Electronic Literature in Europe

As a project presentation, I will show two pieces, "I am writing you to remember" and “She…”.

"I am writing you to remember" is an online piece interrogating the relation between personal snapshots and memory. Capitalizing on Flickr’s built-in features, such as image blogging, notations and map placement, the reader is toured through a selection of old family photographs. But unlike most photographs hosted on Flickr, these images are blank. More aptly, they can be seen as place holders, memory triggers or projection screens. Moving the cursor across a blank surface, the viewer/reader is prompted to reconstruct the unseen through a series of fragmentary annotations. For example, one note reads: "They are standing near each other but not touching." Posture and proximity become hints to possible tensions in the scene. Moving from snapshot to snapshot, what results is a representation of familial relations through an accumulation of minor details.

The overall navigation is non-linear. Click one way, and the reader is shuttled to maps, plotting the locations where the photographs were originally taken. Navigate to the slide view, and the empty photographs are shown in sequence with only titles and dates. Follow the link to the subtitles, and there is another view showing narrator’s personal reflections and associations. In this layer of the piece, the tone shifts from being descriptive to reflective. Under one image the narrator says: "I have very little memory of the farm and that house. Though I was told they were happy when they lived there." Like the process of remembering, each layer builds on the other while never really adding up to a cohesive story. Ultimately, through the grammar of Flickr, the piece circumscribes a set of absences and explores the contentious and subtle relation between family photographs and personal memory.

The second piece, “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 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 plays with 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.

urls/

"I am writing you to remember": http://www.fudgethefacts.com/writing_you/to_remember.html

"She..." : http://www.fudgethefacts.com/she/launch.html

**Technical requirements: speakers, beam and broadband internet connection** I will have my own laptop.