Abstract:
BlackBOX: Painting A Digital Picture of Documented Memory, is a
doctoral creative arts project, a digital media CD-ROM/Internet
work that seeks to exploit and enhance the creative potentials of
digitally produced music, sound, image and text relationships in an
interactive & online environment. In this context, the delivery of
interactive work provides an innovative approach to the conventional
narrative & documentary forms. In blackBOX, the participant/player will
experience music/dance performances revealed through interaction with
(i) a set of virtual ‘boxes’; and (ii) through the slippage across a series
of interactive screen surfaces, engaging the participant/player in a
spatial relationship with the program.
…It is inscribed, as on Pandora’s Box… do not
open…passions…escape in all directions from a box that lies
open…
Bruno Latour, “Opening Pandora’s Black Box”, 1987.¹
The creative research comes out of my practise as a digital media artist
- a hybrid of processes & disciplines, but primarily through the lens of
visual arts practise & the notion of ‘electronic’ (image/sound/text)
writing. My central concern is to playfully reverse, obscure, distort the
look of the dominating/colonialist gaze, in the production of an
interactive ‘game’ & allow the girl to picture herself. The research methodology is focused around the interrogation of a
series of symbolic strategies that are realised in the production of the
creative text: blackBOX a digital media work. ‘blackBOX’ is an emblem
of a container for meaning of symbols, and is a symbol in itself,
“...symbols possess a universal imagery and thus address themselves to
the needs of specific individuals or cultures, but in a mythological and
psychological language.”² (Hockey: 2001) The idea of mobilising a
series of myths cross-culturally is at play in the inner workings of the
game device, in devising a computer interface strategy for this digital
media work. Nina’s [the protagonist’s] journey is a struggle and search for virtual
objects, whose meaning represent aspects of her outer world and
reveals to her aspects of her inner self. This search, mirrors for the
player/participant our own search through text and for self
–understanding. In comprehending the text, we are provoked to
consider the cultural artefacts that shape the individual and tap into a
deeper reservoir of mythological ruins. The work is comprised of an interactive CD-ROM & website URL
http://www.strangecities.net, documenting and theorising the
production.
