domesticity

For this piece, Bigelow uses the most famous pangram in the English language, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” to structure a poetic narrative hypertext. Each letter contains a piece of a story about a relationship about to change, expressed by means of a poetic line that moves in meaningful ways over a brief looped video background. Not wishing to reveal more about the story, I will just say that Bigelow deftly maps the story onto the pangram several ways: chromatically, graphemically, allegorically, and cinematically. In the credits, he describes his role as “spun by Alan Bigelow,” an interesting choice of words in the context of his creative approach. Having read his delightful series of “Ten…” short list-essays on digital literature (positioned after the images in his site), and having read the credits to his works, I know that he uses royalty-free sounds, images, video, and occasionally language —modified as he sees fit— in the creation of his works. The English language and its alphabet are also “found” or ready made visual, aural, and semantic objects (thankfully FOSS) which can be combined in a variety of meaningful ways. In the textile world, to “spin” is to interconnect fibers into yarn— a frame of reference used by poets such as Yeats to refer to their craft (note the use of “stitching and unstitching” in “Adam’s Curse”). Thus Bigelow’s site is aptly titled “Webyarns.” So whatever else this might be, whatever else anyone might call it, it is poetry.

(Source: Leonardo Flores)

Home explores the meaning of home, the secrets revealed there, and our emotional relationship to both the place and the intimacies contained therein. A house is for sale; it has been abandoned. Yet it reverberates with the memories of those who lived there and whose most private moments still inhabit the half empty spaces. The user overhears snippets of emotionally charged family conversations, moves down dark corridors and enters into surprising rooms. You eavesdrop, learn secrets, watch. From these fragments the story of this specific home is pieced together, as well as the meaning of home itself.

Using VRML, Home invites you to move through the pretty, flat suburb and into the 3-D world inside the house. This home, like all homes, is constructed from rooms and objects: a coffee cup, a telephone, a moth, a postcard, a slice of pie, a family photo, a bottle of alcohol, a nightlight, a bedside stand, children’s toys, a bathroom mirror, a bathtub, and even a window to the outside. These objects are links to the work of fourteen different artists who were invited by Barbier and Browning to create a piece on the meaning of home. Many of these works are fragments from longer films and videos. Collectively they present different points of view on the psychological, social, and cultural dimensions of home. From this mosaic, a complex narrative of home and its meaning is created.

(Source: Michelle Citron, in "START HERE> An Interdisciplinary Introduction to Electronic Literature")