Elayne Zalis.
"At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes."
BIOGRAPHY 26.1 (Winter 2003): 84-119.
This special issue was devoted to "Online Lives."
elaynez@msn.com
BACKGROUND
United by a common tendency to raise questions about the meaning, recollection,
and locus of "home" in a digital age, the five hypermedia Web
sites on this virtual tour open up arenas for staging autobiographical
scenes differently. Broadening the scope of The Home Project that the
trAce Online Writing Centre maintains, and drawing on theories of spatiality
and cyber-culture, the survey of Family Portrait, Grandfather Gets a House,
The Family Album Portrait, Home Maker, and Heard It in the Playground
shows how these networked experiments with collaborative storytelling
and a composite approach transform personal home pages into new spaces
for cultural intervention that, while merging "private" and
"public" spheres, provide forums in which culturally diverse
casts of characters showcase theatres of recollection for heterogeneous
audiences around the world.
**********
HOME MAKER
While some people lose their homes and face exile, homelessness, or internment,
other people find themselves confined to their homes. With a housebound
older population in mind, British digital artist Jeanie Finlay asks, "What
makes a house a home? How does this change if you cannot leave? Does a
home have a memory?" ("Tea," screen 2). Assisted by Peoplexpress,
Derbyshire County Council Social Services, and the Year of the Artist
fund, Finlay developed Home Maker to answer the questions she posed. (26)
Through new media technologies like QuickTime VR panoramas, Home Maker
allows four housebound seniors to tell their stories in innovative ways,
a novelty for these residents of South Derbyshire, an area with many isolated
or rural sections and almost no public access to digital technologies
and the Internet. Virtual guests navigate domestic environments and get
acquainted with Florrie, Roy, Betty, and Lilian. Selected hot spots, detected
through trial and error or by highlighting a button on the control panel,
offer additional options. Clicking on a window, for instance, or a door
in any room leads to someone else's home. Within each home, several additional
hot spots activate short video clips in which the residents share anecdotes
about the selected objects or images. Clicking on the faces of the "home
makers" activates videos in which the speakers introduce themselves
and reflect on their living conditions. Except for the introductory videos,
which bear the names of the respective speakers, each clip has a distinctive
title. Adopting a direct address style, Florrie, Roy, Betty, and Lilian
anticipate questions from visitors to their homes in cyberspace. For these
guests and for posterity, the four hosts provide insights into Finlay's
questions about home.
VIRTUAL DOMAINS: A RETURN
HOME MAKER
In Home Maker, Finlay situates Florrie, Roy, Betty, and Lilian, the elderly
British subjects who have opened their homes to her, in navigable panoramas
of their living rooms. (36) Part oral history, part documentary, Home
Maker builds on the relationships that Finlay established with her subjects.
"I visited each person around 8 times, chatting, drinking a lot of
tea, taking photos and eventually taking video," she recalls; "As
I got to know them they relaxed in front of the camera and opened up more
about themselves." (37) Finlay came to incorporate video into the
project when she "realised that the stories I was told each week
as I made the panoramas were giving me a complete history of each person.
Objects in the room would be referred to as part of these stories, like
illustrations or props setting the scene" ("Re: Home Maker").
As settings for videotaped stories that the inhabitants tell, the four
private residences are interlinked to give visitors the impression they
are exploring a single large house w ith multiple--albeit highly personalized--rooms,
adding a collective dimension to the apparently independent portrayals
of these four individuals.
Viewing the homes in a panoramic sweep, zooming in on derails, zooming
out for longer shots, and cutting back to previous scenes all enhance
the sense of being there with Florrie, Roy, Betty, and Lilian. Roy, for
example, sits comfortably on an easy chair in his living room, flanked
by a densely filled bookcase and a cluttered desk in what looks like a
work area. (No computer is in sight here, or in any of the other homes.)
Zooming in on the bookcase creates a sensation similar to that of walking
toward it, as if one soon Could reach out and grab a book from the shelf,
as Roy might do. Panning to the desk and zooming in and out adds to the
sense of exploring Roy's world. The motion from long shot to close shot
simulates the act of sitting down at the desk, as though having a chance
to discover firsthand the workspace that Roy treasures. In a video clip
entitled "A Historical Book," Roy elaborates on his relation
to this space. Curious guests can activate this clip by clicking on either
the papers that cover the top of the desk or the books sitting on the
shelf above. In the clip, Roy presents himself as a writer of a children's
book, which he already has finished, and a historical novel, which preoccupies
him at the time.
The television figures prominently in Lilian's home. Accorded the status
of a hot spot, it activates a video clip aptly entitled "TV."
As Lilian has explained in other videotaped segments of her oral history,
she recently lost her husband of sixty-five years and now lives alone.
Getting out of the house only three times a week, Lilian confesses that
TV has become her life. She especially likes the soaps, and as she talks,
the camera cuts to the television in her living room. Wedding scenes from
a soap opera fill the screen. Lilian remembers her own marriage in a video
clip called "My Husband," which is activated by three framed
photographs of the couple--two on the wall, one under the other, and the
third on a small table below. The arrangement resembles a shrine. Lilian
talks about the death of her husband in 2000, and reminisces about the
good life they shared together, conveying how much she misses him While
she talks, the video zooms in on the photographs (offering clearer images
than the zoom on the cont rol panel allows). Before going to bed every
night and after awakening every morning, Lilian speaks with her husband
while looking at the photographs--a ritual she finds comforting. By inviting
guests into such an intimate theatre of recollection, Lilian exposes virtual
travelers to "other" spaces that tend to get overlooked in the
material world as well as online. At the same time, she tells stories
that are particularly relevant to the target audience of people over sixty-five
who require assistance to leave their homes. (38)
NOTES
(26.) Home Maker grew out of T3: Tea-Toast-Technology: New Arts with Older
People, another project that Finlay worked on with senior citizens in
collaboration with Peoplexpress, a professional community arts organization.
Established in 1990, its mission is to work "with groups of people
living in South Derbyshire to devise, plan and undertake arts projects
which are appropriate to local needs" (Finlay, "Tea"--Peoplexpress
screen). While Home Maker offers portrayals of four individuals who contributed
to a hypermedia production that Finlay made about them, T3 focused on
work that the participants themselves made (Finlay, "Re: Home Maker").
Over a three-year period, T3 taught older people in South Derbyshire to
use computers creatively, as participants crafted digital images that
reflected their ideas of love. The results appear in an online art gallery
(Finlay, "Exhibition"). For background on South Derbyshire,
see Finlay "Tea"--Where screen. For background on Finlay's other
digital projects, see her personal Web site, Ruby Digital Arts and Design.
WORKS CITED
Finlay, Jeanie. "Exhibition." 12 Sept. 2002. .
-----. Home Maker. 2001--2002. 12 Sept. 2002. .
-----. Home page. Ruby Digital Arts and Design. 12 Sept. 2002. .
-----. "Re: Home Maker and Heard It in the Playground." Email
to the author. 17 Oct. 2002.
-----. "Tea-Toast-Technology: Home Maker." 2001--2002. 12 Sept.
2002. .
-----. T3: Tea-Toast-Technology: New Arts with Older People. 12 Sept.
2002. ..
Elayne Zalis, an independent scholar based in Southern California, draws
on her interdisciplinary background in the media arts, critical theory,
and writing to study personal narratives that use print, video, and new
media in innovative ways. Her current research on Web-based approaches
to autobiographical and biographical texts appears online.
COPYRIGHT 2003 University of Hawaii Press
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