First Voices and Visions

"New Voices New Visions 1994 "
CD-ROM, $ 29.95
The Voyager Company
(212) 431-5199
http://www.voyagerco.com/

A screen shot from Robert Linehan's "Lebuse's Letters"

The deadline for the 1996 "New Voices/New Visions" competition is approaching (Friday, June 28)--which may be a good opportunity to look back at the first competition held in 1994. "New Voices/New Visions"(http://www.nvnv.org/) is organized by Interval Research Corporation and The Voyager Company and tries to support creative people using computers for original works. Eligible are digital works (not commercially marketed) that are available in their entirety on a computer-readable medium.
The two CD-ROMs documenting 1994's competition feature the three grand prize winners--"An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War," "Sound Toy," "The Dream of Time"--as well as twenty "Noteworthies."

The most poetic work among the three winners is Hsi-Chien Huang's "The Dream of Time," a lyrical meditation on the nature of time. The project was inspired by Alan Lightman's book Einstein 's Dreams,a collection of short stories on the subject of time. "The Dream of Time" addresses in a self-referential way the aspects of interactive media that relate to temporality, such as symbol building, pacing and the viewer's experience. At the core of the project are objects that evolve, need to be touched, remembered and forgotten. During the interaction with the interface, viewers are continually reminded that time is passing--there's always a clock that's counting time or a sound that signifies arrival and departure.
George Legrady's "An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War" has by now become a kind of "classic" of the inventory-archeology genre. Legrady uses the floor plan of the former Hungarian Worker's Movement Museum as an interface to explore a personal history and identity shaped by the Cold War. A click on a room in the floor plan connects you to archives of objects, books, family documents and socialist propaganda that document a memory of a Hungarian childhood. The Cold War-related artifacts and stories have been arranged thematically in eight rooms superimposed on the original floor plan. Looking at the map of the museum, you hear the hollow sound of footsteps, echoes from a past that will always be present to haunt those who lived it.
Todd Robbin's "Sound Toy" makes a radically different use of the technology--the toy is a keypad consisting of button-like regions that each contain a pair of sounds. Moving the cursor over these areas triggers the sounds, and allows you to play the blues and (re)discover its rhythms. "Sound Toy" is an exploration of how an interface channels the ways we play and create.

If there is a "trend" to be found among the twenty noteworthies, it is a certain self-reflexiveness. The "new" possibilities offered by the digital medium often become the theme of a project. Many of the pieces focus on the manipulation and morphing of electronic images, on the manifold options of navigation, or on the relation of the printed/written word to the electronic medium. Josh Feldman's "Consciousness," for instance, is an animation that uses only type, and involves a computer that gains consciousness. In other projects, the reflections on the characteristics and possibilities of digital media are sometimes interwoven with personal histories captured in the form of photos or letters. Robert Linehan's "Lebuse's Letters" explores the letter as the sole form of "link" among family members separated by war. The letters link stories and scenes both as a formal element and on the level of content. "Point and Click" by Annie Lovejoy uses photos from the family album to explore the history of the photographic image in digital culture and question notions of personal/photographic/computerized "memory."
In September, the winning new voices and visions will be announced and it remains to be seen whether the visions of their predecessors are echoed, reloaded or transcended.