“Blind Side of a Secret” consists of three audiovisual variations, created individually by Mühlenbruch, Sodeoka, and Nakamura, on words written by Thom Swiss. The work could be considered remix culture in action, overlaying and cutting up an underlying tale—which is never given entirely as a whole, though many sections are held in common—about the unspoken parts of relationships, of coming and going. In all three pieces, alternating third-person voice-over narration by a man and a woman forms the bulk of the audio portion, and it includes parts in English, French, and Dutch. The three collaborators approach the material in sharply contrasting ways: the horizontally scrolling, black-and-red fluidity of Nakamura's animation tells the tale in the most linear fashion, with no interruptions or breaks in the audio and no interaction; Sodeoka takes a DJ's approach, carving up the audio into rhythmic segments and pulsating images that recall song more than narrative; and Mühlenbruch turns it into an interactive flash animation, where an image based on the narrative forms a template that a user can click on to follow the individual narrative threads of the voice-over or run them over each other concurrently. Taken together, and given the absence of the source text in the final presentation, the work suggests that the plethora of angles from which to approach the idea of remix in digital art need not conflict, while at the same time suggesting that nostalgia for an “original work” is perhaps secondary in some respects to the artistic potential of collaboration and redistribution.
(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Rob Schoenbeck)
