after is before

The recently finished rescan of my negatives and slides reinvigorated my project damage. Like the earlier reflets, it consists of a great number of images. There are far too many of them for a casual browser to absorb, should any casual browser come along.

Neither project, though, is finished. For each, my goal is to show the images one by one on the page as a flowing unending series of slow change, (probably) in mock random order. This image flow will be accompanied by poetry. Reflets’s poetry is big town blues, which is ready. Damage is more difficult: its poetries are the angst cycles, which are mostly unedited and unrecorded, and I’m not sure I’m yet able to fix them.

Still, before I consider adding the poetry, I have to work out how to display the images. Which language should I use? The obvious choice is Javascript, but I don’t know whether it’s capable of what I want. It’s likely modern versions should be suitable, but older or obscure versions may be too gratchity to go. Given this will be a contemporary project, I might simply insist on an HTML5 compatible browser and leave it at that: after all, I’m one man, not a conglomerate, there’s only so much I can do.

The poems and the images will not be tied closely. There will be some images, there will be some poems. The images and the poetry will both come in their own order at the own time, as false entropy dictates. I want to create the feel of decades past, not of a particular moment, even though the poetry is often of a moment. In that respect, it’ll be like looking back on an old memory and realising the complete pig’s ear the mind has made of it. Both damage and reflets are heavily fancified corruptions of the apparent real.