Terminals
1997
Terminals 1.0: Considering the End was an on-line and multi-venue museum exhibition in conjunction with the UCSB conference: The Cultural Production of Death, 1996. Considering the End was conceived and curated by Victoria Vesna and Connie Samaras.
Suspension was my project for the Terminals 1.0 exhibition. (PERL) Scripted to die as the direct result of browser participation, it is now dead. Suspension presented the browser with an opening page of underwater sharks circling rainbow colored bars. Each color bar led to a variation of a main story where a protagonist is enjoying an island vacation only to be abruptly interrupted by an accident that may cause her death. If the browser decided not to find out what happens to the protagonist, and ‘bails out’, their action was scripted to degrade the color bar by 2 percent. If the browser continued with the story, they were rewarded with its end and a visual. The project died a natural death.
1999
Terminals 2.0: is a book/CD-ROM/Web project organized and curated by Victoria Vesna and Connie Samaras.
Picking up and continuing the theme of death from Terminals 1.0, Terminals 2.0 distinguishes itself in its poignant identity as both a creative project and a memorial to three artists/writers who were dear to many, including Victoria and Connie. I was invited to create an artists project for the book that drew inspiration from the lives and journals of the three recently departed artists.
Untitled (4 Kathy, Bob, Christine, and where they all speak together):
Laurel Beckman's untitled project takes as its inspiration the journal writings of Kathy Acker, Bob Flanagan, and Christine Tamblyn. Most of the journal texts were among the final self-reflexive moments in the too-short lives of these critical artists. Working with the texts Laurel enacts a kind of blind collaboration, allowing the fantastic partners of the dying-trauma and possibility-to work their way into visual form on the four pages that comprise her project. The pages, both homage and invention, offer (in sequence) a vulnerable and lusty Kathy, a truly naked (with all his words removed, leaving only punctuation) Bob, and the importance that time, friendship and work played in Christine's life. Finally, the fourth page is where they speak simultaneously to each other and to us.
