Navigating John Ashbery’s Nest

John Ashbery’s Nest is a virtual tour of the collections and house of John Ashbery, collaborative with his life story and the interactive engagement with his work and his collections as an artist, a poet, and a collector. By utilizing both visual and auditory implements, users can feel more intimate and interested in exploring information. Also, provided an option to expand more tabs for categorized information on the right side, users who are not familiar with using 3D virtual tour can optimize their experience with different digital tools and formats. That is, one can study information in more static forms such as image aligned with additional written information, or more vivid and graphical forms such as video and audio source in virtual tour, depending on one’s preference.

The sources of most information are directly from John Ashbery himself and his partner David Kermani, in forms of recordings of reading, videos, photographs, interviews, and Ashbery’s published and unpublished materials. Also, aside from major edition of structure by Yale professor Karin Roffman, some other sources such as short film of Open Road Media, Photography of Poetry Foundation,and editorial support from Yale Media were used. Sometimes, recordings of university lecture are attached as replacements, in order to provide more historical and sophisticated background of the collections. By visiting the menu bar on the right side and clicking Architectural Document tab, one can get access to more primary sources like the images of blueprints of his house.

Processing of the sources on the website is very user-friendly and engaging. In virtual tour, users can click each items to get access to the full image along with his life story and anecdotes provided as  written scripts, audio, and video such as a short film. Those extra anecdotes recorded in Ashbery’s own voice allow users to feel much closer to his world of arts by understanding connection between his arts and the very possessions that inspired him. Some images can be rotated 360 degree, which allows users to obtain full view of the object with feeling depth and density more vividly. Even though the virtual tour is only created for the central hall as of now, they are planning to construct tours for other rooms in a timely manner. Meanwhile, one can also explore each room by probing tab of Room by Room on menu bar, where information are more neatly organized and categorized with images and written explanation aligned together.

The presentation of information seems organized, effective, and optimal. By merging the concept of tour and virtual simulation, it created an interesting method of exploring Ashbery’s life and his collections. Information are organized under different categories such as rooms and items, using optimal digital tools that stimulate every possible sensation. Also, it is fascinating in that it captures attention of both users who are familiar to more actively-engaging digital tools such as virtual reality simulation and who are more fond of static digital tools such as images and written texts.

All in all, the John Ashbery’s Nest was a remarkable website to examine, since it was such a creative format to construct and structure a database, yet still being easy and interesting to navigate. Utilizing suitable and various digital tools for different purposes helped the exploration to become more exciting and memorable.