Autobiography installed at Winnipeg Art Gallery, showing lightboxes
and one of two monitors.


      I recently showed a Web-based piece, Autobiography, at The Winnipeg Art Gallery (September 26, 1996-January 12, 1997). As a form, the Web is open-ended and fluid: first, the artist has no final control over the appearance of a Web page; but more importantly, a Web site is "ongoing". It consists in the process, as its parts are posted, and is under continuous review and revision. Two of the lightboxes for Autobiography are "open" in form; built from layered, overlapping panels of plexiglas, they're open along the top and bottom inner edges allowing light to leak out. These devices reinforce the idea that there's no closure--that our experience is open-ended, unframed. For the website itself, I have written software which allows the viewer to rotate and flip images, as well as to zoom in on images, creating "pixelized effects". The image manipulation is a metaphor for process, but "pixelized" images which become increasingly abstract go perhaps a step further by suggesting the disappearance of the image altogether into a realm of abstract process.

      Autobiography uses a second computer, in addition to the one connected to the Web. This second computer has my own multimedia software installed, a revision of the software I wrote for Two Women. Both computers access the same data but provide different experiences, the co-presence of which emphasizes the extensibility and fluidity of content and form. Connected to this second computer is a lightbox housing five images, each of which lights up in turn, either automatically by software timing or through keyboard requests. Again, the point here is the idea of motion, that the world of images is not fixed.

      Autobiography was installed in a dimly lit gallery where the lightboxes and computers became important sources of light, the light coming towards the viewer and spilling out onto the walls, suggesting how illumination is lost to the shadows of process that engulf us.

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