Sign After the X
David Clarke has created a new work of net art called Sign After the X in collaboration with Marina Roy and Graham Meisner. Sign After the X is structurally similar to some of Clark's earlier works such as A is for Apple and 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein. The form of these works is one that Clark has been developing for some time now; A is for Apple, the first of them, was published in 2002.
The nodes or chapters or sections of these hypermedia works are done in Flash. They're multimedia approaches to a subject. We hear a voice reading a text about Freud or Lacan or Wittgenstein or X (etc) while Clark's animated visuals improvise with the text–in the sense that the visuals explicate or explore or expand or riff on the text's meaning. Sign After the X is organized into five categories: Mind, Body, Land, Language, and Law. Each of these contains anywhere from four to thirty nodes/Flash works.
The putative subject of Sign After the X is “the letter X and it’s multiple meanings in our culture“. And, yes, I can see that in some of the material presented. But it seems to me there's considerably more going on than that.
For instance, in the 'Mind' section, we encounter about thirty hypermedia works, many of which are explanatory of or exploratory of Freud's ideas. Perhaps these are indeed related to X, but I don't know how. However, that is not a criticism; the hypermedia works are often compelling in their voiced text and almost always are interesting in their visual nature and workings. The connection with X is not obvious and might emerge with more exploration of other parts of the work, which is unusually large for a work of net art.
Some of the hypermedia works are not so good. The reading of Coleridge's “Kubla Kahn”, for instance. Particularly by the guy who normally reads those theorified texts. Yeesh. But many of them are fascinating and considerably more original than a bad reading of “Kubla Khan” accompanied with mild visuals. The interest of Clark's work, to me, is in his avoiding, for the most part, such cliches of digital literary production. His background is in visual art. The individual nodes are often very polished, and that which links them, and the resulting overall shape and semantic, thematic structure, are of great interest in these fascinating works by David Clark. I don't see anyone else exploring this sort of form in the same way Clark has been since 2002.
If you find Sign After the X of interest, you should also check out his site chemicalpictures.net for other projects and writings.
Tags: Flash | Freud | hyperliterature | hypermedia | Lacan
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3 Responses to “Sign After the X”.
Thanks for posting this, Jim. I’ve spent some time looking at it, but I haven’t looked at all of it by any means – and I must say one of my initial impressions is that it’s got too much material in it, with too little evidence of a central theme or controlling schema. I find it both absorbing and frustrating. Some of the sections have got really interesting information in them – the sections in “Language” about the swastika and the letter X for example, or the section about Xenotrasplantation in “Body” – but it’s all very wordy, and because of the absence of an obvious central theme or principle of design you’re left with the feeling that you’re being subjected to a great display of learning for no particular purpose. Also, because of the lack of interaction once you’ve found your way to a particular “chapter”, the feel is rather like an extremely superior PowerPoint presentation: basically a jazzy, modern, new media way of serving you up a whole load of facts. It’s a bit like listening to Stephen Fry on the quiz show QI. You can only think “Ooh, that’s really interesting” a certain number of times before you start to get fed up with it.
Some of the graphic design is really good, and some of the presentational design is really good too – meaning that it sometimes conveys information in a very clear and compact way. On the other hand, it sometimes gets banal, with the graphics merely mimicking the information we are being given by the audio track. For example, “Xenotransplantation, otherwise known as medical grafting” is accompanied first by a spelling-out of the word “Xenotransplantation” (fair enough, we might not know how to spell it) followed by a spelling-out of the words “medical grafting” (banal – it doesn’t offer us any information which the audio track hasn’t already given us).
One design trick of which I’ve had definitely had enough is the practice of making an on-screen image seem more “edgy” by letting it go slightly out-of-focus occasionally, usually accompanied by some kind of a zizzing noise, like the sound of a key being dragged along a piano-wire. I’m afraid Clarke goes in for this quite a lot in places, although he’s no worse than a lot of other practitioners in this respect.
I think what I’m really saying is that although it’s extremely accomplished in places, the piece fails to transform its materials into any sort of poetry. I’d be interested to know what other people think – Alan Bigelow, for example.
- Edward
I don’t think there’s any more aspiration to “transform its materials into any sort of poetry” than there is in, say, Deleuze and Guattari. It’s more from a uh visual art vibe. The writing we tend to encounter in visual arts is critical, a kind of mixture of analysis and intellectual fashion.
I haven’t looked at enough of the piece to have a sense of how it all hangs together, or not. And, if it doesn’t, whether it doesn’t hang together like apples and oranges don’t hang together, or whether it doesn’t hang together like Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson don’t hang together. Or, if it does hang together, whether it all hangs together like yogurt or a diamond necklace.
But I find the approach and subjects interesting. It’s not a predictable narrative delivered in standardized media. In other words, it’s not an approach that hangs together like canned meat.
The only pieces this piece reminds me of are two other pieces by David Clark; he’s doing something here on his own. I appreciate that.
I’ll buy that. And actually, looking at it again, the section on Freud and his living-quarters is really quite absorbing and impressive.
- Edward