The participants, Roberto Simanowski:

Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw, by Donna Leishman
Opener:
Four houses which activate sound on mouseover. Moving in a circle between the houses add up the soundfiles to a melody (as if the houses life together in harmony?). If one keeps the mouse on a house in some cases the sound disappears after a second in others is stays. Mouse over some of the threes makes them grow (I couldn't find an explanation for this effect). However, there is no link on the threes and the mouse on some windows of the houses makes those turning red and invites to click but there is no link (!?). This is surprising and suggests coming back. The only real contact seems to be the ladder at one of the threes. The click makes a gigantic bag appearing, as big as the toll building it leans on. The surface of the bag can be ripped off with the cursor and reveals a sleeping girl inside. Beside the girls are two clickable objects: a clock and a box.
If one clicks on the box a book appears with the picture of the girl and the notice "My name is Christian Shaw. I am ten almost eleven years old" As thick as the book is, no other pages or information are available.
Scene 2:
The click on the clock brings the same landscape we saw as opener but without the girl and the bag. And there are three differences: The windows do not turn red on mouse over anymore, the threes do not grow, and the ladder hangs in the three and does not reach to the ground anymore. The only contact to continue -a house or barn in the background- is mark red.
Scene 3:
The click brings a surface from this barn to the foreground in which the girl is standing on an alley besides a three and some flower. The side surface has the barn as vanishing point. The rest of the tableau eclipses, which directs the attention to this 'story-board' in the foreground. There are two links from her: One is a mark in the storyboard the other is the entire faded surrounding. The click on the latter brings back to scene 2. The click on the mark moves alley, three, and girl to the center (pretending the move of the camera) and shows another mark at the right up corner. The first mark does still signal a link though not action will be triggered after clicking it. The new mark shifts the camera left down and brings an owl in a three in sight. The click on the mark beside the owl (why not on the owl?) shifts the camera again and shoves a man with an animal head in the picture. Clicking on the mark beside this man brings back to the beginning of scene 2.
 
There seems no way out of this circle. (However, the piece has a comment if one repeats it again and again. The girl vomits.) The other link option mentioned before brings back to scene 2 where one realizes now other links beside the red mark. The corner at the big building in front, the shore of the pond, and the path that leads to the horizon. The click on this path brings up a surface again, smaller now and now with the girl and a male adult showed from the back. The vanishing point is now the horizon. The adult obviously brings the girl to the doctor, which is rendered with little but very effective animation. In the doctor's room she spits out something hard, round, and hot (it steams on the ground). The next click lets the surface disappear and brings back to the beginning of scene 2 but now with four half hidden copies of the girl in the scenery. The click on one of these copies evokes a surface again filled with the girl, which provides additional rather vague, unclear information about the girl.
 
Finally the only link to be found is the sky. This triggers the barn appearing in the sky, unfolding a stair down to the city, unfolding a platform in front of the house with 6 man in uniform, the adult from before and the doctor. Another link is then available in the foreground bringing up three layers of grass in which fours man appear. The click on a man moves him into a cage that appears in front of the girl and the 8 men on the platform. The scene looks like a trial. Nothing will happen before not all four men have been transported into the cage. Then the cage falls down as if into the pond below. Since one realizes for a second the death's-head on the cage/box one assumes that the fours men haven been sentenced to death. The emerging salving-cheery piano music seems to underline this notion as a relief.
 
