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The participants, Raine Koskimaa: |
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Deviant:
"The Possession of Christian Shaw" |
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| The first encounters with the work were puzzling (without any knowledge of the historical case of Christian Shaw). The simple, even naïve illustration seemed occasionally to react to the wandering cursor (some of the trees growing taller), and some objects blinked in a way suggesting functionality. By clicking, randomly, one of them opened a new window, with a peculiarly androgynous figure in it. Once again, moving the cursor haphazardly over the window caused some minor effects (like the petals of a flower falling down). Clicking on a 'x' took me to another part of the landscape in the window. After a few click the circle closed and I was back in the first scene of this window. Clicking on the main illustration closed the window, but it was quickly detectable that something had changed in the main picture. | |
| After going through all the obvious links, and the subsequent additional windows, I found a few albums, with pictures and handwritten notes attached to them. The big mystery was here: the main picture included quite modern buildings but in one of the albums there is a picture of the reverend Brisbane, stating that he started there in 1693… | |
| I did explore the work several times, going through some of the scenes over and over again, without stumbling to the place with the explanation of Christian Shaw's case. I simply could make no sense of the work. That was frustrating in two ways: I could not fathom what was the work all about (what was the story, or was there a story at all), and I could not make sense how did it all function. Was there a meaning to all the small interactive gimmicks scattered around the work - did it make any change if I closed a certain window without 'activating' any of the rotating flowers, or after activating them all, or just some of them? | |
| After a while, I made what people these days do: I googled "Christian Shaw" and immediately things started to get clearer. I found several documents about Christian Shaw, and noticed familiar names and dates (Balgarran, late 17th Century). Reading the documents closer, I noticed even more things, which fit in in what I had been experiencing, tales of Christian Shaw bending peculiarly like she had her spine broken, flying episode, vomiting strange stuff, rash… Going back to the work was now totally different. The mix of pastoral and childish atmosphere in the main illustration got a more twisted feel to it. Still, it was far from the anxiety of witch-burning Salem familiar from various movies. The places where it got darker were the scenes including industrial-like constructions, with flames burning on them when clicked on right spots - even though I can't work this into a coherent interpretation, I can't help but see a reference to the Holocaust in the flaming ovens. | |
| What I got then, was a perspective on the case of Christian Shaw, which was somehow filtered through a child's mind, and (visually) set in contemporary era. And at that point I accidentally stumbled in a hot-spot taking me to the scenes where other kids popping up from the grass are taken to the cell, the witch-court and the flames, and finally, to the explanation of the historical background. As a conclusion, there are four main interpretations of what it was all about, each creating quite a different picture of the person Christian Shaw - there are four pictures, one for each of these alternatives, and I had a chance to pick my choice, was she simply mad, evil, innocent… | |
| Deviant is a work, which requires a close, very close look. There are minutest details to which you should pay attention to. Or, at least there are lots of small details you may pay attention to, but what is their significance is not really clear. One dichotomy seems to be recurrent: blooming and falling down. You can make trees grow taller, or apples to fall down from the tree; you can make flower bloom, or flower petals fall down. (In somewhat similar sense, fire appears in two quite opposite roles, as the source of warmth, and as something (potentially) threatening.) | |
| While exploring the work, I had two concepts frequently in mind - Markku Eskelinen distinction between chosen and caused effects in an ergodic work, and Janez Strehovec's 'techno surprise' (for him, a feature of digital poetry). In Deviant, I can choose between certain options (clicking on the Cross, for example, to open a window with reverend Brisbane in it), and I can see that some of my choices cause certain consequences, for example, the water-boiler like thing on top of one of the buildings will fall down and does not work as a link anymore. There may be other consequences too, which I am not even aware of. Because of this, I am constantly suspecting, that my actions may shut some doors for good. (Quite clearly this was the case, when clicking on the girl facing the grey wall - I just got a grey screen with no escape but to close the browser window; I did face this grey death in some other places too.) During the first half a dozen exploring times, did I do something that prevented me from getting to the witch-court scene, or was it only that I didn't hit the right spot those times? And here I come to the techno-surprise, the way how interactive, digital work may constantly surprise me in behaving unexpectedly, bringing delightful surprises even when I believe I am very strictly repeating just the thing I have done several times before - but just one pixel to wrong direction may do the difference. Talking about techno-surprise, certainly the jumping flowers were funny suprises. | |
| Just to mention two details I looked at more systematically: the black flowers in the corner down left, once you got the flowers blooming, moving cursor over them made them to rotate - but one of them unexpectedly did not stop to rotate, returning to that particular screen it was still rotating, and moving the cursor once again over all the other flowers made one of them to join the continuously rotating one. Repeating the routine showed that at some times none of the flowers were reacting, at some times one of them was. I couldn't find a logic to that, even though it somehow exclamated itself in a way as there had to be something behind it. Similarly, in the screen where there are all these strange creatures parasitically sucking on Christian's neck, they usually disappeared immediately when you moved cursor away from them - but once I managed to jump to another screen so that one of the creatures was still visible; did it make any difference if it was visible or not, when continuing to explore different parts of the work? | |
| One thing that did puzzle me badly, were the puzzle like animations encountered in several places. There seems to be some logic behind the procedure according to which these patterns reshaped, but it was just impossible to find out, what that logic might actually be. On certain places (like the 'snow flakes' on the wall in doctor's office') the reshaping turned out to be just a loop, where the pattern returned to the initial one after a while. And what are the empty screens, with just a link 'x' on them. Is there something supposed to appear on them at some point? | |
| Sounds are used in quite a minimal way - there are places where a tiny sound brings your attention to a very small change in the picture (I am thinking about the metallic clicking while moving the cursor over the cacti). It is, however, places where sound is missing, that are the most striking ones. There are several places where there are people talking on the screen, and one is unavoidably expecting to hear something - but there is no sound. This is quite a powerful effect in the scene, where the six people are inside the burning house, mouths open, but no sound can be heard… | |
| It is the feeling of things happening, just on the verge of being left unnoticed which I appreciated in the Deviant. Everything is there, on the screen, but you just have to look at it very carefully, paying attention to the smallest detail. Also the movement in several places is minimal, almost unnoticeable. | |
| As the title already suggests, the work is about Difference, about the Other. Christian sees these strange creatures. There is a striking discrepancy between the tragic background story, and the funny, even sympathetic 'monsters' met around the work, accompanied by the childish, nightmare visuals - (but what is the marshmallow man doing there?) There is a child-like attitude towards interpretation, where most things are new, unknown, and strange (and threatening in their unfamiliarity), but they are made familiar by picturing them through scary (but familiar, and thus controllable) imagery. All the small, (inter)active gimmicks could also be seen as toys, as something which brings pleasure just in the way they can be manipulated time after time, just for the fun of it (the jumping flowers…) | |
| So, maybe Deviant is a toy, with deadly serious meaning attached to it. The fun comes out of never-ending new details, the repetition with some surprising variations, but suddenly the play gives way to sinister consequences. | |
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March,
2004
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