Screenshot of Underbelly

Underbelly ‘beta version’ launched today!

UPDATE: new version uploaded 26 March 2010

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 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.

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:

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

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

Kate Pullinger's 'Line of Influence' at Binary Katwalk

Binarykatwalk is an online exhibition space for experimental digital work, curated by locative media/new media artist and writer, Jeremy Hight, and this month sees the launch of the Kate Pullinger section of The Line of Influence, which is:

…a series of a few artists selected to show their work alongside who influenced them and those they see as kindred spirits coming up. This is not an ordinary exhibition, but instead a chance to show how ideas and works progress over time and how no artist is a solitary force out there.

I’m honoured that Kate has chosen to include my own piece, Fitting the Pattern, alongside Flight Paths, the networked novel she co-creates with Chris Joseph, These Waves of Girls by Caitlin Fisher and Renee Turner’s She….

Fitting the Pattern in the Binary Katwalk open-gallery-network

remixed for R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX from: classy joint + Toni Lebusque + recycling bellini

My friend Toni Lebusque is an artist who makes images with pen and pastels as well as digital media and lately she’s been inscribing her wonderful drawings into her flesh. I’ve never been tempted to get a tattoo myself, I’m far too variable, but I can relate to that desire to embody, to embolden the body, to flesh out, to be art in the flesh. It feels somehow connected, although diametrically different, to what draws me in much of my creative work – bringing viscera and flesh into the virtual, see: rawVamp, rawLorem Ipsum, IntraVenus or couplings.

So what do I do? I turn Toni’s tattoos electronic. Well, there’s no ‘arm in it, is there? (sorry;-)

flash source for remixing: bananarma_CS3.fla or bananarma_fla8.fla

IntraVenus

Female Icons: it’s not the gaze but the looks is a fascinating project by De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research, that explores what makes a woman an icon through a rich variety of means, including workshops, streaming lectures, online data collecting and new media works on view such as She… by Renee Turner and my own IntraVenus.

In December 2007 Renee interviewed me about IntraVenus for the Female Icons archive. I reproduce it here:

The Interview

Renee Turner: Can you give me a little background on IntraVenus, meaning what your impetus was to make the work?

Christine Wilks: I created the images some time ago when I was a young art student. At the time I felt somewhat overwhelmed by the predominance of the female nude throughout art history and felt the pressure of this archetypal image (exacerbated by being taught by an almost entirely male staff) was interfering with my ability to visualise myself as a practising artist. I wanted to explore this, to get inside the image and challenge it directly with my own body. I was quite surprised when the images turned out to look so violent, the way my body looked so battered and bruised. It was disturbing, but all the more fitting since my self-image as an artist was bruised.

from IntraVenus

I ended up with a whole load of 35mm transparencies which I filmed on a 16mm rostrum camera and added a kind of abstract sound track – but I was never entirely happy with this version. I’d reduced myself to an image and hadn’t even given myself a voice. So after showing the work a few times on tour with some other women film-makers, the work languished unseen – or to quote the work itself, IntraVenus laid fallow for many years.

Then in 2004, thanks to getting involved with the trAce online writing centre, I started to create rich media for the web. After many years of going down creative cul-de-sacs or veering off on detours, this finally felt like the perfect arena for me as an artist. Rooting around in some boxes one day, I found the 35mm slides and decided to scan them into my computer. I realised I was finally ready and able to write the soundtrack/voice-over that the images needed.

RT: As a projection, you chose Titian’s Venus of Urbino, why that particular Venus above all others from art history?

Titian's Venus

CW: I was attracted to her – her fishlike softness, her gaze, the way her hand rests in her crotch, the two women in the background looking in the chest (what are they looking for?). Plus, on a practical level, I found I could fit my body into hers the best. I tried many other images – Manet’s Olympia, Ingre’s Grande Odalisque, Boucher’s Nude on a Sofa, etc. – but Titian’s Venus was the best fit…!

RT: The Muse is on the one hand passive, a classical female nude who is the recipient of the gaze and on the other, without the muse, creativity cannot take place.   In myth and art history, she is actually the one who ignites the creative process.   Can you talk about the some of the contradictions of the Muse as an archetypal female figure within the creative arts?     (I imagine this question will bring up the fact that you’re a woman making art…  and yet art historically, women could inspire but not create.)

