Apparently, there are still fans of the Lexique de l’interactivité I wrote a little under ten years ago. Yikes! I was at the Arborescence festival when I was introduced to an interesting artist (more on her work later) who could recite my own texts back to me. The emotional effect was at once charming and creepy. It is also funny how each fan seems to attach himself or herself to a very different quote, and how it talks to each of them in very different ways — in fact in ways that have little to do with the way I currently view interactivity. Over the years I have occasionally met fans of this old text, but I had thought them long since gone. Apparently not. I also met some enthusiastic readers back in June after the 8=8 concert, so it looks indeed like my old cat just keeps coming back, no matter what I do to misplace it.
So under request, I’ve reactivated the lexique in all its embarrassing glory, up on the main abstractmachine_menubar. Just look for the red cursor up on top of any abstractmachine page. I also updated the diagrams with a more appropriate icon to keep the confusion to a minimum.
I should also point out that all the interactive illustrations run in Shockwave which makes things a little complicated if you’re on a MacIntel like me. There are work-arounds explained on the opening page. The annoying thing is that you have to choose between the newer Processing-based diagrams or these older Director-based ones, requiring a browser restart to switch over from one to the other (I actually just keep two browsers open). Although this is ridiculous, I find it almost poetically indicative of the state of Director as a development platform, especially when an open-source equivalent has been available for MacIntels for several months, indeed almost from the moment the machines were available.