grief

AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS is a web audio adventure about the meaning of death. It draws audio drama, audio tours and alternate reality gaming. The use of audio is an attempt to create a sense of unity in a highly fragmented experience. I see the techniques and experience of audio tours as a way to bring disparate elements together. Just as an audio tour involves guiding a listener to different places, this audio experience guides players to different websites. I include both custom and existing sites, and so this project continues my interest in pervasive design: where the players’ world is part of the fictional world. The story is born out of the pain of suddenly losing my mother, and facing the meaninglessness of my life. I got past heaviness of the subject matter by drawing on my early days in sketch comedy theatre, unifying the disparate times of my life.

(Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

This manga-inspired graphic novel app is about thirteen-year-old Tavs, who chooses his name (meaning “silent”) when he writes a declaration to his parents: “From now on I will be silent”. The story is about the loneliness and loss Tavs feels upon the death of his twin and his family’s move to Tokyo. TAVS is a fantasy narrative with gothic, humorous and boy-meets-girl elements and references to haiku and manga. The app mixes text, music, still images, sound effects and animation into an immersive aesthetic experience. For example, as we read of Tavs’ sorrow and frustration the words begin to fall down from the screen and the reader has to take an active part in the reading process by grabbing the sentences. The chapters show great variation, operating between expressive powerful animations and stills and black pages, between strong sound effects and silence and between spoken and written words, right up to the final fight between the twins; between life and death. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

The piece is a short poem written using a nested series of file folders on a computer desktop. The process of composition is animated, with a total run time of two and a half minutes followed by a pause before repeating. A scripting agent running on the command line controls a Finder window view of the desktop as folders are created, renamed, reshuffled, and nested within one another, forming the poem. What is presented is not a video recording - it runs live on the desktop file system in the gallery. The viewer watches as the poem is written in folders, expands, is dated and sorted into its final form, and finally disappears to start again.

The work "Eight was where it ended" explores one story from the community of "Angel Baby" mothers - online communities dedicated to grieving for their unborn children in ways not afforded by society at large. It explores this identity position through the medium of digital file systems, in particular their embedded modes of representing temporality, the visible, and the hidden.

The piece is an electronic literature work that is small, simple, novel in form, and conceptually experimental. Versions of it have appeared in various digital interfaces, print editions, and live performances (see below). This edition was specifically designed for casual viewing by an electronic literature gallery audience.

This edition is written in a mixture of delimited text, shell script, and AppleScript.

(Source: The ELO 2012 Media Art Show.) 

"Planting Trees out of the Grief" is a lyrical essay, or work of creative non-fiction about mourning. "Planting Trees out of the Grief. In Memoriam Robert Creeley" is a ficticious story that mirrors the psychological processes of coping with mourning described in the essay.

The hypertext will lead you through both texts as same as one goes through the process of mourning. You will go further and sometimes you realize you just stepped backwards finding yourself at the same point you were once before.

Being at the same point (textpassage) you were once before you'll have the choice to follow new paths - or you have to go through the same until a new path (link) reveals. Sometimes people forget they were in grief and then, suddenly, they face their loss again. Therefore, I am dealing with intendend moments of recurrence. By this, you are forced to find new paths and follow other links.