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Communication with others is largely driven by a need to affirm one's existence. Visible Traces The explosion of computer-based virtual environments and online communication SERENA LII has reinforced the need to convey thought and intention in ways other than through Vr Video/computer animation/installatic physical presence. Evolving network technologies drastically condense distance and 19. time, and the accelerated interaction that results combines an inescapable sense of distance with an equally compelling sense of intimacy. Visible Traces is the title of both an installation and a computer-generated animation. The installation is a physical emulation of an immersive virtual environment. Within a mazelike enclosed space carved by a series of translucent curved screens, the viewer comes across both projected animations of computer-generated environments and slowly pulsing phrases of text. As the viewer moves through the installation, the various levels of spatial existence, physical and virtual, perpetually intermingle to create meaning. Visible Traces grows from my investigation of the role of virtual spaces in communicating emotion. In virtual spaces, the physical clues that generally enrich a conversation-such as voice pitch and gesture-are absent. Without a shared physical presence, subtle - information is omitted that might alter the meaning of a given exchange. My work explores the ways in which the "virtual stage" on which the dialogue takes place can begin to assume the role of representing reaction and gesture. This creates a perceptual theater for emotional call and response. In Visible Traces, I create visual gestures connected to the common conditions of fear, anger, and love. Each sentiment is presented as a particular spatial environment through which the viewer is taken on a journey amidst a collage of sound and layered images built from my sensory associations with each emotion. N }n 96 east With Beast, I explore two themes that have dominated my interest for some time: the potential of CQUES SERVIN hypertext, and the nature of our conditioning by technology and its growing banality. The medium that has emerged on the Web, and that continues to dominate commercial aesthetics in )rld Wide Web general, is one that fosters, and depends on, utter transience of attention. Extending television's effects through its much-vaunted interactivity, the Web has served to reduce writing to "content"-something to squeeze between flashy interaction and absorb any drops of attention that might spill. The Beast hypertext system is an alternative to the Web's. Instead of jumping from text to text, the reader can direct the progress of a single document by interaction with it and with its interior, illustrations that float through in seem- ^. . . ing 3D. By this means I hope to tap the interactive possibilities of the ' medium without compromising the meditative nature of reading, which depends on the text being seen as a whole, allowing the eye to be a hypertext engine far more sophisticated than any we could devise. . f. ,- t^,. At the same time, I try to call attention to its medium by subverting _ . / t_ the meditative approach through jarring messages and the system's peri- ff odic takeover of its own functions. A nightmarish, superficially dehuman- _' izing system, Beast is a decoction of much that is terrifying and unpleasant about computer technology, and about society and ourselves as the computer has built us. But I feel that this microcosmic Web has a humanizing core-the text-that allows the attention to focus as the system-produced anxieties recede, and that speaks to those very anxieties. This dichotomy in Beast is intended to highlight the one between the ugliness of computer technology and its almost medieval beauty. Archetypes and symbols are even more evident on the Web than on television, and the connections they forge may run deeper because of the participation they demand. This is one of the primary themes of the Beast text: the archaic and authentically primitive quality of the Web-wide world that has erected itself so suddenly, and that rests on so little besides marketplace forces. Digital Salon, Artists' Statements 399 B JA( Wc 199 ...

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