The participants, Mark Amerika:

2.20.04
To Whom It May Concern:
I am writing this reader's report in response to Donna Leishman's new online project entitled "Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw." As with her previous web works, especially the popular "redridinghood", Leishman's new work attempts to investigate the interrelationship between interactivity, design, fiction, fact, narrative, dreams, folklore, myth-making, and alternative realities.
 
Whereas in "redridinghood" the artist created a primarily linear narrative with a few dream digressions, the new work requires more user-interactivity and the story, if one can call it that, is revealed in a number of different ways depending on where the visitor clicks and/or rolls their cursor like a magic wand. Clicking itself is not a result of the usual in-your-face "click me" variety we see on most websites. In fact, the visual cues are minimalist and require quite a bit of attention to the details of her animated drawings which portray an uncomfortable proximity between nature, industry, and all things alien. This alien culture is loaded with constructed visual metaphors that portray ideas-in-conflict with each other, and the brooding, preoccupied creatures that populate her environments and the dreams of God-knows-who seem lost in Soma-induced catatonia or what in the past we have called states of being-possessed. They are voiceless.
 
Once one gets in the groove of looking for and eventually locating the visual cues that will launch new animations, we are then treated to a kind of multi or nonlinear narrative environment full of screenal transformations, some subtle / some not, that are more about experiencing or "interstanding" the work as you help it evolve as opposed to understanding its true meaning, as if that were possible. Sometimes the scenes are smooth and fulfill user-triggered expectations, other times they are like gloppy paintings that move the more you roll over them. Don't look for the aesthetically pleasing here; rather, witness the anti-aesthetic leaking (of emotion, confusion, visual dyslexia, uncertainty).
 
Some of these short, experiential environments contain imagery that reminds me of scenes found in the dream sequences of "redridinghood" (the artist's signature effects) but that are still quite different in that they are less obvious in revealing the piece's intention. With "redridinghood" one has a sense of knowing what it is about (even if they really haven't a clue) - i.e. girl relaxes in a field of clover, falls asleep, dreams and/or hallucinates scenes of youthful angst and sexual confusion, wakes up and finds herself in Grandma's house where, for those of us familiar with the original Red story, we cannot help but anticipate some sense of closure, albeit one that puts a postmodern spin on the original folktale. However, in "Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw", the artist defamiliarizes her previous attention to plot and linearity and focuses more on the unfolding of micro-scenes that never congeal into what we usually call story but operate more as an interactive experiment in moving visual art or what - as an interactive experience - I would called deep stoned dreamwriting.
 
Here the dreamwriting is not verbal, but is more like image écriture, a kind of postfeminist image writing where the textuality is not conceived in word form but in iconic manipulation. Instead of asking why does the protagonist do A instead of B, we realize there is no protagonist per se, but rather an undressing of the animated self who is subject to either alien abuse or fantasy or both. Should you choose to become obsessive and want more out of this self-contained world, then you will have turned the interactive experience into some kind of fetishized object lesson in what it means to be post-human in defiantly bodily times. The fact that the work ends by explicitly referring to a story that took place in the late 1690s does not diminish the eerie post-contemporary feel that this digital source material resonates with our lives today. Think of Goth culture, of the Columbine high school massacre, or even of the strange sexual scandals surrounding the Catholic Church. In fact, I'm not even sure how necessary it is for me to know about the actual mythology behind Christian Shaw. Sure, her story may have been made up to publicize a particular ideology that promotes patriarchy, and for those who want to dig in deeper, all the more to them. But I prefer to interstand the process of revealing lifestories as I play them, which this piece does regardless of its original source.
 
Some forms of experimental cinema have found a way to trigger otherworldliness - I am thinking of Until the End of the World, Blue Velvet, and the recent Lost In Translation - but the online art world has had less success creating experientially-disturbing environments that one can relate to "on another level". Leishman has taken this on as a central part of her artistic investigations and one can only hope that she will continue developing new work in this area.
 
February, 2004