Isabel Brison

Lapse

Collage of engravings of ships on the sea.
2021 Website with quotes from multiple sources and images.

View project.

Lapse is a text-based piece published in the online magazine Interact, under the theme Dead Link.

The text is entirely composed of quotes, most of them found online, all related in some way with at least one of the meanings of the word “lapse”: a slip towards entropy, an omission, or an interval of time. The quotes link to their sources, but the code contains a script that invalidates a randomly determined subset of the links by removing characters from their URLs. The images are similarly rigged, so that they don’t always point to their source, but instead display other quotes as alt text. Each time the page is loaded, different links or images may be affected.

“(...) The world of words and emotions and intellect has been your range till now, Poet. But what do you know of the real world, outside Leptar?” “That there is much water, some land, and mostly ignorance.” “What tales have you heard from your bear friend, Urson? He is a traveled man and should know some of what there is of the earth.” “The stories of sailors,” said Geo, “are menageries of beasts that no one has ever seen, of lands for which no maps exist, and of peoples no man has met.”