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[Today's work of electronic literature: We feel fine].
A huge part of my work in discovering and exploring electronic literature deals with surfing the Web searching for interesting examples of this new literary phenomenon. Being its definitions and boundaries still blurred, and being creativity and fantasy its fundamental characteristics, you can happen to find manifold diverse examples out there.
For instance, We feel Fine can be considered as a continuously up-to-date enciclopedia of feelings. Every ten minutes it starts scanning a series of blog looking for sentences that open with “I feel” or “I am feeling”. Then the different moods are catalogued according six different “movements”, as its founders call them. I don’t know if it can be actually considered literature, but the question whether blogging is a literary phenomenon or not is still open. Maybe this gives you the chance to think a little bit about it…
Hi! Me again.
) I was really amazed!
This seemed to me like an interesting topic since the first reading but I thought “Ok, I’ve just left a comment on the previous post, I can’t do it again otherwise I would come to leave hundreds of comments by the end of the blog and Beniamina would finally kill me”.
That was before I opened the link to the “We feel fine” page…it’s incredible!
By the time I started the application with all those coloured bubbles (about 15 minutes thanks to the unsteady wi-fi I’m kind of “stealing” from my neighbours
Maybe I’m just acting like a little kid who sees something new and gets excited but I think I’ll spend at least the next hour reading here and there emotions and thoughts by “who knows who” around the world!
Actually I think that I’ll bookmark the web site as I find it very challenging, allow me to say that “I feel delighted as I read it”, so maybe someone will read this statement on the very same web site within the next ten minutes!
Tristano
Thank you Tristano! And please feel free to comment whenever/wherever you want! I’m so glad you like it.
And if you feel like a little kid playing with a new toy, well, that’s the aim of all this: enjoy those weird “literary” experiments – even though sometimes they go slightly away from literature as we are used to know it.
“We feel fine” is one of those things that in some ways catch your attention: maybe it’s because of those colors, maybe it’s because it makes you feel “connected” with all the rest of the world even though you are not actually interacting with anybody. But, you know, we’re humans, and that’s the proof that even in your worse moments, there’s somebody else around who is using more or less the same words to express his/her feelings. I don’t know why they’ve chosen that name as a title for their project, but as I see it it’s a way to describe a sort of intermediate condition. “Fine”: not good, not totally bad. But it’s important to keep track of your feelings and to be aware of what you’re experiencing avery moment of the day. When you realize that you’re just feeling fine, try to go deeper…maybe all those colored bubbles can give you some useful suggestion…