early web

Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment emerged as a response to a discourse of disembodiment prevalent in early days of the Internet. I never believed that the physical gendered body would be subsumed in an idealized information age. Even in our attempts to externalize and expand upon the processes of the brain through the computational and storage capacities of the computer, the precariousness of the biological body persists. Somewhere along the way cultural theory veered away from body politics. Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment examines from the inside, not just 'the' body, but also 'my' body in particular. I have focused on the storage and retention of bodily memory in order to explore the relationship and/or disconnect between body and mind that has preoccupied philosophers for generations. In Ethics, Part II: Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind, Spinoza writes: "The human mind is capable of perceiving a great number of things, and … is cable of receiving a great number of impressions… If the human body is affected in a manner which involves the nature of any external body, the human mind will regard the said external body as actually existing… Memory is simply a certain association of ideas involving the nature of things outside the human body, which association arises in the mind according to the order and association of the modifications of the human body… The human mind has no knowledge of the body, and does not know it to exist, save through the ideas of the modifications whereby the body is affected."

The title, (a grammar of signs has replaced a botany of symptoms), comes from Michel Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic, in which he charts a shift in the language surrounding the perception and description of the human body which occurred along with the advent of modern medicine.

Hidden beneath layers of highly magnified and slowly animated images of plant cells are small narrative texts which, when clicked upon, reveal botanical observations of colour from the perception of a child. These textual offerings must be actively sought out - with no user interaction they will never be revealed. Upon clicking, no sooner are the texts exposed, then they are covered up again. This continuous process of regeneration illustrates paradox of the elusiveness of any grammar in the face of a relentless botany.

When I began writing Mythologies in 1995 I was thinking about gender in language and, informed by a poststructuralist feminist critique of the representation of the female body as landscape, I set out to explode these stereotypes by using over-the-top geological metaphors. I wanted to convey a moment of realization, when a number of ideas come together at once. It mattered little to me what order the ideas came in, only that they came together in the end. The narrative structure of this non-linear HTML version was influenced by the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The interface was based on the placemats you get at many restaurants in Nova Scotia, which depict a map of Nova Scotia surrounded by icons of purported interest to tourists: lobsters, whales, lighthouses, beaches and the Bluenose. The found images and texts came from a geology course I took in university, a civil engineering manual from the 1920s and a random assortment of textbooks found in used bookstores. The deadpan technical descriptions of dikes, groins and mattress work add perverse sexual overtones to the otherwise quite chaste first-person narrative. Between the diagrammatic images and the enigmatic texts, a meta-narrative emerges - an entre space - where the absurd and the inarticulate, desire and loss may finally co-exist.