metamorphosis

A short story told from the perspective of a young girl named Stella, who is lying in the grass in the summer sunshine when she realises that she cannot move. She finds that in order to escape from this immobility she can change herself into a series of other things and creatures: a stone, a fish, a house - and she finally finds that she in fact wants to be herself again. This is a lyrical story raising questions of identity and the transition from child to adult.

The story is displayed as a series of pages with a paragraph on each page and graphical elements beneath. It is entirely linear, but designed to be read on an iPad.

David Jhave Johnston’s video-based "Interstitial" is a meditation on terminal anxiety. The title of the piece, which refers generally to that which occupies an “empty interval,” takes on a specific connotation when one considers its popular use in web development contexts for the commercial “pre-loaders” that hawk their wares while one waits for the site to open. The video, which is minimally edited, features three views arranged in triptych form: a cat decomposing in a river, tidal pools, and a bug undergoing metamorphosis. These events, as witnessed by Johnston, are unaltered and unmodified, simply captured where they occurred using handheld equipment. According to an artist’s statement published on Tributaries and Text-fed Streams (http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/2008/02/22/interstitial/), the web presentation of the files was formatted through the process of naming the discrete video, audio, and poetic text files and allowing software to assemble these pieces into an endless loop. Variations in the piece are a product of technical differentials—processing speed, bandwidth, and computer to computer interaction—rather than human interaction. The grand result is a provocative juxtaposition of contrasting phases of life and death, ebbing and flowing, in the interstice created by the poetic process.

(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Davin Heckman)