ghost

Breathe is a ghost story. It is a ghost story about a young woman, Flo, who likes to talk to ghosts. Or maybe it’s the ghosts who like to talk to her.

Full of psychological suspense and haunting interruptions, Breathe is a story for anyone who wants to know what it’s like to read a personalised book and feel a chill when they see their digital world and their real world combine.

Intimate and uncanny, Breathe will leave you checking over your shoulder and looking at your phone and your room in a way you never have before.

(Source: Taken from the about page)

Ghost City is a website that focuses on the representation of the city by the mass media. It uses the space of the web as a sculptural space, allowing viewers to interact with animated graphics to delve deeper and deeper into an imaginary city.

Ghost City is a labyrinthine environment through which viewers can navigate, either following the linear narrative that unfolds by moving from page to page, or they can delve into the non-linear chaos of random links. Each space is made up of appropriated images and texts. The images are culled from various print media sources. The texts are either found passages from urban theory or specifically written poetic musings on the city.

Rather than present static images, Ghost City is a collage of moving parts. It is a pulsating grid of flashing images that loop indefinitely. The viewer is an urban wanderer moving through the site, step by step, page by page. One moves forward and back retracing ones steps within the urban grid, discovering new spaces and new meanings. Ghost City is about memory, and about traveling through time and space. The time is infinite. The space is finite. Yet the time and space of Ghost City metaphorically relate to the experience of the city where people walk and talk and interact. Within the confines of Ghost City visitors can pause and think and move backwards and forwards. Ghost City is a city of fragments. A memory. A ghost of reality. A ghost city. Ghost City was begun in 1997 and has been changed and updated over the last four years. Each visit to Ghost City while seemingly similar, upon close examination reveals new avenues to explore.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

Inspired by the author’s own dreams and experiences, The Flat presents users/readers with a challenging mouse-controlled environment in which narrative fragments left behind by an abandoned building’s previous inhabitants still linger. Through a combination of atmospheric photography, parallax scrolling techniques, snippets of written fiction, and an evocative soundtrack, the work allows various rooms in the flat to be explored by panning around with the mouse; the transient textual narratives themselves often changing and/or progressing when the rooms are revisited. To add to the feeling of tension and urgency, and to encourage the work to be revisited, a timer ticks down in the top right hand corner of the screen before the user/reader is ejected from the narrative and shown a final, enigmatic scene: a white hooded figure in the back garden.