The Prime Directive

The Prime Directive is a new digital poetic work by Swedish poet and artist Johannes Heldén, presented by the Danish website AfsnitP.

The Prime Directive is Johannes Heldén's largest online piece, uniting his talents within literature, sound art, and drawing. It is released simultaneously in a Swedish and an English version.

A fragment which might originate from the artist's harddisk, reads:

"The Prime Directive is [two non-linear landscape levels] two prisoners in a linear geography. For each "on(mouseOver)" and "on(release)" a new rift in time will open, a new possibility for something to slip through. A text, a variable, a prime number. Or if you so desire; The Prime Directive is [an instance of] a machine, there to construct a context where there is none, i.e. in what we know as the real world. Two escape lines trapped in bureaucracy, but each line is inhabited by myriads of tiny ones [automatons, machines] and what these little [cute] ones does when you click the button, or when you don't pay attention, or when you sleep(...)"

The work is the first in a series of new Nordic visual poetry called Ord i øjet (Words in the Eye) on the Afsnit P website. The series is curated by Christian Yde Frostholm and Karen Wagner.