Welcome to World Wide Glide - Part One. This is a project I developed with Echo & the Bunnymen's guitarist, Will Sergeant, in 1996. At the time, the piece was featured in HotWired, which called it "the standard-bearer for truly cool interactivity on the web." There is no objective or solution per se other than to get lost in playing around, making your own little symphony. There's a randomness vs. authorship balance at work here: each object very explicitly has a linked sound to it. Each of the three possible planet cursors (Earth, Moon, Venus) have a distinct loop affixed to them. The volume level is tweezable by you, tied to the perceived "distance" and/or location. Also, each hot item more often than not causes a specific, scripted effect. For instance, the road will always be the one and only place to trigger the rhythm loops. What is random in that specific case is that it may be one of three rhythm loops picked at random. Well, six, if you count my remixes, triggered by the Shift key. Also random is the construction of the scene elements, which are whipped together on the fly when you click on a hot item. The "finger paint" effect on the hot spots is deliberate. An artful blend of determinism and free will in the service of drama and atmosphere is the essence of interactive art, in my humble opinion. That's the overriding theme here. If it gets a little messy at times, that's the price of experimentation. I find that a slow, dreamy wandering of the different nooks and crannies of the piece yeilds a more satisfying aesthetic experience. There's a reason why it's called Glide and not "Scrub Madly Around the Screen Like a Crazed Rabbit." Frankly, I'm just amazed that ten-year-old code still compiles and plays in a modern browser. That alone is testament to Shockwave's awesome kung fu. ;) Frank Coleman New York City November 2005