Published on the Web (online journal)

In our world of perpetual connectivity, touching interfaces that keep us out of reach, we form attachments whilst remaining detached, by turns kindling and dampening emotions. Conceived as the first in a series of musings on the paradoxical and sometimes poignant nature of human relationships amid networked life, Out of Touch was created in Flash and incorporates text sequences, randomness, intensively filtered video, sound and cut-up voices.

This Out of Touch episode was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for the Third Hand Plays series curated by Brian Stefans, who wrote:

Her use of video, particularly the manipulations that reduce reality to iconic or cartoon-like (which I read as linguistic) simplicity, accentuates some of the horror at the base of this piece, which has a quasi-Expressionist element — I can’t help but see echoes of “The Scream” in here, or perhaps, with a very different valence in relation to time and experience (it doesn’t happen in Wilks’s piece), the blurred faces in the work of Christian Boltanski.

Out of Touch extended for live performance

After creating the original Out of Touch piece for SFMOMA, Christine began to develop the ideas further as an ongoing project of playable and performing media. The focus of the extended project has been for live digital performance. Version 1.0 of her OOT performance interface includes two additional interactive pieces, Out of Hand and Out of Sight, which she performs live as playable media.

ii — in the white darkness is an interactive piece about memory. The work was created by Reiner Strasser in collaboration with M.D. Coverley (Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink) over a period of 9 months in 2003/04. It assimilates and reflects the experience with patients fallen ill with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's diseases, showing the fragility and fluidity of memory from a subjective point of view. "It was not the erasure that mattered so much as the act of trying to recover what we no longer can identify." (M.D. Coverley) From the pulsing dots of the background-interface different events can be started, played, and combined. In this process the experience of remembering and loss of memory can be re-created in the appearance and disappearance of words, pictures, animations, and sounds. Memories (readable with a general metaphorical meaning) are unveiled and veiled in transition at the same time, arranged by or using your own memory.

(Source: Author Description from Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1)

This work allows readers a new way to conceptualize and empathize with patients who experience an illness related to memory. The interactive component serves to strengthen this empathy by giving the reader some amount of control over the memories, but not at all an absolute control, similar to the struggle an individual with Parkinson's or Alzheimer's might experience. This work could also serve as a means of spreading awareness about the illnesses by giving a real-life representation of the tragic feelings that come with losing your memories. In the modern day people may take this for granted, and it could be beneficial to have such a vivid reminder.

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 Fragments of Distances is a short, only 5 web pages long browser based narrative focusing on the inner world of the main protagonist as he (it as well might be a she) meets the tourists asking him for a direction in his hometown. In other words it’s about the difference of the remembering and experiencing self and how they get along in forming of the self image. Or perhaps it’s just about the streets of Ljubljana. After all there is a lot of Google Maps API involved in the narrative. Actually, I’ll leave it up to you to make your own take on it.

Rememori is a degenerative memory game created in Flash. It’s poetics play out some of the affects and effects of dementia on an intimate circle of characters. Juggling with point-of-view and the process of identification, the Rememori player becomes entangled in a struggle for accurate recall, orientation, attention and the search for meaning. In such situations, where does empathy lie and how does the player cope? Inevitably, it’s a contrary game - there can be no winners. 

According to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, 42% of the UK population (25 million people) know a family member or close friend with dementia, and worldwide, there is a new case of dementia every seven seconds.* In the light of these facts Rememori is a challenging game in more ways than one.

*Alzheimer's Disease International (2009), World Alzheimer's Report

BA-Tale is an interactive, intermedial electronic literature piece, whose narrative is a fake myth about the formation of Slovakia’s capital—Bratislava. The way the reader engages with the piece brings about the concept of myth as an oral narrative and re-contextualizes it. The story is read in fragments—semantic units from the scattered moving text. The aspect of catching a fragment in time reminds one of listening to the oral story, although the necessity to remember the subsequent words in order to proceed adds a new aspect to this tradition. The sound is randomly computer-chosen from our database that defines for each unit a number of sounds. The semantically most important word of the unit was used as a keyword to find several corresponding sounds in freesounds.org.

Interaction: The first line of the story is marked white. You mouse over the first line and then you follow by mousing over any of the white marked words. These words group into a string. When mouse-released, another group of words turns white. By following the marked units, you can read the whole narrative string in a sequence. But you do not have to—and can create your own.

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.

Firefly: a tale told in 180 degrees of separation is a lyrical yet formal structure comprised of 6 stanzas, each five lines "long" and six lines "deep." Readers make their own way through the text by clicking on each line to reveal a different facet of the story. Click on the right hand icon for the next installment of lines.The work is a "true" hypertext in that it cannot be read linearly. The structure, subtly changing settings, and reader interaction all provide multi-dimensional spaces for meaning, subtext, and context.

(Source: Description from Poems that Go)