The Electronic Diary

counters these characters in his everyday life and is creatively influenced by them. In the process, he discovers the key to his own paradoxical position within the orisha universe. WE MAKE MEMORIES Abbe Don, 3435 Clay Street #4, San Francisco, CA 941 18, U.S.A. E-mail: abbe@well.sf.ca.us As my great-grandmother told stories, she wove in and out of the past and present, the old country and America , English and Yiddish, business and family, changing voice from first person to direct address to third person. Each detail was part of the narrative continuum and was potentially linked to several other stories or digressions, some of them new, some of which I had heard before. However, both content and meaning were affected by the context: the presence of other visitors , whether we were baking together or looking at photos in her scrapbook, or if I interrupted the flow of the story to ask for more details. It was as if she had a chronological, topical and associative matrix that enabled her to generate stories in which content, structure and context were interdependent. I have used my great-grandmother's storytelling style as a model to create an interactive multimedia installation that reveals how our family history has been constructed and passed down matrilinearly. A pictorial timcline of family photographs that date from 1890 to the present enables viewers to move through time on a Macintosh screen. By clicking on one of the headshots, viewers hear stories from my great-grandmother, my grandmother , my mother and me that weave in and out of the past and present , the old country and America, English and Yiddish. business and family. WI' Make Memories is composed of a 9-megabyte Hypercard stack and a 30min videodisc. It requires a Macintosh II with at least 2 megabytes of random access memory (RAM) and a laserdisc player with a serial port, ideally a Pioneer 4200, and a video monitor. WI' Make Memories is available as an environmental installation that recreates my great-grandmother's study, with a wooden desk covered with informal family snapshots tucked under a piece of plexiglass and formal farnilv portraits hanging on the walls. The computer and video moni88 Words On Works tors as well as the mouse sit side-byside atop the desk, and the rest of the video and computer equipment is hidden from view. LIVING CINEMA Robert Edgar, Oak 112, William Henry Apts., Malvern, PA 19355. U.S.A. E-mail: lull@well.sf.ca.us I.iving Cinema is a desktop video system that explores the montage of motion video, live video, cell/sprite animation , speech generation. videodisc audio, captured and manipulated images and image-manipulation routines in real time. I.iving Cinema combines the electronic manipulation of a video synthesizer with the formal strategies of cinema and the rcorganizational capabilities of the computer : hypertonal montage. Composer Dutch Knotts works with audio samplers and synthesizers and parallels the processes I use with frame grabbers and image manipulation. liuing. Cinema is built around the Truevision Targa 16 board, a speech svnthesizer, MS-DOS computer. laserdisc plaver, color video camera and monitor, and various storage devices and peripherals. The software was written in the C programming language . In performance, the performers relationship with the image goes hevond simply choosing the image-the performer builds and otherwise metamorphoses the image in real time. The pace of I.iving Cinema is not the pace of music videos; it is the speed of the aperccptual thought of the performers. THE ELECTRONIC DIARY Lvnn Hershman, Hotwire Productions, 545 Sutter St., Apt. :~():\ San Francisco, CA 94108, u.s.A. The diary has long been used by women as a way of understanding their private though ts and experience . A confessional of the first order, '1'he Elertronic Diat» (1985-1989, VHS, 63 min) records the struggle, transformation and transcendence of a middle-aged woman whose personal storv unfolds before the camera. Though touching and unnerving, her sell-revelation is not sirnplv a personal storv. The piece is divided into three segments: (I) "Confessions of a Chameleon", in which confusion of truth in personal memory and fictitious episodes form a twisted...