Beyond by Zoe Beloff (review)

© 1999 ISAST LEONARDO REVIEWS LEONARDO, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 63–74, 1999 63 MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTS BEYOND produced by Zoe Beloff. CD-ROM for the Macintosh. 1996. $20.00. Available from the artist’s Website: . Reviewed by Michael Leggett, 17 Ivy Street, Darlington, Sydney 2008, Australia. Email : . Beyond enters the fin de siècle—that of the twentieth century for the production of this interactive CD-ROM and of the nineteenth century for its point of reference and sources. Both periods are characterized by rapid technological changes that directly affect social intercourse. The notion of discourse—the development of ideas and themes that occur as a series of responses that can be asynchronous and cyclical rather than singular and linear—can be closely mimicked by the modes of navigation made possible by interactive multimedia. Beyond uses multimedia as a metaphor for the navigation of aspects of late–nineteenth -century discourse. Centuries of inherited belief, weakened by the thenrecent action of the Enlightenment, were being challenged by new systems of knowledge. Technology—and more importantly, the corporate power it gave its owners— was claimed by detractors at that time, as in our own, to be at the expense of both the imagination and liberty itself. Beloff examines some of the swirls and eddies created by this process. The wreckage of a rural hospital in a site surrounded by leafless trees is the launching point for excursions into various readings, the sources of which are diligently listed in a thesis-like bibliographic section. Crossovers to the contemporary world are not easy to come by, but are accessible through both the familiar (Charles Baudelaire) and the unfamiliar (the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet), and Walter Benjamin , whose writings in this exploration delineate the edge closest to our own time. And why Baudelaire? He was the first great writer of the modern city, the first modernist. It was he who first defined this idea of “mental geography” as a state of mind. The city shot through by allegory. He was the archetypal flaneur—while my work might be described as an exercise in digital flanerie! The assembled texts, as performances, are accompanied by photographs and film of various goings-on in the living rooms of the “experimentalists” of the time—seances, parapsychology, the paranormal (evidenced in one memorable moment with the title “rare example of a nude ghost photograph”), pornography, dress-ups, trips and expeditions. “I have been interested for some time in early serial films, particularly those of Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires)—I love the way he made up the episodes of his serial films as he went along” [1]. While the work is imbued with ideas of the time, Beloff draws parallels between multimedia and the then-developing technology and aesthetic of cinema: No one makes serials any more so I decided to make a serial and put it on the Web. It wasn’t a literal narrative serial , it was just me, traveling in time and space, sending back reports each week, exploring the relationship between technology and imagination from around 1850 to 1940 [2]. Beloff commenced Beyond by using a tiny QuickCam camera feeding directly into the computer to make QuickTime movies which, though of postage-stamp dimensions, were hungry for space on the hard disk. It became so enormous that I transformed it into a CD-ROM. Everything was done “live,” I projected the film, played the music and read the texts often all at the same time. I just spent the day starting from a rough idea, no notes or plans, setting things up in my house, trying things out till something somehow worked. I love to throw myself into something and surprise myself . It was more like “casting a spell” than making a movie [3]. The artist records her interventions by, for instance, suspending words on transparent material in front of the image . At other times, Beloff appears while footage projects behind her as the narration proceeds. Objects are introduced to accompany the reciting of the words, completing the rich visual collage and accompanied by a sound mix of the recited quotes (in a funny, squashed, declamatory voice), which drop names from the period like so many leaves...