france

One of the first works of interactive fiction made by a female designer, La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs is an examination of sexual harassments in cyberculture. The game, written by Chine Lanzmann and coded by Jean-Louis Le Breton, allows the player to impersonate a woman who has to face numerous seducers. Interestingly, one of the sexual predators is a computer. The game is stylized upon a chat on Minitel, where the player is asked several questions. She can type only two answers: "yes" or "no", which influence the outcome of the game. However, the more the player becomes involved in the simulated chat, the lesser the chance to avoid one of the six endings, all of them negative.

The Cabinet Noir was the name given in France for the secret office where the post of suspected persons was opened and inspected before being forwarded to its final recipient. Governments since have used similar Black Chambers to spy on their populations communication via telegram, telephone and internet media. In order to avoid detection, some individuals have resorted to the technique of Steganography, where communications are hidden in seemingly innocent messages. This can lead to a state of paranoia where every text may contain evidence of nefarious intentions. This work takes the email exchange and data produced for the WEISE7 Labor exhibition and mixes it with the text of Edgar Allan Poe's detective story The Purloined Letter. The result is a paranoid archive of implied subtext.

Soliloquy is an unedited document of every word I spoke during the week of April 15-21, 1996, from the moment I woke up Monday morning to the moment I went to sleep on Sunday night. To accomplish this, I wore a hidden voice-activated tape recorder. I transcribed Soliloquy during the summer of 1996 at the Chateau Bionnay in Lacenas, France, during a residency there. It took 8 weeks, working 8 hours a day. Soliloquy was first realized as a gallery exhibition at Bravin Post Lee in Soho during April of 1997. Subsequently, the gallery published the text in a limited edition of 50. In the fall of 2001, Granary Books published a trade edition of the text. The web version of Soliloquy contains the exact text from the 281-page original book version, but due to the architecture of the web, each chapter is sub-divided into 10 parts. And, of course, the textual treatment of the web version is indeed web-specific and perhaps more truly references the ephemerality of language as reflected by the book's epigraph: "If every word spoken in New York City daily / were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, / each day there would be a blizzard." In order to achieve this effect, the web version is available only to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape 6+. Unfortunately, none of the prior versions of Netscape support the CSS tag used here: "a { text-decoration: none }" ; to view the piece in web form without this function enabled would be to ruin the intended experience of this work.

(Source: Author description, ELC vol. 1)