Cultures in Webs: Working in Hypermedia with the Documentary Image

This CD-ROM explores how hypertextual writing and image-making merge in creating projects with nonfiction materials such as photographs, video clips, audio recordings and observational notes. The work includes two hypertextual field projects, one concerning a wine harvest in Burgundy, France, and the other concerning a series of performances in Ghana. The project uses an html-based format to weave among differing modes of writing and image-presentation. The section "The Harvest" was selected for exhibition in the 2001 ELO "State Of The Arts" symposium gallery. Based on two months of participant observation working the harvest at a small vineyard in France, the project combines diaristic writing, visual notes, dialog, exposition, and other forms of writing alongside a fifty-four image sequence. The work also includes videos and slide shows. "Concealed Narratives" offers two routes, interactive paths by which users travel to a series of public events in Ghana. The work explores how cultural battles are imagined and how stories get expressed through performances, visual tropes, and metaphors. The work also includes a critical essay about how to merge techniques of metaphor and montage in creating artistic and ethnographic projects based on material evidence. The work bridges practices of the arts, humanities and social sciences.

(Source: Author's description in the Electronic Literature Directory)