The Liquidation
project, a vast Web picture story completed in 1998 by Michel Lefebvre
and Eva Quintas, inspired these two artists to pursue their creative
experiment on the Web and combine with other artists to invest their
respective talents in new joint adventures. WhatÕs more, this desire
for cooperation and experimentation has spread, providing other creators
from the fields of literature, photography and multi-media with an
opportunity to create works of photographic fiction on the Web. The
five picture stories produced by the Agence Topo, in cooperation with
the Socit des arts technologiques, which brought its technical expertise,
result from this effort and show obvious enthusiasm, a remarkable
opening and a determination to explore a genre on the Web.
Carnages,
designed by Mitsiko Miller and
Eva Quintas, comprises
several levels of text, including Alice, which can be related more
directly to the picture story. Straight out of a mime show, Alice
and her assistants take part in a narrative thread strongly influenced
by childrenÕs stories, to which explicit reference is made, starting
with the title. This account uses a parodic style to take us without
ambiguity into the world of symbolism. The adoption of such a style
might surprise us at the outset, but it shows unquestionable humour,
which becomes darker and more complex as the story progresses. Indeed,
this story, while linear in structure, superimposes itself on an underground
space which the visitor enters when he engages in the corridors it
opens. The succession of pictures, actually permeated from all sides
through hyperlinks, leads to a bottomless well, a journey into the
dark universe of anthropophagy, building a fascinating bridge between
childrenÕs stories and the history of humankind. The interest of the
two artists for cultural diversity is shown here by an incursion into
cannibalism, which leads them to push their investigation still further,
as the Web allows, from one universe and one register to another without
distinction. From fiction, the visitor thus moves suddenly to the
documentary, which proves an abyss where the desire of the other becomes
consumption, ingestion, digestion and annihilation, whether in the
area of eroticism or cultural or territorial appropriation. Carnages
is not without making allusion, by extension, to the voracious and
sometimes malicious nature of the Web, and to the immense potential
for appropriation that is digital technology.
Méprise,
by Lucie Duval, Joseph Lefèvre
and Stanley Péan, revisits the typical sentimental plot
of the picture story by turning its antiquated formula upside down.
Here the idealized characters and the predictable achievement of the
loversÕ perfect union are replaced with a great deal of humour by
a contrasting proposal. This tragicomic universe is as much about
the desire for the other as about a look into oneself through a hazardous
quest. Their expression leans on the structure of the account motivated
by the new possibilities offered by the Web. Indeed, the many paths
suggested, the returns, the repetitions unceasingly defer the conclusion
of this unpredictable, random journey, feeding the expectancy so characteristic
of the amorous state. Also playing on words and the graphic narrative,
the work increases the charactersÕ and visitorsÕ confusion, which
by the end of the account is total, a discordant commentary on the
traditional sentimental plot. Mprise leans on some phenomena very
present on the Web, this universe where the individual eludes both
himself and the others, redefines himself, and tries to carve a place:
the glance at oneself, the search for the other, and the instability
of identity on the network.
On quite
another tone, Quittez, je vous prie
by D. Kimm et Élène
Tremblay proposes, thanks to the theme of departure, a journey
within the account, corresponding, step by step and page by page,
to the visitorÕs Web-surfing activity. The work also relies on the
mediumÕs intimate character while making the personal relationship
proceeding from the Web experience coincide with the story ingredients.
Indeed, the small dimension of the images on the screen and the choice
of object-containers acting as so many metaphors of the interior,
private world (bags, chest of drawers, letters, personal diary, boxes,
jewel case, clothing) build an intimate universe with which one can
identify as an individual. A woman leaves, and we witness the countdown,
scene by scene, the vacuum created by her absence as the account progresses.
The various forms taken by this relinquishment are signified by the
disappearance of each page from the screen, and the vacuum finally
reached corresponds to the completion of the project. The characterÕs
dispossession finds an echo in the renouncement of this same world
of objects consented to by the visitor engaged in a virtual experience.
In this respect, the work is concerned by the experience of dematerialization
prompted by the Web, and this, with much sensitivity.
Zocalo,
by Daniel Lavoie et André
Lemelin, also invites to a journey, using the same correspondence
with the nature of the Web, but treating it in a completely different
manner. The work creates an analogy between the discovery of a place
and that of an individual. Here the travel idea makes it possible
to meet and delve into the relationship established with the other.
The work relies on various movement-generating processes to serve
the idea of this pursuit, conveyed in a quasi-cinematographic manner.
The sequences of images merging with text gradually bring the visitor
closer to the coveted character, and arouse in him the desire for
an even greater proximity. The second part of the work is organized
like a photo album to be discovered in randomly, each captioned image
adding a new aspect to the portrait and expressing part of the character.
The accumulation of these images, always replaced in their context
and accompanied by very personal reflections that help animate them,
ends up constituting an increasingly complex living portrait of the
character. The work suggests, by skilful means, that the discovery
and knowledge of the other depend on the time invested in him. Moreover,
the meeting at the core of this work is also that of image and text,
which interact, move one toward the other, agree on an additional
life, intermingle, in short, maintain a particularly symbiotic relation.
The exploration
of photographic fiction carried out on the Web by Michel
Lefebvre and Chuck Samuels in Bad
days/ Une mauvaise journée proves
very different, although it also astutely takes into account the nature
of its support. The photo close-ups used to relate the misadventures
of this bad day build a dual relationship with the visitor. On the
one hand, this image processing means a rapprochement, a very personal
involvement; on the other hand, as a fragment of a situation, the
close-up contributes to covering up the context, as if an unveiling
to come were implied. The photographs thus orchestrate a shuttle between
the search for intimacy and the remote setting, assigning to the viewer
a complex position. The short statements accompanying them free the
photographs from their overly immediate narrative nature, offering
them a semantic opening to better carry them to a vague space that
will afterwards take its full meaning. At once compact and picturesque,
these verbal expressions also demand to be taken into account, resolved.
This vague space allows empathy, and amusement, to settle at a distance
from the mishaps reported at the beginning of the journey. In an unexpected
way, the series of troubles besetting the narrator and exposed to
the visitor will gradually become his own, as the navigation problems
accumulate. At a dead end, the visitor will have to resort to an act
of radical withdrawal to extirpate himself from the work. As indicated
by the clock, the emblematic figure of the work pervading all the
scenes, each visitorÕs itinerary will be a matter of time. Bad
days / Une mauvaise journe thus casts a critical glance at the
frustration generated by technology and at the multiform, and sometimes
insidious, hold it has on the user.
In each
of the projects created for Fixions, the guest artists managed
to rise to the challenge of cooperation by producing works made up
of agreements and differences between text and images, transcending
the exclusive fields of literature and photography. Moreover, their
work gathered here shows that they know how to take into account the
medium, and the specific possibilities of this creation tool that
is the Web, while taking a critical look at this new means of communication
and its effects. The insight of the works, their true commitment to
the new space of the Web deserve to be underlined, especially since,
for several of the artists, this was their first work designed for
this medium. The five photographic fictions created for the Web as
part of Fixions show a great diversity, enabling us to envisage
multiple avenues and a real blooming of the genre and inciting us
to welcome this type of initiative.
Sylvie
Parent
