Category Archives: crissxross

creative works by Christine Wilks

Digital Literature featured in The Independent

Underbelly and Fitting the Pattern recommended works

In an Arts & Entertainments feature in The Independent, Lisa Gee “explores the unbound possibilities of digital-era fiction” and announces the shortlist for the 2011 New Media Writing Prize. She asked a number of people working in digital writing and/or publishing to nominate their favourite works of digital literature and I’m delighted to say that Tim Wright and Jim Pope both recommended Underbelly, and Sue Thomas picked Fitting the Pattern. Here’s what they had to say in the accompanying video:

Underbelly screenshotTim Wright, digital writer/consultant, on Underbelly :

It’s a really interesting use of interactivity, Flash animation,  amazing sound and it’s a story about women miners but then also a thought piece about bearing children and motherhood and balancing work and home.

Dr James Pope, academic & judge/co-founder, New Media Writing Prize, on Underbelly :

I still maybe think it’s the best piece I’ve seen in terms of emotional connection to a piece of interactive work.

Detail from Fitting the PatternSue Thomas, professor of new media, De Montfort University, on Fitting the Pattern:

It’s beautifully designed, but it also has very clever tools within it that you have to learn how to use before you can actually navigate the piece and read the story.

Here are the other recommended works:

New Media Writing Prize 2011 – shortlist

Also announced yesterday on the New Media Writing Prize blog, the shortlist for the student prize:

Student Entries

  • Chasing Pandora – Emily Devereux, Allyson Cikor, Trent Redmond, Mathew Vickery  (Alberta, Canada)
  • 5 Haitis – Simon Kerr  (Nottingham)
  • Maybe Make Some Change – Aaaron A. Reed  (Santa Cruz, California)
  • Unravelled –   Spenser Wain, Zac Urness, Kollin Branicki  (Alberta, Canada)

14 November 2011 by crissxross | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Rememori – a new work

Rememori - a game and e-poem

Rememori is a degenerative memory game and playable poem that grapples with the effects of dementia on an intimate circle of characters.

Play-read or read-play, however you approach it and whoever you identify with, you’ll become entangled in a struggle for accurate recall, attention and the search for meaning. Inevitably, it’s a contrary game – there can be no winners.

I began creating Rememori about a year ago, when my father was in the later stages of Alzheimer’s Disease but still living at home, being cared for by my mother. I finished the work this weekend, coincidentally just as my father moved from a hospital ward into a Nursing Care Home. On the face of it, the main reason why it’s taken so long to make is because I took time out to work on other projects. During that period my father had a third massive stroke and the prognosis didn’t look good. So for a while, I think I was reluctant to return to the piece. I’m glad I did. There can be no happy endings in situations like these but, now that we have him settled in our preferred Care Home, there’s a sense of respite. I think the work reflects that, certainly in the later stages of the game.

Having said that, the work is a game – it’s not factual, it’s not autobiographical, but like all works of art, it’s fed by reflecting on one’s experience.

Modified image of brain: source thanks to Wellcome Library, London.

7 November 2011 by crissxross | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Notes Noir

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A collaboration for remixworx: concept and roadwork by runran, visualization and code by crissxross, based loosely on animations by babel.

Photograph of Ailsa Dyson by Gordie Agar (Winnipeg), texts adapted from One Million Footnotes by poet Geof Huth, music loop from Palais de Glace by media artist Talan Memmott.

Source files: notesnoir (CS5.5 + SWF) or Noir-10-CS4.fla

3 October 2011 by crissxross | Also posted in Flash artworks, remixworx | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Third Hand Plays: Out Of Touch

Out of Touch is my new work commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for Third Hand Plays, a series about electronic literature curated and discussed by Brian Kim Stefans for the SFMOMA blog.