The next link evokes a burning house, probably the hell, with five window in which the four men and the girl can be seen, on mouse over displayed on an extra board as we know it from sport, cultural, and political events (the trial as a media event?). On the next click hell and sky-barn disappears; the girl walks to the remains of the burning house. Now an image shows a book, the girl's legs hanging from the top and an unidentifiable ball, which may be supposed to render a head. The text behind the book-link reveals the story behind this piece.
Source
In 1697 the 11-yr-old girl Christian fell victim to one of the most well remembered cases of 'demonic possession' in Scottish History. She was able to sustain herself against the devil. Investigations into the community and witch trials led to the execution of six men and women accused to have cursed and thus invoked Christian's demonic possession. As the text reports within the coming centuries as society became more sceptical and atheist about the likes of witches and demons the character of Christian has come under close scrutiny. One new reading proposed that she was an impostor, who enacted hellish pranks on gullible audiences, causing the deaths of the local community members out of spite. Another reading is that Christian was suffering from a mental illness resulting in her possible hysteria. A most recent reading, however, is using a feminist angle and investigated the first hand documentation of the case with the shocking result that the documents are written by an anonymous author and contain many striking resemblances, in tone, and language, to the more famous Salem witchcraft outbreak in New England in 1692. Is it possible that the anonymous author of the documentation had access to and was inspired by the accounts of events in Salem?
Donna Leishman, however, regrets that over the issue of the demonic possession it is mostly neglected that Christian became one of the earliest recorded Scottish female entrepreneurs, the driving force behind the Bargarran Thread Company. 'Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw' is her "sentinel to who I think Christian might have been, a re-imagining of her world."
The explanation is clarifying and disappointing. Disappointing because Leishman's piece fails to convey a clear picture of her own approach to the Christian-Story. Neither does she convincingly or just noticeable question the traditional account nor does she make a point of Christian's life afterwards as a female entrepreneur except four portraits of Christian at the very end showing her dressed in modern style like an intellectual or a business person.
All in all, the last scene does not really convince. The portraits are great as well as the applied organ music played on mouse over on the leaves surrounding the book. However, the hanging legs do not really convey the image of an entrepreneur and would, if meant as symbol for the killing of Christian's image in history, be too contrived or undecipherable respectively. The unidentifiable ball-head has no other function than to move up on mousecontact. That there is no way out of the story, no official end (one can only close the window) is interesting on the other hand as a hint on the unfinished business to read the Christian-story.
 
Comment
The given information help understand some aspects of the piece. Christian was said to be able to bend her body almost double upon herself and to sink her eyes back into her head until they looked to disappear. Leishman has taken those saying as a challenge to render them in her piece. She succeeded. However, the question appears if this success was necessary and where it leads the piece and its readers.
 
The visuals are very impressive. The figures are sketched with only a few lines, which nevertheless give a good impression of the character behind the face. The girl and partly the other characters in the play always move slightly. Thus the girl's eyelid closes and opens and sometimes the pupil moves on mouseover to adjust the gaze to the user who is at the end of the mouse. These effects are very impressive.
 
The user always keeps the bird's eye view of the city, the surfaces pop up from this city to the foreground like hidden stories and display few figures and objects which appear more like revealed key'words' for a story nobody dares to tell. However, there are hints: The girl's naked thighs between skirt and pantihose; the scurry between the images, the images itself. Thought, these hints may be misleading and generate the suspicion of a rape rather than the story that is really behind it.
 
The principle of this piece is uncovering and hiding as well as repetition. The story appears more like a detective story told as a slide show (the marks as triggers to continue the story remind of the button of a slide projector): one evidence after the other. However, there is no clear conclusion. It should be mentioned that the repetition does not function throughout the entire piece. If for example the bird has bit apart the rope between the girl and the bird in the next repetition the girl will fly without a rope. The clock, which automatically fast-forwards from two to three will in the next repetition already be on three. This hints that repetition has its limits though I am not sure what exactly this statement would be supposed to mean.
 
There are other effects without discernable meaning: In scene 1 on mouse over all windows in three of the four houses turn red. In the forth house only the windows in the first three floors turn red. One is inclined to take this as a sign and search for the deeper meaning behind the marked difference. I did not find any.
 
Good details: In the surface with the flying girl and the clock the mark is so positioned behind the clock that the user whose earlier action moved the cursor to the right bottom corner has to cross the clock to click on the mark, which finally makes the watch hand running one round and hence setting the time from two to three. However, it remains unclear what this contributes to the story and our understanding of it.
The piece has reminds of a computer game where one has to look for the next link and step in a similar ways as here.
To be continued.
March, 2004