Ashbury’s Nest – Teagan Micah

The following website that I explored and I’m going to reverse engineer was ‘John Ashbery’s Nest’.

The link to this is: http://s3.amazonaws.com/vr.ashberyhouse.yale.edu/index.html#

The following is a screenshot of inside the Hudson House:

John Ashbery’s Nest was a scholarly website created at Yale University which surrounded John Ashbery’s successful career as a poet as well as his collections of housing furniture and art. Initially, I was greeted with an outside image of the infamous ‘Hudson House’ and then walked inside through a first person video. Following this, I was taken to a homepage which was the centre of all links. Within these links was an interactive virtual tour which narrated Ashbery’s life and provided incredible graphics of his house.

As you can see the initial start to the virtual tour began in ‘The Center Hall’, following this I was able to click on information cues which led me to different rooms of the house. These cues provided me with different written facts and photographs. The content was mostly surrounding Ashbery’s poetry, art or furniture. Within each of these cues there was often hyperlinks to further expand on the subject. For example, the poem “Chinese Whispers” was introduced and then there was a link with the option to go and read the full poem.

As well as being able to read the in-text information, I was able to have fun with sources such as the 360 imagery and background voice-overs of different stories. The background audio voice-overs were often previous excerpts from interviews which further provided me with insight and knowledge of Ashbery’s poems and his life. As well as this, they historically explained each poem, each different room of the house or different particular artifacts. Once I directed myself through the website, I noticed there was a link to a short film called “Meet John Ashbery”. Throughout this short video, it included incredible visuals, voice-overs and photographs of Ashbery’s life as well as an interview of Ashbery. Therefore, the website was quite segmented leading you to a new room to explore with every click.

I particularly liked this website because it was easy to navigate throughout the virtual tour and it also provided me with a sense of actually being inside the house. It was created to be a visualised tour through the use of different home videos and 360 imagery, therefore I found it to be very interactive and user friendly.

Teagan Micah.