Home

Home explores the meaning of home, the secrets revealed there, and our emotional relationship to both the place and the intimacies contained therein. A house is for sale; it has been abandoned. Yet it reverberates with the memories of those who lived there and whose most private moments still inhabit the half empty spaces. The user overhears snippets of emotionally charged family conversations, moves down dark corridors and enters into surprising rooms. You eavesdrop, learn secrets, watch. From these fragments the story of this specific home is pieced together, as well as the meaning of home itself.

Using VRML, Home invites you to move through the pretty, flat suburb and into the 3-D world inside the house. This home, like all homes, is constructed from rooms and objects: a coffee cup, a telephone, a moth, a postcard, a slice of pie, a family photo, a bottle of alcohol, a nightlight, a bedside stand, children’s toys, a bathroom mirror, a bathtub, and even a window to the outside. These objects are links to the work of fourteen different artists who were invited by Barbier and Browning to create a piece on the meaning of home. Many of these works are fragments from longer films and videos. Collectively they present different points of view on the psychological, social, and cultural dimensions of home. From this mosaic, a complex narrative of home and its meaning is created.

(Source: Michelle Citron, in "START HERE> An Interdisciplinary Introduction to Electronic Literature")