Trieb

Trieb takes its name from a word central to Goethe’s way of seeing plants: shoot, impulse, and the formative drive through which living form unfolds. The app transforms all 123 sections of Goethe’s “The Metamorphosis of Plants” into an environment for observation. Read the German original, Emily M. Cox’s public-domain English translation, or the Code&Mode Japanese adaptation. Each section is accompanied by a generative visual form and a sine-wave moiré sound created in real time on the device. Trieb is neither a conventional ebook nor a musical instrument. Text, image, sound, and touch meet as different ways of attending to change. Swipe through the sections, move between image and reading views, compare languages, and hold the screen to intensify a form. The visual and sonic responses do not illustrate the text literally; they open another field in which growth, contraction, expansion,…