The clownfish follows your cursor. Starting fish count can be adjusted from 2 to 10, and fish death can be turned on (1) or off (0). Female fish are signified by a pink circle, male fish are signified by a green circle, and juvenile fish have no circle. Click the rainbow for rainbow mode. Gonochoristic = fish that never change sex in their lifetime.
Queering Religion - Multimodal Assignment. Inspired by Chapter 1: Queer Spiritual Spaces (Sally Munt), Queer Spiritual Spaces: Sexuality and Sacred Places I chose Scratch as a medium instead of a more advanced programming language because everyone would be able to interact with the project online (without having to download anything), and because I was interested in revisiting the program I basically learned to code in 10 years ago. My goal was to illustrate the concept described in chapter 1 of several kinds of fish commonly changing sex, sometimes multiple times in their lifespans, which was an example of seeing queerness in the animal kingdom. The chapter talks about how “immersion into someone else’s world allows an encounter with the deeply strange,” and I tried to create something that was immersive in a different way than reading: actually embodying a fish, controlling it and affecting an environment, and observing the cascading impact of your actions. The simulation isn’t a precisely scientific depiction, but it’s based on ideas from the chapter: that some kinds of fish don’t mature until they interact with a mature male or female fish, and that “[t]he ability to change gender has been an incredible survival tool.” The latter I hope is evidenced in observing how the population grows as enabled by this mechanic. I also was inspired by the mention of “altered colouration” to add a “rainbow mode”—when you click the rainbow, every fish changes color by a random amount, resulting in an unpredictable and unique overall visual change, going beyond the “dichromatic” changes observed in nature. Stretching the metaphor a little, the chapter also speaks of the “differend – the straining of the mind at the edges of itself.” Perhaps the tendency of the simulation to lag as the population grows to 300 (the programmatic limit) might be considered a manifestation of the differend , where the sublime cannot be contained in a concrete way.
