The Glide Project

Author: Diana Slattery

Web URL or medium: Java applet at www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/ or CD-ROM

Description: Glide is a dynamic visual language that originated in the context of Slattery's novel, The Maze Game. The materials available on the website use a strategy of multimodal means of self-presentation: narration, animation, translation, divination, game design, and appropriation of theoretical ideas that suit its purposes. Glide, at play on mutable media, modestly conceals the extravagance of its evolutionary intentions behind thin veils of noetic license.

There are several interactive sections of the website:
1) a full lexicon;
2) The Glide oracle, called The Wine of the Lilies, contains a suite of auxiliary Glide language tools: two libraries of interpretations of combinations of glyphs, one static and one dynamic, (over 2000 entries); and a rich library of graphics and music compositions;
3) the Collabyrinth, a full Glide language glyph editor. The Collabyrinth invites the user to experiment with the language by arranging glyphs, seeing how they can be linked and nested, changing their properties such as size, color, orientation, and creating animated glyphs by morphing between one glyph and another.

Glide has been used as a tutor text by Profesor N. Katherine Hayles.

Technical requirements: Current Web browser with latest Flash plugin.

Start/Restart instructions: Load URL to start. Reload URL to restart.

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