Friday the 5th Homework...was 3 pages as a word document

Matt Ellman
ENGL 3116
Winokur
11/5/2010

The Creative Mind of Paul Neave

            Neave.com is an interactive website offering a variety of activities for the users to immerse themselves in.  Its goal is to allow the computer to expand the users creativity and imagination, while at the same time, remaining a creative medium for the creator, Paul Neave.  In a section of his website, Neave explains what the website is and what he as the designer does, “I'm an Interaction Designer, which is a fancy way of saying I make interactive tools and toys: websites, games, web and mobile applications, experimental interactive art, installations and intuitive user interfaces.”  Each tab of the website is unique in its creativity, whether it is a collage of randomness or a virtual reality flower.  It could be argued that this website is nothing more than an extremely lazy means of going through normal experiences, but Neave argues that its purpose is to provide an alternative, creative means of those experiences, “I love dissolving the barriers between technology and people and making the digital world more simple, fun and human.” 
            The first feature of the website is Neave Television.  In this feature, Neave hopes to model the human mind.  The television is supposed to follow a stream of consciousness, jumping from one idea to another.  It is comprised of short, streaming video clips on a loop that have nothing to do with each other.  After watching, the user is encouraged to follow a similar thought pattern, and think of other viral videos that fit in to “not fitting in”.  Though this is not an interactive part of the digital playground, it uses the videos’ pictures and sounds to inspire the watcher to creativity similar to the creators.
            Several of Neave’s more creative and interactive hybrid pieces of art use noise as the key interface.  A microphone on the computer is required for these to work, because without the programs able to pick up outside noise, the screen will remain either black or stagnant.  These programs allow the user to expand on the creator’s art.  While Neave provides the lifeless canvas to the user, he also provides the user with a tool to turn the canvas into something.  The programs react differently and uniquely to the user’s noises, allowing the user to be original and create something that nobody has ever seen before.
            The first and least impressive of these noise-activated programs is Neave Bounce.  Once opened, there is a black background with a bunch of different colored balls of varying sizes resting on the bottom.  As the user talks or more specifically, plays music, the balls bounce to the beats and different sounds being played.  This allows the user’s media to become multimedia, manipulating the different colors and shapes on the screen, and allowing the user to creating moving art as well.
            Neave Light is the second noise-activated feature of the website.  Neave light is very similar to Neave Bounce.  It starts with a black background, and as noise is added, an orb of light starts to shine in the middle of the screen.  As the beats and tones of the music change, so does the orb.  It will begin to shine in waves rippling out from the middle of the screen while it changes ambient colors.  This again serves to change the users media into multimedia, allowing the user to create new art.
            This final noise-activated feature of the website is Neave Dandelion.  This activity is unique in that it has the user actively participating in it.  Before the program opens, Neave gives a message, “Sit and blow at my digital dandelion seeds.  Not quite as fun as the real thing, granted, but at least here you have an endless supply of fluffy blowballs.”  After clicking the message, the screen changes to a view of an empty field with close up of a dandelion.  The program is designed to pick up the noise of the user blowing air towards the computer screen.  The harder the user blows, the more noise the computer picks up, and the harder the flower is blown back a little bit while some of the seeds blow off and float away.  The user can continue to blow at the screen until the dandelion is bare, at which pint a new flower will replace it.  The concept of an interactive, virtual flower is unique.  There may be programs where a user can point and click on a “water the flower” button to make the flower grow, but with Neave’s program, the user need not touch any part of the computer at all.  The flower also reacts in real time to the user’s actions.
            Neave’s website is all about user interaction and combining modes of media.  Some of his other features involve the user personally contributing webcam footage to a wall of different video screens each having a different effect.  The website is not only an experimental piece of art, but it allows the users to contribute to the experiment, or just experiment on their own, exploring new patterns and media combinations that nobody has ever seen before.  It is a truly unique experience.