The interactive CD-ROM Typhoid Mary was created on Macintosh computers at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. Photographic images were scanned and manipulated using Letraset╒s Color Studio and Adobe Photoshop. A rough draft of the interactive structure was made with HyperCard and the final with Macromind Director.
The viewer sits down at the computer and clicks anywhere on the image on screen. There is no apparent interface or menu system so he or she moves blindly along the paths that connect images, animations, sounds, quotes, diary extracts, medical information, statistics, and stories. Occasionally stories, which are not seen on screen, will print out. There is no hierarchy or order to the piece. The bodies of information orbit and loop and are connected by a multitude of active areas embedded in the imagery. The work often turns back on itself, returns, and hides.
The monitor is small and only one person at a time can be clicking on the screen. Levels of intimacy with bleak, sexual, and violent content are kept safe by the technological media: the flesh is not really flesh, it is made of pixels and so can be touched. Unless the work is touched, nothing happens. By exhibiting a work with this kind of interactivity I╒m able to offer people a walk through a part of my head, but they have to initiate the movement and constantly ask for more.
This project was assisted by the Art Research and Development Fund of the Australian Network for Art and Technology.
Artist╒s statement
The content of my work is highly personal and corporeal. It deals with my own experiences, memories, aggression, flesh, desire, madness, bloodlust, and fantasy. I follow the logic of dream and hallucination to create a subterranean, subcutaneous narrative of personal symbols.
In order to work, I establish a tightly controlled framework of technology within which I can let go. I always exercise fascistic control over the media I choose. Being in control lets me lose control, thus letting the art take care of itself.
This lets me work with that which I cannot control: madness, unreason╤the dark areas, indefinite and nebulous. Creativity allows me to use my abrogative, destructive tendencies to wander over both sides of the line that marks out what is ╥reasonable.╙ There is value, knowledge, and danger in the unreasonable, in madness, and in pain. In making art I can use that which threatens me and decrease the threat by working through it. There is something about creativity that sustains.
The computer processes and stores information, my information, and gives it back to me within the order and framework I have demanded. It is about memory and about altering memory. I am able to enter into the computer a confusion of lies and pictures, work on them, out there in nonexistent computer space, then see it appear on the screen with the weight of fact, technology, and money.
The computer is the prized toy of our essentially male culture. To use technologies that are really intended for a clean, slick commercial boy╒s world, to make personal, bodily, feminine work, and to reinsert this work into mainstream culture, into art discourse and into society, is a political act.
Although my work╤the process of making it as well as the end result╤has a political function, creativity is for me primarily about finding a voice and speaking, for to speak saves.
About the author
Linda Dement, born 1959 in Brisbane, Australia. BA College of Fine Arts, UNSW, 1988, MFA 1993. Dement has been an exhibiting artist since 1982 with a background in photography, film, and writing. She is now working with computer-based interactive works and computer manipulated 2-D imagery and is currently lecturing in digital imaging and interactivity at the University of NSW.
