daddylabyrinth

daddylabyrinth is an interactive new media memoir, a combination of traditional writing and personal video assembled and delivered through the authoring system SCALAR <http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/>. It exists at the cusp of several forms—the lyric essay, the archive, the family history, the home movie—and delves into questions that shape our contemporary narrative practices, such as navigational readership and new ways of experiencing the cinematic. daddylabyrinth is a father/son book, in a long tradition of such, refracted through the lens of new media’s narrative possibilities. The legacies of my father that I carry—objects he left behind and a flotilla of unresolved emotions that continue to vex my self-identity nearly forty years after his death, when I am a father myself— resist any single linear narrative. I turned to SCALAR for this project because it lets me create multiple, interlocking narrative lines, through which I explore interrelationships between objects, incidents, and impressions. These two legacies have with time become inextricably bound, and the stories that I weave from them resist any single linear narrative. I turned to SCALAR to write daddylabyrinth because it allows me to create multiple, interlocking narrative lines, through which I could track and explore interrelationships between objects, incidents, and impressions—ranging from objects of his that I’ve given my children to ways that my father has shown up in my fiction. A portion of the work is currently up to view on demo at http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/daddylabyrinth/index. Approximately 25% of its pages are available at the moment, and I will have a significantly more robust version of it available for the ELO conference next spring should my proposal be selected for the Media Arts Show—ideally a premiere of the whole work before I seek a publisher for it. Exhibition at ELO could take one (or both) of two forms. Internet-connected desktop, notebook, or tablet computers with headphones could be used in a stationary gallery situation, where readers could explore the work at their own pace. I could also present it in a live venue, talking my way through the labyrinth as I navigate it live and play some of its short videos. A combination of these two exhibition approaches would be ideal, and I am amenable to either a full presentation or a split one with another artist. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)