Category Archives: exhibiting + presenting

showing my work at festivals, conferences, online exhibitions, publications…

Underbelly in Beta & Transliteracy

Underbelly screenshot

Screenshot of Underbelly

Underbelly ‘beta version’ launched today!

Underbelly is my latest playable media fiction that I created in Flash. I call it a playable fiction because you need to explore it with your mouse to find and play the many voices of the narrator. It’s about a woman sculptor, carving on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery, now landscaped into a country park. As she carves, she is disturbed by a medley of voices, along with her ticking biological clock, and the player/reader is plunged into an underworld of the artist’s repressed fears and desires mashed up with the disregarded histories of the 19th Century women who once worked underground mining coal.

Yesterday I performed Underbelly at the stimulating and wonderfully amplified Transliteracy Research GroupTransliteracy Conference in Leicester at the new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre. The conference was a rich mix of practitioners’ talks, academic papers and artists’ presentations. I was delighted to share an artists’ panel, classed as Transliterate Practice, with Michael J Maguire, who performed his experimental piece, cameltext, and Steve Gibson, who talked about his game-installation, Grand Theft Bicycle. (Later in the day I took a joy ride on his eponymous bicycle and caused a bit of havoc in game-art shooter land;) To get a flavour of our panel session, see the liveblog: Practice in Transliteracy – parallel session 2

Calling for Underbelly user testers

Taking my cue from another Transliteracy presentation, Kirsty McGill on Remote Audiences, I’d like to engage some remote user testing of Underbelly. As discussed in my panel’s session, one kind of transliterate practice is where an individual artist takes on a number of roles to create a multimedia digital work across what are traditionally considered different disciplines. This is certainly how I made Underbelly – I devised, wrote, designed, programmed, animated, image-edited, sound recorded/mixed and even performed the voices. One thing I didn’t do was carve the sculptures – that’s the work of my sister, Melanie Wilks. I relish working in multiple media on my own, independently, but one of the downsides is that I hardly have anyone around me to grab and say, ‘Hey, have a go at this, does it work for you?’ (other than my hard-pressed partner, Dane Gould, whom I can’t thank enough) and usability testing is essential for interactive pieces.

So I would be very grateful if, after playing with Underbelly, you would leave comments for me here about any bugs or issues you might find, or any improvements you’d like to see to the user interface. Comments on any other aspect of the work would be most welcome too. Cheers.

11 February 2010 by crissxross | Also posted in Flash artworks | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Studies in the Maternal publishes Fitting the Pattern

Detail from Fitting the PatternIt’s fascinating to see one’s work in different contexts and this month my interactive, online memoir, Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker’s daughter, is published in issue two of Studies in the Maternal. It appears alongside a PDF download of my parallel lecture about the piece, Being Creatively Autobiographical in New Media.

Here’s how Lisa Baraitser and Sigal Spigel describe the work in their editorial:

Christine Wilks’ wonderfully quirky interactive digital media work: Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker’s daughter… is a memoir about her mother, a skilled dressmaker, whom Christine grew up with in Leeds. Christine makes use of biographical minutiae at their intersection with cultural representations for exploring the emergence of subjectivities within mother-daughter relations. The work invites the reader/viewer to take part in the exploration and mediated construction of perplexed yet intimate mother-daughter relationship.

About Studies in the Maternal

Studies in the Maternal is an international, peer-reviewed, scholarly online journal. It aims to provide a forum for contemporary critical debates on the maternal understood as lived experience, social location, political and scientific practice, economic and ethical challenge, a theoretical question, and a structural dimension in human relations, politics and ethics.

The e-journal publishes “articles, essays and reviews from academics, writers, artists and clinical and cultural practitioners who engage with the maternal from diverse perspectives,” including multimedia work that “falls outside of the textual tradition.”

Here are the contents of the current issue:

Editorial by Sigal Spigel and Lisa Baraitser
The Abundance of Water by Jenny Mitchell

20 December 2009 by crissxross | Also posted in crissxross | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Underbelly and Writing Bodies

Conference of the Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Writing Network, 11-12 Sept 2009, at University of Oxford

Conference of the Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Writing Network, 11-12 Sept 2009, at University of Oxford

A couple of days ago I presented, Underbelly, my most recent work of digital fiction (an almost finished work-in-progress) at the Writing Bodies/Reading Bodies conference in Oxford. Underbelly is about a woman sculptor carving a figure on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery now landscaped into a country park, but it also includes stories of the women miners who used to work underground in the 19th Century. As I said in my introduction, there’s a long association of the female body with the land, e.g. Mother Earth, but it’s perhaps little known that women used to work underground, hauling coal like beasts of burden. This history is largely forgotten, almost erased apart from a few websites (see below), and now the colliery sites themselves have been erased from the landscape too.

National Coal Board Collection: Portrait of a Miner 2 disc set from BFI

National Coal Board Collection: Portrait of a Miner 2 disc set from BFI

So it’s with great interest that, on my return from the Writing Bodies conference, I read in the Guardian that the British Film Institute is launching a ‘major restrospective of its extraordinary archive of mining films.’ In his article, Pitmen at the pictures, playwright Lee Hall makes a similar point about the effacement of our working class history:

As soon as the pits started closing all evidence of their existence was erased. I remember driving around the Durham coalfield trying to find locations for the movie of Billy Elliot, desperate to get a glimpse of an archetypal winding gear, and shocked to find they’d all been knocked down. Similarly the industry seems to have been Photoshopped out of the national imagination as if the working classes didn’t exist any more – as if all that labour history was an embarrassment to the consensus of all the major parties, who now see us as consumers rather than producers.

Thankfully Photoshop is just as good for montage as it is for airbrushing out and I have used it for Underbelly to put women miners back into the picture in an interactive collage of imagery and voices from my imagination and historical sources. I’ll be publishing the piece, created in Flash, on crissxross.net fairly soon.

For more about the history of pitwomen see A Web of English History: The Peel Web or A Modern History Sourcebook: Women Miners in the English Coal Pits or Women in World History Curriculum: The Coal Mines, Industrial Revolution

13 September 2009 by crissxross | Also posted in writing + research | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

remixworx in overview of E-Poetry 2009

ePoetry Barcelona 09Thanks to Chris Funkhouser, digital poet and researcher, for this fantastic, all-embracing report of E-Poetry 2009, the international festival and symposium of digital poetry that took place in Barcelona in May:

Encapsulating E-Poetry 2009: Some views on contemporary digital poetry

This was the first time I’d attended this biennial festival where I presented a selection of remixes from R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX. Here’s what Funkhouser had to say about it in the section on the May 26 Panel of works:

Wilks (whose comments on the presentation—as well as links to several works she showed—are posted at http://crissxross.net/wilx/2009/06/07/remixing-at-epoetry-barcelona-2009/) showed a series of works that have been presented on a collaborative blog titled remixworx. Members of the group have done roughly 500 multimedia remixes since 2006 (Wilks usually uses Flash). She presented “trails” of posts to the site—which is set up as a blog and artistic responses are posted in comment fields—that reflected how the works evolved, and also read a couple of text pieces from the site. Beyond the high quality of the works presented, the collaborative axis of remixworx is more than respectable, and the sheer variety of types of works (stylistically/aesthetically)—kinetic visual poems often combining text/animation/sound—appearing on the site is marvelous.

20 August 2009 by crissxross | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1)