French

Don’t touch me displays the photograph of a woman lying on a bed, as a voice - that of Annie Abrahams - starts telling a story. “Don’t touch me tells a dream I had when I was a teenager," says Annie Abrahams. This dream can be interpreted as the sometimes painful transition from teenage to adulthood for a young woman exposed to the gaze and the desire of men. The interactor listens, but can experience at the same time an action with the mouse. Being passive, looking and listening without using the mouse is not always easy for the interactor, often prompted to click compulsively. But if the user rolls the cursor of the mouse over the picture, a text immediately appears on the screen, expressing the woman’s refusal (« don’t touch me ») and she changes positions. The vocal tale stops immediately and restarts from the beginning. On the fourth attempt of caress with the mouse, the window closes up.

The story Don’t touch me has a vocal, visual (the young woman displayed) as well as textual dimension (the three messages of refusal). It also has a gestural dimension: it is through the action of the user that the vocal narrative makes sense. This is an interactive story insofar as it stages interactivity. The piece is indeed based on a play between interactivity and narrativity. Interactivity prevents narrativity insofar as the gesture of the user stops the narrative. The author plays on the apparent incompatibility between narrativity and interactivity to suggest the user to learn to resist his desire to click, but also to apprehend differently the representations - especially online – of the woman body. The vocal narrative can only be interpreted through the gesture of the user: it makes sense because it is interactive.

Reviewed by Serge Bouchardon

Sous terre is an order of the RATP for the celebration of the centenary of the Parisian subway in the year 2000. Under ground, the subway, his memory, his internal organization, his/her/its history. His tunnels, of travelers that pass and iron. All one life that we forget under streets. The subway is useful, it serves to go from a point to another, to move without being confronted to the urban chaos. It is another city, but of passages, of flux, of cuts,: a network. Between time, in the displacement, it is necessary to kill the time, not to feel the surrounding intensity, all these people that us meet without recognizing them, the out-flow of the maintaining chanted by the scrolling of stations. To the difference of the other means of transportation the subway doesn't ask for no attention of travelers as for the taken road. One only waits. The subway requires to face the other travelers then, to look at them while waiting to arrive to destination. Travelers are held seated or standing. Some watch on the right, on the left, of others no. A woman reads a book, a man a newspaper, of others merely the emptiness. One hears machines, grindings and rubbings, opening and closing of doors. A teenager rises to let his room with a small smile. And then a pregnant woman or an old man . There is very community, but only of passages, of suspends, of waiting, of a point to another. I imagine that active to his work according to the same journey since ten years someone must cross the same people every day in the underground, and ever to address them the speech. And yet they know themselves, without recognizing themselves. It is this anonymity that is under our feet. It is this anonymity of oddness and the minority that is the memory of the world. The subway is a network, as Internet, as our memory. Near and at a time distant of him. Distance of the subway that is marked by history, the one of the last century and his utopias. Proximity with Internet, relations between beings, there, under ground, here in the binary. Network of a silence and a possibility of meeting between travelers. We are passage on the network, we go from a place to another and we are several, to different places of the planet, to be connected at the same time to the same site. The last subway passed, one closes grids. Another life begins. One cleans, one repairs, one improves, one installs during all night long so that the following day takes place without tear for travelers, that all functions perfectly, that this day, this other is now forgotten and that we can pass a place to another while forgetting the distance that separates us.

(Source: Author's description from the Boston Cyberarts Festival)

The “plane poet” belongs to the series of " little uncomfortable reading poems." The reader must constantly move the mouse back and forth if she wants to "plan" the flat tinte that continually reforms in order to access reading the animation that plays before it. Which the text or the reader controls the other? Does not the ridiculousness or the game prevail over the literature? What do we read when zapping and action are thus compelled? But ultimately, planing the color of the water to return to the water into the animation, is it nothing else a rhetorical figure which the reader is the instrument? Then: immersion in the text or, conversely, the text is it immersed into the reader? Poetry of the device, of the relationship more than just writing: a text to see and read that is no longer thought as a set of words or in terms of image.

