Mahasukha Halo -- snapshots, pleas, and confessions from a future world of alien sex and alien gods, where humans do the dirty work and put on the dirty shows. Lost missionaries, sex addicts, hyacinth men, and post-millenium religious fanatics poulate these street scenes where sex and religion are polyvalent, and body parts proliferate. (Source: Eastgate)
Megan Heyward's interactive narrative, I Am a Singer, was created in 1997 with Macromedia Director for the artist's MFA thesis and was exhibited widely after its release. Concerned with memory and identity, I Am a Singer tells the fictional story of Isobel Jones, a famous rock singer who has been in an accident and is suffering amnesia. Although she is still able to access the media traces of her life- songs, articles, newspaper clippings, and various items of personal memorabilia, she cannot draw together these disparate threads into a meaningful sense of self. Structurally, I Am A Singer is a narrative built of fragments, of small, discrete but intersecting sequences, mirroring the fragmented consciousness of the singer. It operates on a number of levels – as a pure tale about an amnesiac singer trying to regain her memory, and as a broader exploration of identity and memory.
I Am A Singer was supported by Interactive Media funding from the Australian Film Commission (now Screen Australia ) of $57,400 and premiered as a finalist in the MILIA New Talent Pavilion in Cannes, France. It was exhibited widely between 1997 and 2000 in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, USA, Mexico and Brazil. I am a Singer won several national Australian awards for digital media including Apple Australia Award for Individual Excellence 1998, AIMIA ’98 best title produced by a student, and the US Invision‘98 Awards (US)- Best Digital Storytelling (Bronze), Omni Intermedia‘98 Awards (US)- Experimental (Silver) and Omni Intermedia‘98 Awards (US)- Sound Design (Silver).
Megan undertook multiple creative roles in the development of the work, as writer, artist, graphic/ interface designer, director, sound desiner and programmer. Her AFC funding allowed her to commission singwriter Phil Kakulas of Australian band The Black Eyed Susans to write two original songs for the work:- 'I Am a Singer" and 'Going Down". Black Eyed Susans musicians Phil Kakulas, Kiernan Box, Dan Luscombe and Mark Dawson played on the two tracks and incidental music for the project, which can be heard throughout the work interspersed with Megan's sound design elements. The track I Am a Singer was later recorded in entirety by the band and vocalist Rob Snarksi and released commercially.
Megan built the project in Macromedia Director 4.0, and it comprises approximatley 55 Director files and 10 video files and 50 audio files. The project took several years to fully develop.
Lucid Mapping and Codex Transformissions in the Z-Buffer is an investigation of textual and narrative possibilities within three dimensional on-screen environments (specifically Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or VRML). Functionally, it is both a text to be read and a space to be surveyed. The various elements of the title -- "lucid mapping," "transformissions," "the Z-buffer" -- are all glossed within the VRML environment itself, so I will not discuss them in detail here. The project evolved from a set of early schematic models. These experiments in "spatial heuristics," as I called them, were not conceived as displays of technical virtuosity; rather, I hoped to begin exploring some of the questions raised by three-dimensional information spaces: How well suited are they to organizing documents according to the non-linear principles pioneered by hypertext developers? How can the addition of a third dimension extend (hyper)textual visualization? What are the conditions required for "narrative" in three-dimensional on-screen environments? And so on . . .
Passage is issued from a multimedia generator which arranges fixed and/or mobile images, literary texts to be read and/or heard and music all of which are on an interactive cederom. Passage can not be reinitialized even if the computer is turned off, so that the reader must always go ahead in his reading. The work is always passing away.
(Source: Author's description)