Fitting the Pattern

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Description (in English): 

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. The structure of Fitting the Pattern attempts to replicate this experience; hence it is a memoir in pieces that the reader can explore, to some extent, in a non-linear fashion. There are certain parallels between my mother’s creative craft process and my own in new media; therefore the visual design of the piece is based on the aesthetics of sewing patterns. These similarities, as well as our differences, are embedded in the digital media and text, literally drawn out through animation and dramatized through interactivity. Custom cursors designed as digital dressmaking tools fuse the interactive process into the narrative world, so the reader becomes actively involved in constructing and/or unpicking the narrative.
(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

I ♥ E-Poetry entry: 
Technical notes: 

Use the dressmaking tool custom cursors to navigate. You will have read all the fragments of the memoir when all the pattern pieces are dark in the pattern layout diagram (see bottom right corner). When the pattern pieces jiggle, click again to view the final, randomly-generated sequence. To quit, close the browser window.

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Eric Dean Rasmussen