encyclopedic

The End: Death in Seven Colours is a non-linear Internet artwork made in the interactive authoring environment Korsakow. Seven deaths (corresponding to seven colours of the rainbow) are examined through the prism of popular culture and film in a vast, encyclopedic mash-up. The work presents an “exploded view” diagram of our culture’s relationship to death and narrative closure. Like a chose-your-own-adventure conspiracy theory, The End weaves together a paranoid meta-text organized around themes of the unknown, concealment, secrecy, and the shifting boundary between animal, man and computer in the post-human era. The deaths of Alan Turing, Sigmund Freud, Princess Diana, Jim Morrison, Judy Garland, Walter Benjamin, and Marcel Duchamp become the touchstones for many impractical segues and short circuits peppered with recurring motifs such as 4 a.m., His Master’s Voice, Snow White,The Rainbow, Chess, The Man Behind the Curtain, and an array of famous surrealist artworks that find new meaning in their entanglements with these stories.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

What happens with an essay when it abandons the set form of book pages, and steps out into the internet's virtual space? Webessay is an invitation into a digital meta-essay: an enormous text-tapestry of quotations, photos, rt and music produced from the two essayists associations and personal library, and arranged into four metaphorical trips: the scientific expedition, the internal journey, the big city holiday, and space tourism. The travelers move past over fifty different stops in all, and are sketched out with the help of many hundreds of airmail-striped envelopes. The program is organized so that the traveler can follow the predetermined routes' tracks, or take a spontaneous trip with the help of self-selected links. You can search in the depths, surf freely away in a labyrinth of hypertexts, or you can choose to be led by the webessay's composition. You're guaranteed to get lost, and find something you weren't expecting.