over time, again and again, always different, always flagrant.

* Flagrant World was written in code, specifically ActionScript, which was a scripting language used in Adobe Flash that was retired, I think around 2020, and current browsers no longer support it. This makes experiencing the realtime dynamic collage of image/video/text/sound impossible today. But I will be publishing a link to a several-minute video demo of the project. Coming soon.