In his article, Stefans draws a comparison between Out of Touch and  ”a very early piece of internet poetry by the graphic designer Juliet Martin called ‘oooxxxooo,’ …which took as its subject the apparently desperate need of the artist-protagonist for the computer to ameliorate her loneliness.” About my piece, he goes on to say:

Her use of video, particularly the manipulations that reduce reality to iconic or cartoon-like (which I read as linguistic) simplicity, accentuates some of the horror at the base of this piece, which has a quasi-Expressionist element — I can’t help but see echoes of “The Scream” in here, or perhaps, with a very different valence in relation to time and experience (it doesn’t happen in Wilks’s piece), the blurred faces in the work of Christian Boltanski.

Making Out of Touch

Despite my background in film-making and scriptwriting, I rarely set out with a written script, storyboard or a wireframe design, a blueprint that I execute. I start with a collection (or network) of ideas that I want to explore. Then I experiment; manipulating text, code, images, sounds, video fx, animation, narrative elements… until something meaningful emerges.  To me, it seems a very hands-on, even tactile approach, like that of a sculptor or collage artist – although what is there to actually touch? A keyboard, a mouse, a digital drawing tablet. It’s a far cry from handling messy art materials or tussling with camera, tripod, lights on location and reels of celluloid in the cutting room. And yet there’s a strong sense of the haptic in what I do. This preoccupation with touch and its absence is a recurring feature in my work – e.g. the handiwork of the dressmaker in Fitting the Pattern and the sculptor in Underbelly – so I find it interesting that, in relation to Out of Touch, Stefans describes Juliet Martin’s oooxxxooo piece as “linguistic sculpture.” It also highlights how digital synaesthesia is a key expressive quality of digital media arts. And while I’m on the subject of cross-wiring… from crissxross to R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX and more xxxooo…

More Third Hand Plays

See my last post for a list of the previously published works of e-literature in the Third Hand Plays series and Brian Stefan’s accompanying articles. Also keep checking the SFMOMA blog throughout August for more posts in the series.

4 August 2011 by crissxross | Also posted in exhibiting + presenting | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Underbelly wins Digital Media Competition

Motherhood, Servitude and the Delegation of Care

MaMSIE* Study Day

Birkbeck, University of London, 20 May 2011

 

My playable media fiction, Underbelly, will be exhibited throughout the Study Day, which concludes with the presentation of the winners of the Digital Media Competition 2011: Maternal Subjectivities, Care and Labour - and I’m delighted to announce that Underbelly is the overall winner!

The other winners are:

  • Marie-Josiane Agossou and Esther Jones for ‘The Order of Things‘, an 8 minute video
  • Hester Jones, ‘Call Yourself a Mother’:  2 photos
  • Hollie McNish – ‘Push Kick‘ audio poetry collection
  • Marina Velez – two photographs, ‘My Family 1′ and ‘Strowis Motherhood’.
About the Study Day

MaMSIE is an international network of scholars, artists and activists working in the emerging interdisciplinary field of maternal studies. Our 6th event focuses on the interrelations between labour, capital, care and the maternal. In particular, it will consider the diverse ways ‘maternal care’ has been, and continues to be delegated and shared, and the implications for our understandings of maternal subjectivities and the labour of care.

The study day will open up ‘maternity’ as a term that includes the paid and unpaid work of a diverse range of social actors. It aims at generating a dialogue between two rich and substantial bodies of feminist scholarship; work on the social histories of domestic labour, service and servitude and current debates about globalism, migration and the care industries, recasting existing scholarship through the lens of maternal studies.

The Keynote speaker is Stella Sandford. Other speakers include: Rosie Cox, Lucy Delap, Alison Light, Mirca Madianou,Daniel Miller, Jenny Mitchell, Kate Pullinger, Rachel Thomson, Imogen Tyler, and Helen Wood.

Many thanks to the MaMSIE network and the organisers of both the Study Day and the Digital Media Competition. For more information see MaMSIE events.

*Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics

18 May 2011 by crissxross | Also posted in exhibiting + presenting | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)