Syndicate: David Blair: WAXWEB onlin

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

Date: Thu, 01 Jul 1999 22:43:26 +0200
From: David Blair <blair@telepathic-movie.org>


The entire final project of WAXWEB is online now.
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/wax

and will also be open at
http://www.waxweb.org
in about a week or so.



Jacob Maker is a beekeeper who designs flight simulators.
One day, the past arrives out of the future, and Jacob enters:

"WAXWEB"

By David Blair
(1999)

http://www.waxweb.org

.... a "hypermedia" version of the theatrically-distributed electronic
feature "WAX or the discovery among the bees" (1991, 85:00). Available on
cdRom from the author, or the Web, in English, French, or Japanese versions.

The first time user can watch the movie play from beginning to end. Then or
later, any of WAX's 1600 shots can be clicked, leading the viewer into a
25-section matrix unique to each shot. There, similar pictures, descriptive
text, and moving 3D images interweave, coherently leading the viewer from
one media to the next, within and between shot matrices, always moving in
and out of the time of the movie. It is the author's hope that as the user
spends time with WAXWEB, the perceived boundaries between the movie and the
surrounding composition will dissolve, sending the movie into extended and
apparently endless time, as if it were a temporary, grotesque world.

Like a world, WAXWEB contains more detail than any user, however attentive,
could ever absorb. Each shot is linked to similar shots, by many means....
A key element of the narrative's hypnotic, allusive structure is endless
graphic resemblance, and the pleasure of this meaningful visual system is
extended by being placed flat in screenspace, rather than in time. The
connective weave is furthered by hypertexts written for each shot, offering
allusion, new story, or poetic redescription. Space becomes time with
animated 3D scenes (PC only) which extends the woven structure into a
completely different sort of moving image.... Each shot is embedded in 5
unique moving spaces, containing 3D elements and other shots from the film,
creating a silent, non-narrative antipode to the film which, nonetheless,
is highly evocative of the main character's inner world.

The viewer need only watch the movie, or click a few times. To completely
support this activity, the author has created more than 1 million picture,
hypertext, and 3d links; the animated 3d scenes would play 40 hours if
placed end to end. But this is not a database.... It is a movie
composition, made for many sorts of viewer pleasure.

Waxweb (1999)
http://www.waxweb.org
or
cdRom for PC (slow or fast versions), Mac (slow or fast versions),
in English, French, or Japanese (available from the site).

creative and technical authoring: David Blair

Hosted by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
Partially supported by a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.

This release completes a project which first went online in 1994.


------Syndicate mailinglist--------------------
 Syndicate network for media culture and media art
 information and archive: http://www.v2.nl/syndicate
 to unsubscribe, write to <syndicate-request@aec.at>
 in the body of the msg: unsubscribe your@email.adress