[-empyre-] Interactive Video for the Web - Have you thought of a story?

[Barbara Lattanzi <threads@wildernesspuppets.net>]

Hello all.

Thanks to Jim Andrews for the welcome and to all empyre associates for 
hosting these conversations....

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" ' Have you thought of a story?'  I was asked each morning, and each 
morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative."

---- quote from Mary Shelley, Introduction to 1831 edition of Frankenstein.


This quote comes to mind as I try to formulate some ways to approach the 
empyre topic of Interactive Video for the Web.  As a start, I am thinking 
about how a compelling horror story (such as Frankenstein) has yet to be 
produced as an interactive video.

Some might disagree, insisting that video streams embedded in 
hyperlink-encrusted pages of msnbc.com or perhaps the U.S. military news 
channel are monstrously horrifying enough.  Yet, neither streaming news 
videos nor (say, at the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum) motion 
graphic visualizations of artificial life, generative software, or 
"creative code" ever deal with re-animating the dead.  Within the cocoon of 
interactivity we have never found ourselves wondering, via the 
performativity of the interface/code, if the dead are staying dead.  In 
other words, we have not developed forms that viscerally test the liminal 
spaces of subjectivity.

A boundary region, with the necessary markers, can also be an 
interface.  So, in experiencing interfaces integrated into something we 
label "interactive video", do we ever manage to place ourselves at the edge 
of something otherwise unimaginable, face-to-face with ((animate matter)) 
that is radically other?

Okay.  Maybe I should name some names.  I am making sketchy associations, 
here, because I know that my question is clumsily posed.  Here are 4 names, 
among others I could mention, whose work I would position in relation to 
interactive video and to my questions:

-- Alan Sondheim, whose continually evolving texts on discussion lists 
include hyperlinks to parallel images and videos with an overall cumulative 
effect (over time) that is like being startled in slow-motiion.  I am 
tempted to say that his collected works comprise one ongoing extended work 
of interactive cinema.

-- Graham Harwood, whose work doesn't approach the boundary (the zone of 
interface where, as Sandy Stone has said, "agency changes form") so much as 
his work starts there and radiates outward from it.  (Some of his work can 
be found at http://www.scotoma.org  Unfortunately the work, "Rehearsal of 
Memory", is only available as a cdrom.)

-- Amy Alexander, whose v-jay posturing and kookiness does not hide an 
obsessive drive to tear off every layer of interface as if each one was a 
mask hiding something disturbing and unsettling beneath it.  For example, 
try her funny and strange exorcist.exe at http://deprogramming.us/

-- Zoe Beloff, who's web presence is descriptive of her performance and 
cdrom works - her projects frame the experience of stereoscopic interactive 
videos as philosophical toys... diagetic worlds where we witness, in 
miniature, our illusions (optical and otherwise) externalized and 
collectively projected/hallucinated outside our fragile-bounded 
selves.  Zoe's website is http://www.zoebeloff.com/

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My own work has been described very well by Jim.

My most recent work incorporates video streams from the C-SPAN.org website, 
using (among other components) lyrics and music of karaoke songs as methods 
for (1) interpreting and talking/singing back to the one-way flow of cspan 
videos, (2) gaining awareness and understanding of public policy-making and 
ritualistic governmental process while practicing the first method, and (3) 
experimenting with forms of cinematic experience made possible by the 
technical limitations of network processes.

The C-SPAN x 4 project can be accessed at
http://www.wildernesspuppets.net/yarns/annotate/cspanx4.html


Barbara

---------------------------------------------
Barbara Lattanzi
www.wildernesspuppets.net