"The Two" could be called a digital poem or a story generator. It produces three-line narratives. In the first line of each stanza, two characters of unspecified gender are introduced. The second line includes two pronouns and a verb phrase, stating specific genders for the two characters but leaving the resolution of these pronouns up to the reader. The last line offers a sort of conclusion and describes something about the two characters. Because particular roles introduced in the first line (such as "the babysitter" and "the police officer") are stereotypically imagined as mapping to particular genders, the story that is generated can pose a challenge to readers and can expose their assumptions. Because languages differ in how easy it is to initally omit mention of person's gender, the translation of this piece can also be challenging.

This work was made in the event of the 30th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou. Thirty works each represented a year from 1977 to 2007 and Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries represented year 2007 with the work Les Amants de Beaubourg. The work deals with more philosophical questions than other more narrative-based works, such as Bust Down the Doors!, by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries and has many references to the creation of art by artists, especially Marcel Duchamp.

Fictions d’Issy is a generative novel, its narrative being gradually composed as it is presented to the readers. It was first shown at the 2005 edition of the 1ER CONTACT FESTIVAL.It retraces the story of two characters – he and she – and their relationship, oscillating between breaking-up and being involved. The story - continuously generated, sentence after sentence - is published in Issy-les-Moulineaux’ eleven urban e-newspapers, alternating with municipal information. The story takes place in the town of Issy; the names of public establishments, streets and squares are memorised by the text-generating device and appear regularly throughout the narrative. The local population is thus able to follow the characters’ adventures as they take place in familiar places.

Readers can shape the narrative, whether they live in Issy or not, by calling a toll-free number, as messages regularly invite them to do. When calling this number, they are asked to press a key on the phone’s keyboard, which then acts as a symbolic map representing both the town’s territory and the emotional territory of the characters’ relationship. The choices made by readers either bring the characters together or pull them apart; readers then receive a text message with the narrative piece they have helped to generate. Piece by piece, contribution by contribution, the readers are able to modify the novel-generating system, which will ultimately decide whether the couple splits up or reunites.  All the generated pieces are also stored online on a dedicated website.

(Source: Le Cube)

Pond is the result of a writing experience I have had with a friend. Just like my father, hers had died of a serious illness. For several weeks, we would meet and talk about our experience. Through short texts revolving around several themes, we would try to imagine each other’s experience. Some years after this experience in writing, I had the opportunity to take pictures in a burned-down house. On insurance grounds, the former inhabitants had had to leave all their belongings in the burned rooms. I decided to fill these rooms with the voice of my friend’s father, as well as with his daughter’s voice.

By interacting on manipulable elements, the reader moves from room to room in this soot-covered house. But the images are just reflections, vague memories, completely conditioned by the subjective eye of the photographer. The "voices" floating on these evanescent images are equally labile, i.e. constructed and deconstructed by fragile textual animations. The author's voice is sometimes superimposed on the animated text; in German, this voice tells her own experience of her father’s death.

Death, forgetfulness, the slow but sure decay of memories are both suggested on a "visual" level and denied by the circularity of the "wandering" experience. The digital work tries to preserve these memories, even if they are to fall inevitably into oblivion. The work invites the reader to become a party to this desperate attempt to prevent the stream of oblivion from leaking.

Because of the operating systems, the software and the ever changing speed of computers, the digital device may sometimes affect the author’s artistic project. In Tramway, this instability of the device is metaphorised on the surface of the screen; and it is thematised in the relationship between the figures of "manipulation" and the manipulable textual context.

In this work, I tried to compose with the strange temporal thickness of certain events. Ten years later, an event in my life took this paradoxical thickness: My mother and I had to make a gesture that always seems so solemn and natural in movies, i.e. close the eyes of my father who had just died. My mother finally did it, but in a way I managed to describe only once; also because she partially failed. This scene had remained an open wound - like a fiery eye I could neither close nor keep open.

After a few exploratory clicks in Tramway, a scrolling text appears: it describes the traumatic scene. On most standard computers, it is possible to decipher the text. But the stream of words will become undecipherable when displayed on more powerful computers. The "lability" of the digital device is thus used to reflect on the possible forgetting of this scene. The result of this process is both reassuring and unbearable.

Tramway therefore proposes a second definition of mourning and oblivion, based on the persistence of memory. Pop-ups "invade" the screen. The reader tries to close these windows, but others keep on popping up. Five narrative threads revolve around the traumatic event without ever thematising it. Throughout their arduous interactions, readers finally understand that no manipulation of the digital interface will ever allow them to "accomplish" the frozen gesture described in the traumatic scene.