CW: Personally, I don’t know whether the idea of the muse is very helpful. Usually I don’t feel the need to personify the source of my creativity, but in this instance, with the repurposing of the images for IntraVenus, it helped me out of an impasse. I wanted to address my situation as a female artist who, in the past, felt she had lost her way and succumbed to unproductive periods, times when it would seem her muse had deserted her… if you believe in that kind of thing… Well, I certainly didn’t then and I didn’t spend my time hanging around, waiting for the muse to strike. But, crucially, I didn’t believe in myself as an artist either. I neglected that vital core of my being. Ironically, it was by tackling head-on the archetypal idea of the female muse that restored me as an artist.

IntraVenus is about taking creative responsibility. As an artist, one must choose one’s own muse. If you choose a damaging muse, a muse that silences you, that batters your creative ego, then it’s going to be a long and difficult struggle – which it was for me… until now. Now I feel free of the dodgy muse that wants to silence me.

Whether your muse, if you need one, is male or female, depends on how the fancy takes you.

RT: Can you discuss the use of projection in the piece and how that works symbolically?

CW: ‘According to Corey Mixon, projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one “projects” one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else.’ [quote from: Psychological Projection, wikipedia.org]

There’s a strong connection between projecting an image and the concept of psychological projection. I project the object of art, in this case the female nude, the object of the male gaze, onto myself, the subject, the artist. I become both subject and object. It’s my subjective view but  it’s complicated because I’ve internalised the objectification of the female body in art and it projects back onto me, doing me visual ‘damage’, interfering with my ability as a female artist to picture myself – both to represent myself visually as unequivocally and sexually female, and to psychologically picture myself as an artist. My internal self-image as an artist becomes distorted and damaged, which inhibits my creativity. For me, psychologically, the only way out of this is to face it and struggle with it, to challenge it, to do battle with the demons. So I project onto myself what I most fear – passivity, being unable to act, being unable to create as an artist – and in the act of doing this, I am creating. It’s the way out.

Ada and one of many networks of women today

remixed for R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX from: maschinenmensch + la cicciolisa + Wikimedia Commons File:Ada Lovelace 1838.jpg + Wikimedia Commons File:Babbage difference engine drawing.gif

flash source: adalovelacedayCS3.fla (206kb)

Cutting through memories, pinning down facts, stitching fabrications, unpicking the past – an interactive, animated memoir, created in Flash, exploring aspects of my relationship with my dressmaking mother.

Life’s mysteries are rarely uncovered by a logical, linear process of deduction. You arrive at answers, ideas, suspicions, intuitions… haphazardly, in fragments. Over time you build the picture, piece by piece, shuffling and rearranging, until you start to see a pattern emerging. Fitting the Pattern attempts to replicate this experience, hence it’s a memoir in pieces for you to explore…

I gave a live performance of this piece last month at the Creative Writing and New Media MA showcase at the IOCT Salon at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. That was fun!

Recently Renee Turner interviewed me about IntraVenus, one of my short Flash moving pix, for De Geuzen’s fascinating Female Icons site which explores what makes a woman an icon.

From the Virgin Mary, to Marilyn Monroe, to Madonna, a select group of women have been canonized, mythologized and elevated to the status of icon.

Whether idolized or vilified, they reveal something about the social underpinnings of the feminine in all its clichés, perversities and conventions.

There’s a wonderful wealth of material on the site and many ways to contribute. One of my favourite elements of the project is the Female Icons Impersonator. Go to the Flickr page and add your own. I found it such fun, I also animated mine: used to be big

I gained so many useful insights during the day, but one of the things that sticks in my mind is the issue of how to deal with aggressive comments. It’s not something I’ve experienced on my own blog, but I have while contributing to other blogs. Personally it doesn’t bother me too much, in fact I often enjoy the rough and tumble of a heated debate, but I know many women are uncomfortable with it. The keynote speakers (or one of them, at least) pointed out that, generally speaking, men and women tend to have different commenting styles: men like to challenge more, women tend to be more consensual. No one’s denying that there are trolls out there, but it’s important for women to remember that a challenging comment is not necessarily an attack.

I enjoy peaceful discussion and consensus can be good – but I like variety and it’s exciting to get a shake up once in a while too. If women become overly concerned about online aggression, the danger is they abdicate from the discussion, they lose their voice, they silence themselves. It’s important to remember that online men have no real advantage, they are no bigger nor louder than any woman wants to be – and as Jory Des Jardins from BlogHer pointed out, collectively women are a powerful and influential online presence.

There’s nothing to stop individual women making their mark too. If a woman wants to carve out a space for herself, she’s got to be prepared to defend it. In a virtual web 2.0 world the balance of power is different… and still evolving… Don’t take your old assumptions into battle – and don’t assume it’s always a brawl.

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