This page also serves as our means of conveying the meaning of this undertaking in terms of the art (sound,video, and dance) that we create. Because we are artists first, and programmers second, this represents the heart of what the KromoZone Intermedia project is all about.


Here's my random thought for the day, entitled:
Why James Joyce Would Approve of "KromoZone" as a name for our project.

James Joyce's final complete book, Finnigan's Wake, is a masterpiece of semantic manipulation and wordplay. In case you don't know much about it, I'll share a few fun facts. It begins with the word "riverrun," in lowercase and with the comma. It ends with the words "a long the". The intention here is that the book is in fact a loop. That you should be able to start anywhere in the book, at any word, and read back around to that word again, and the book with have just as much meaning. He was trying to map out everything going on in one man's (Finnegan's) mind at one instant while he was asleep. It is 600+ pages long. So the sentence can be read "a long the riverrun," and the book is an uninterrupted tape loop of meaning.

But he doesn't stop there. Every word of the book is hypercharged with meaning. Joyce was fluent in Greek, Latin and French, and the words are constantly slightly misspelled, or strange compounds are formed, so that words can have a double- or triple-entendre, or more. He pulls in meanings and cliches from other cultures to have fun with them, and provide subtext after subtext to everything.

So KromoZone: a compound of Kromo and Zone. Kromo: an obvious blend of Chromo (color) and Krono (time), like the Messaien masterpiece "Chronochromie" (colored time, in French). Zone: a demarcated physical or conceptual area ("The Neutral Zone") or ("I'm feeling zoned out"), also a sly reference to a computer networking term ("Appletalk Zone"). The whole word, also, of course, resembles "chromosome", a large unit in genetics, one of the things that contains the instructions for how to create a living organism.

So, to extrapolate this, we can say that what we are building relates to all of these meanings: we are attempting to (literally) create a computer-network for distributing and processing color and time, our work represents an area of colored (and otherwise decorated) time, it is an expression of the part of our minds that co-ordinates time and color, and it contains a set of coded instructions, pathways, and intruments by which we (the conceptual amino acids, if we extend the analogy) attempt to create something (out of time and color, no less!) that is living, breathing, and organic.

Joyce couldn't have done better himself, I believe.

Time to get some real work done. Toodles.

S.