The artistic media in “The Flocking Party” have been largely affected by the code. These more traditional elements have had to adjust to the multilinear format. For example, I did not write my text for a printed book or make the images to stand alone in a gallery show. They are contingent upon one another in the context of the story's multilinearity. My intention of using code as a medium was to integrate the reader's behaviors between the viewing of text and images. Within a program called Flash, the code retained a kind of plain of consistency. Overall, the code facilitated different sorts of multilinearity using both digital and perceptual code mechanisms to enable the process of making connections. For example, the text is functionally and stylistically affected by the coding. The chunks of text had to function as readable units, not necessarily relying on what came before them. This was admittedly difficult, but linking pages that were more related to one another solved problems of this nature.

The drawings and images were also affected by the code, primarily through their animation. Some animations were simple linear scripts. Others used random number generators or mouse behaviors to drive them. The life that animation gave to the drawings and graphic design further expanded their inherent multilinear qualities. The animation that navigation brought to the visual impression of the story helped to provide interactive accessibility to the content. By using layered scrims that were activated by rollovers, the reader could reveal information as they moved through. Random number generators and mouse behaviors also helped to break up the images' constancy in time.

Another way that code affected the images was through their digitization. Drawings and photos alike all had to go through Adobe Photoshop before they reached Macromedia's Flash. The manipulation and collaging that happened in Photoshop gave the images a feeling that they were constructed from parts, undermining any claims to truth. The illusion of Photoshop only ever fools the reader for a moment, before they notice and remember that it is fiction.

Even the sound of the piece exhibited a multilinear design, which was a collaboration between myself and Timothy Day, a sound artist/engineer from Detroit. He generated and manipulated sounds by writing a program on a platform called KYMA. This program could learn sounds in successive stages, generating clips that sounded like a starling learning to mimic other sounds. The starling-like sounds associated well with their appearance in the story. Tim sent me these clips and I used random number generators and probability constraints to create sound textures. These textures are always a bit different every time a page is visited, like grass blowing in the wind. Because the readers revisit pages, I wanted to provide a bit of variation each time they visited. Like the animations, the sound had life-like qualities, helping the reader to feel that they were inside of a living context.

Connections between content were also made through a visual kind of coding. Because I was designing a virtual environment, I made an attempt to make each page have a particular feeling, like unique places do. When I reuse elements, I do so to create a connection between one page and another. You can see this in the color-coding of the windows and in the sound clips that are recombined. But the pages have specific feelings so that you will not feel like you have been 'here' before unless you really have.