Laura Baldeon

Interaction experiments

Web experiments about living on the internet

Various website experiments · 2019 – 2021

Mapped poetries

An poetic urban walk through an algorithmic world · 2021

Mapped Poetries is a website mapped block by block to the Wall St. neighborhood of NYC. Each block has its own page, which shows a poem when accessed. These poems are generated from a list of the operating businesses on that block, which is sent in real-time to a poetry-generating algorithm created by the University of Coimbra, PoeTryMe. When users "end their walk" through the city, the poems from each of the blocks they "visited" are concatenated, forming a long poem they can download that encompasses their journey.

Business data is repurposed to create a space less focused on efficiency and profit, and more on a subjective experience. Chance encounters can flourish in this map of NYC, as opposed to the sterile god’s eye view of other data-heavy representations of the city.

Mimosa

A typeface in bloom · 2020

Variable Mimosa explores alternative ways of communicating online. In Spanish, “mimoso” means someone who likes and seeks touch, and the name of a plant that responds to touch. Inspired by these two concepts, Mimosa is a variable typeface that blooms—or closes up, depending on the settings—upon interacting with the cursor. The typeface and the website draw a connection between physical and virtual touch, with the cursor and the trackpad or mouse as the bridge between the two.

Highrise

A stair-site · 2020

HighRise is an online publication about housing issues that the user navigates as if it were a building, dealing with the relationship of structure to content on the web. As you scroll up, the site scrolls horizontally through the article, and when you reach the end it shifts to a vertical scroll. After “going up” to the second floor, the site reverts back to horizontal scrolling. The unusual scrolling emulates the physical motion of visiting an exhibition: circling a space and then going up the stairs. At the same time, the content also “goes up” by focusing on local issues on lower floors to global issues on those higher up, providing a view from above. The site features imagery about the locations being discussed in each article, and these images are often as long as the screen height and wider than the screen width, so that the user needs to scroll in order to see them fully. In the context of an exhibition, the images act as immersive windows onto the outside.