Quicktime VR

"Inside Blackwell Mansion" is a historical-fiction digital narrative based on the life story of Sarah Pardee Winchester, the eccentric "haunted" widow of the heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms fortune. On advice from a psychic, Sarah Winchester built a sprawling mansion in San Jose, California, allegedly to avoid the vengeful spirits of the countless many who had been killed by the Winchester rifle. Building went on continuously for 38 years, without plan, and often without apparent purpose, until her death in 1922. Sarah Winchester's story is especially interesting, because it can be considered on so many different levels: spiritualism, skepticism, mythology, tourism, and feminism.

"Inside Blackwell Mansion" is a graphics-intensive, interactive application utilizing QuickTime VR, audio, and 3D graphics to unfold its narrative. The reader navigates through the mansion-museum of the late Abra Blackwell, accompanied by a tour group that serves as a multivoice narrator. The reader interacts with narrative-yielding elements in the house, such as books, furniture, or pictures, to gain insights into the many sides of the inscrutable Abra Blackwell. The reader's spatial progression through the mansion mirrors his or her attempt to gain access to the lost memories and hidden thoughts of Abra Blackwell.

(Source: DAC 1999 Artist's description)

This ode to the moon is written and visually designed to underscore the cyclical nature of the moon’s stages. Using Quicktime VR on a 245 pixel wide circular strip, the view of this work is like being inside a ring and you rotate (or does it rotate?) to see its entire surface. The lines and stanzas in this poem have been arranged on this surface, spaced and indented in relation to one another to create a primarily horizontal visual progression. On the top and bottom of the strip are the stages of the moon, the way you’d find them on a calendar, signaling the passage of time as one reads this poem. The words also signal the passage of time as the speaker discusses her relation to the moon as an oracular companion in the skies, whose stages of dress and undress, bloatedness and thinness, continue to frustrate “lifetimes” of expectation.

(Source: Leonardo Flores)