Waxweb

"Wax..." was my first feature, executed from 1985-1991 with a variety of arts funding, and a co-production commissioning from ZDF in Germany. The narrative is grotesque, an unresolved and unresolvable tragedy revolving around the perceptual and ethical misperceptions of one Jacob Maker, flight simulation systems programmer, and amateur beekeeper. Half-way between suspense and suspension, the movie moves through space, as the protagonist is translated from his home in Alamogordo out to the Army's Deseret Test facility, and beyond, to caves or the world of the dead, and perhaps even further, if his endless talking voice is to be believed (it should be). Dislocated, disoriented, fragmented, and finally flying, the hero and all those bees and other pictures accompanying him fly backwards and forwards through time. And in a sense the viewer does too.

"Waxweb" (1993-1999) is the hypermedia version of the project, available online and on CD-ROM. It is a hypervideo, clickable on a shot by shot basis; and it is literally spatial, recomposing the time of the movie in varieties of space (2d, 3d, wor-d space). The movie expanded into apparently infinite time (made of minor, interrupted epiphanies); a grotesque, miniature, and artificial world.

(Source: Abstract, 1999 DAC conference)