personal voice

Description (in English)

Work on We Descend began in 1984, when five words came unbidden into my mind: “If this document is authentic…” I had no idea what the phrase signified: Who’s saying this? What document? Why wouldn’t it be authentic? How would it be authenticated? By what authority? How would that authority be established? Where did the document come from in the first place? As I pondered these questions, a clutch of fragmentary writings began to appear under my hands — via the standard tech at the time: fountain pen, notebook paper, clipboard.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/we-descend/)

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Technical notes

The fragments generated by that original five-word phrase were eventually transferred from paper to a desktop Macintosh using Storyspace, an early hypertext authoring environment. Eventually, Volume One of We Descend reached publication in 1997 as a standalone computer application, distributed on floppy disk by Eastgate Systems. Twenty years later (in the wake of at least three revolutions in digital tech), Volume Two appeared here in The New River, built in HTML & CSS for reading on any internet device.

Description (in English)

“On the Margin of History” is a witness of the destruction of ancient history and the sharp demographic change in Aleppo (Syria), Mohamad Kebbewar’s home town, a city of six million people that lost ninety percent of its residents over the course of six years. It is the witness of the breakdown of former Yugoslavia, Natasha Boskic’s homeland, culminating in the NATO bombing of Serbia where silence was the only response to events. It is a transdisciplinary project that considers the tensions between personal voice and story and the possibilities of the digital visuals, done by Mary McDonald, to suggest and reinforce false narratives and/or to create understandings through metaphor, playing with all levels of our perception. It attempts to reframe our consciousness to find empathy and closeness, humanity in chaos. The ”Margin” tells the true cost of war — the reverberating loss of the destruction of people and place, family, heritage, traditions, and cultures. These brief fragments of poem and film enhance the experience of the surreal and feelings of displacement. Artistic creation is a kind of healing, and letting go of war and decomposition of life. Even when we chose to leave them behind, they never leave us.