Director ‘Media Myth & Mania’. Curator of “The Electronic Print”, Arnol fini 1989 and “The Electronic Eye” Watershed 1986. Exhibitions include “Electronic Rain forest “- interactive computer environment 1990-9, "Screening the Virus" Artaids and Watershed 1996, "Understanding Echo" DA2 Commission 2000 shown at ISEA2002 in Japan. He has been involved with digital media as an electronic artist since 1981. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Bath Spa university College. Co-Editor of New Screen Media:Cinema/Art/Narrative (BFI 2002)

Labyrinth

In the Dreamhouse project, the artist’s group Ship of Fools combined spatial, ritualistic, and dreamlike elements. As in many other ‘games’ the user finds themselves in a house. A walk through the Dream house offered access to a number of rooms or experiences; each designed by an artist, reworking traditional storytelling structures. Various rooms were appropriately matched to the different psyches of those involved in authoring the piece. So the house became an interactive theatre, where different tales are triggered by audience exploration. The bland domestic environment of a real suburban house (in fact a real Barrett's 'Show Home' in a suburban estate at Bradley Stoke, the negative equity capital of the U.K.) became the main interface.

In my own contribution, Labyrinth various devices-doors, windows, mirrors and other objects, opened gateways into the mythological world. I sought to employ the resonance of poetic verse drama to unpack a number of thematics around fatherhood, overwhelming passion and ‘Real Politick’ suggested by the original Theseus and Daedalus legends. The transition in Greece from the worship of the Goddess to Apollonian religion is explored in the myth, where the Frankenstein-like quest for knowledge has equally dire consequences for the inventor. Daedalus commits murder, loses a son, and creates the monstrous Minotaur through his overweening pride in science. The piece explores these themes through dramatised video and a verse structure, which utilised parallel monologues (or duologues), set in dialectic opposition for each linked pair of protagonists. The verse is constructed so that cross-counterpoints occur with every phrase. The verse reads vertically for the individual speaker and horizontally for each pairing. The freedom to switch video streams at any time allowed the audience to reconstruct meaning somewhere between the two opposing narrations. The development of irony and pathos demanded that no single monologue be privileged. Writing for such an interface involved a new and precise multilineal approach to scripting.

Left and Below:Scenes from Labyrinth

Understanding Echo

The main direction of my recent work has been in examining the nature of theatrical and interactive installation spaces where poetry can be re-imagined as a part of a hypertextual universe. In pursuing this direction I am attempting to synthesise aspects of cinema, video art and more primitive and associative spaces to create a narrative form based in a physical environment, rather than a virtual one. While in a previous installation, Labyrinth a more directly theatrical route was chosen, the Understanding Echo installation was an attempt to root interactive narrative in a magical space corresponding to a part of the audience’s ‘collective unconscious’ where "memory, dreams and reflections" could rise to the surface.

On the wall of the darkened room stands a screen displaying large digital photographic montages. In the central space of the room is a shallow circular pool of water. In the silence of the installation the audience can make out the drip of water. Flickering in the pool is the image of a woman’s face, submerged below the surface. She is of indeterminate age and from time to time she rises from the depths and talks slowly in short poetic fragments or aphorisms. The audience may not immediately understand, but the form of these spoken fragments becomes ever more personal as they get nearer to the pool. The large changing digital montage projections around the pool represent combinations of memory, reflecting aspects of childhood, identity and nature. The spatialised narrative and the poetic monologues are fused together in the environment of the piece. Once an audience enters the installation room they are part of the diegetic space of the narrative and are continually addressed directly or obliquely by the character of Echo.
The figure rising from the waters loosely relates to the nymph, in myth forced to forever speak the last lines of her lover Narcissus’s speeches and trapped in a pool for eternity. The form of the work alludes to all the female spirits that inhabit wells and rivers in various folklore, such as the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian Legend. as is the drowning Orphelia in Hamlet. The woman reviews her life and the sense of powerlessness her situation has brought. The poetic fragments are intended to resemble a mix of colloquial musings and the timeless incisiveness we associate with poetic aphorism. They vary from the general to the intimate. The woman is by turns embittered, flirtatious and coquettish, disillusioned and enthusiastic. Her character moves through a wide emotional range, returning obsessively to her situation and the unhappy love affair which caused it. The order of the fragments is unimportant. There is no linear temporal curve involved. The woman inhabits the present, but lives in the past. On to the audience she projects her loves and fears. We are her blank screens.