Fudge the Facts

After a lot of hard work KOLABO is over. It was a very intense but fantastic week. Some documentation of the workshop can be seen here.

To view the collaborative project made during the workshop go to My Third Life.

Last but not least, a big thanks to the following KOLABOrators ;-)

Annemarie van den Berg
Erik Kroes
Noortje van Eekelen
Vera Verberne
Nadine Roestenburg
Michelle Sipers
Michiel van Heeswijk
Bruno Setola

BinaryKatwalk:v.02a

Because I admire the work of Kate Pullinger, Christine Wilks and Caitlin Fisher, I’m tremendously honored to be included in this collection. A big thanks to both Kate Pullinger and Jeremy Hight for putting this online show together.

After much work She… is finally finished. It’s been a bumpy road, and the piece has had numerous manifestations, some good, others bad, but most were down right ugly. Regrettably, I’m not someone who can make a plan and cleanly execute it. I envy such practitioners. Instead, I pursue an idea on a hunch or a hint of informed intuition, and the rest is up to simple trial and error. My internal directive was that I wanted to write a story about women in the news, and that narrative needed to be situated and implicated in those sources.

She…, is a collage of fact and fiction. The work weaves together seven stories of women in the news. Using html frames, a fictional narrative is edited between live web-pages from CNN, the BBC and other online sources. Capturing articles and online videos of women under media scrutiny, the work explores different female archetypes.

Told from the third person, She… is not meant to be an elaboration of the news, but rather an imagined scenario projected into the gaps of what is untold or unrepresented. While the news provides a public and mediatized context, the fiction casts the protagonists in an imagined moment of private self-reflection. In many respects, the story capitalizes on our inherent tendency to read between the lines, embellishing assumed facts with our own projections, prejudices and desires.

The women depicted range in type from an ambitious careerist, to the last of her kind, to an ageing femme fatale, to a guerrilla fighter on the verge of surrender. Many of the fictionalized characters hearken back to familiar historical, popular or literary figures such as Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois, Disney’s Cinderella and Shakespeare’s shrew. These archetypes are rehearsed, re-invented and reiterated through the spectacle of modern media. Through hyperlink and a continuous soundscape, each protagonist’s story cinematically flows into another with the aim of revealing a composite character, the ultimate She who is the sum of her archetypes.

view She…

By the way, next week I will be reading parts of the work at the Electronic Literature Conference in Bergen Norway.

Screenshot of I am writing you to remember: an interrogation through flickr of personal images, memories and minor details. The actual project can be found here.

Earlier I wrote about experimenting with transcribing photographs. After that post, I scanned in ten photographs which my great aunt had given me. Many of the snapshots were taken before I was born. Barring one, they are all black and white, and most of the people in them have passed away. I wanted to work with the collection precisely because the images were distant from my personal experience. Or at least that is what I thought when I started the piece.

After scanning all the photographs, I blanked out the actual images, leaving only the borders behind. Then, I imported them into flickr. Using the available annotation or note system, I described what was on each of the images.

Writing in the annotations was a radically different experience from my attempts to transcribe them in a linear fashion. Because you can pull, stretch and overlap the highlight boxes across the jpeg’s surface, the writing is spatial and fragmentary. As I was writing the various parts, it felt like drawing the image through text. And in terms of reading, it is interesting to see how the eye is guided to construct the photograph with each hover of the cursor. On a textual level, the picture never comes together because as soon as you view another annotation , the previous one disappears. Only memory gives the image cohesion.

There are other elements woven into the piece such as “the blog this image feature” and the use of flickr maps. Each layer adds another dimension to the series of circumscribed absences.

A few years ago a great aunt of mine travelled to the Netherlands.  She brought with her a selection of around 50 photographs from my father’s side of the family.  I’ve been working on transcribing these images for Flickr.  I have written the photographs in a personal voice, using “my grandmother”, “my father” and “me”, and I have also experimented with transcribing them from a detached view.  Although I’m still sketching through the idea, for some reason I’m finding the detached voice more interesting.