Web essay with video content on the various permutations of _Laura_ story through multiple media. _Laura_ is discussed as a parable of information exchange, with a focus on how sound is transmitted through and across multiple film texts, repetition and desire, noise and the cosmic.
Laura is a parable of molding information.
-- Anytime information reaches a certain point of saturation, anytime information cannot be contained, it becomes noise. (Just as "information wants to be free" so too does it tend toward noise, before moving onto more ethereal realms)
-- Laura-- intersecting with histories of radio, voice on film, popular song, modernist and postmodernist storytelling, television and the internet-- exists in a liminal area between noise and non-noise, repetition and renewal, information and perception, human and machine.
QuickTime, RealMedia
Content and concept Joe Milutis
Interface design Melissa Scherrer
My work generally references the histories of the avant-garde and popular culture. The starting point of this piece is the historical coincidence that "subliminal advertising" and "concrete poetry" were introduced as concepts at nearly the same time. The piece is, as far as I know, the first to use subliminal effects in a work of electronic literature. A fuller description/statement is incorporated in the work itself.
(Source: Author description, Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One.)
“Project for Tachistoscope [Bottomless Pit]” consists of subliminal messages that seem to be attacking something—whether that is icons, corporations, pop culture, or something else entirely. In this piece, it is left up to the reader to determine its subliminal messages by creating different reactions to different readers. What helps create these unique reactions is the music and icons that appear in the background of the text. The icons are the main focus in this piece and what sets it apart from other readings like itself. Certain icons are displayed behind certain words thus creating an association between the words and the icon being shown. Leaving the message up to the reader is the most interesting fact of this piece because the images it creates in each reader’s mind and what they think the author is trying to convey really gets them into the piece; it makes them want to understand it and spend more time viewing it in the process.
(Source: Reviewer description, ELD entry)
I probably encountered emblems first through the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Like much that I admire, emblems are really on the margins of art and literary history. Before the dot.com bust, so much that was written about the web struck me as wrong-headed. People imputed what I can only call 'magic' to web's feature set. Low-cost-per-million multimedia interactivity was going to change the world. I knew that people had said similar things about the emblem, and had offered, in outline, many of the same reasons for it. So the emblem, often literally magical, became a caricature of the web.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)
Requires Shockwave.