The participants, Anja Rau:
Response to Donna Leishman's Deviant - The Possession of Christian Shaw
- the terms "reader" and "text" will be used in ways that include various forms of reception and expression, verbal, visual, architectural .. -
Donna Leishman's art may be called "ticklish Flash fiction", esp. when the reading takes place on a laptop with a track pad: the reader tickles the interface until it yields its story. But "to tickle" is also an activity that only seems nice, like Leishman's landscapes, and may contain untold horrors for at least one of those involved.
Deviant starts calmly enough, houses big and small set in an almost pastoral (though lifeless) landscape. The score is full of sad longing, but rather romantically so. But for the title, this could be the setting of a love-story. Until one starts to mouse around, calling up strange and haunting sound-clips first from the houses, then from objects, plants and people.
Of course, one has to ask whether "narrative" is the right filter in the approach of a piece of digital art, even if it is in part process-oriented. Deviant, however, is very explicitly narrative with a 5-acts-and-epilogue-structure and small embedded narrative islands (while other scenes are rather uneventful, almost meditative).
 
The act-structure goes more or less like this:
Act 1: hack stack/ priest/ kids (either)
Act 2: burning garbage can/ in the grass/ fall down/ sores/ vomit (all) or/ ended by: doctor
Act 3: bend over/ retreating eyes/ flying/ bandage (all) or/ ended by: big house
Act 4: tribunal
Act 5: Ashes - earth opens up
Epilog.
So we get a typical computer-game structure with forking paths within an act and clear boundaries between one act and another. (Although I get the impression that there is no narrative development between acts 2 and 3 and they could in fact be grouped as one act.) Beside the act structure, there is closure, both material (no more hotspots) and conceptual (the epilogue).
 
The reader encounters by now familiar Leishman-elements: the houses, the zoom, the trees that rise, the petals that fall. Persistence (in picking all flowers, in opening all trees, in getting all the kids to type on their little keyboards) that gets you nowhere - or at least not further than less thorough mousing would. One might say that there is a certain level beyond which the story would not go. - Appropriate for the story of the "real" Christian Shaw, about whom he have mediated accounts, but no original data, nothing from herself, and no "final" interpretation of the events.
Deviant is a stubborn work. Adventure games and hypertext fictions have taught us that persistence, even repetition or maybe mere chance returns will get you somewhere. At least, there will be a way to retrace one's steps. A back-button, a "reload saved game". Not so in Deviant. The only way to retrace ones step in Deviant is to restart (more on this below). In a given reading, every choice is final; it leads to the same end, though with different connotations.
This impression of "stubbornness" or resistance is increased by the fact that Deviant, unlike e.g. Leishman's Red Ridinghood, does not rely on a known story or known iconography. (The story of Christian Shaw appears to be well-known in Scotland, but with online-art, at least a generic international audience needs to be kept in mind; for the largest part of such an audience, Christian Shaw will be completely unknown.) Personally, I keep wondering whether some of the stranger images are taken from Scottish folklore with which I am largely unfamiliar. The trees and the babes are strangely reminiscent of Macbeth ... Still, the imagery add to an impression of impenetrability, of not being able to finalize ones grasp of the events and come to an objective conclusion.
 
Depending on where one starts to "read", one gets to see some parts of Deviant while others remain closed. A reading that starts with the haystack will supply the grounds for a different interpretation than one that starts with the priest (and excludes the haystack).
Computer Games and hypertext fiction have established rereading as an acceptable and common reading-strategy. Is it safe for an author to assume that a reader will read a short piece at least twice? In the case of Deviant, the first-time reader will very likely be aware that there is a choice of entrances in the first screen that disappears after the first click. This may be incentive enough to go back after the epilogue and try another beginning.
Rereading from a different starting point may serve to add a additional points of view to a story and to gradually change the reader's interpretation. In conjunction with conditional hotspots that only appear after certain scenes have been visited (realized e.g. via cookies) and the fact that the last piece of information is traditionally regarded as most important and outweighing earlier information, rereading might actively create an experience of "changing ones mind".
In Deviant, however, the added information remains largely unweighed. a) because it is not triggered or controlled and b) because the scenes following the beginning never differ. The result is a deepening of the impression that the author withholds all comment, merely lends a face or an aspect and an atmosphere to certain events.
This view is supported by the epilogue, which offers a selection of images of Christian Shaw that portray her as either pious or mischievous or mad or mild.
This absence of interpretation and judgment draws the reader's (esp. the rereader's) attention to another issue, namely her reading behavior and her position as reader: Here is a little girl who obviously suffers, is afraid, sad, and tortured. How much of this pain do I, as interactor, inflict? Could I prevent the unpleasant visit to the doctor? Is there a way for me to stop the women/creatures from torturing the girl? Do I create the story? Does my interpretation create the story?
 
I final issue I'd like to address is the bug-question. The mouse-behaviors in Deviant is not really satisfying. Sometimes, a hand-cursor only triggers sound or movement while the hotspot is not clickable (typical of Flash). On the other hand, the pointer does not always turn into a hand over a clickable hotspot. Some hotspots are small and hard to find. This may cause the reader to miss crucial scenes even on rereading Deviant and thus to miss the effects that come with rereading. Finally, sometimes the hotspots of the background are still active through the layer of the zoomed-out scene.
 
January 2004