Leonardo On-Line

...Words On Works...

The Doorway....

The Doorway

Eric Dymond

I have been an artist for over 20 years working in a number of media including pottery, painting, photography and electronic art. In all my works I begin by describing events or subjects found in intimate places or personal relationships. As they are serialized, they are transformed and become fictions trying to escape their points of origin.

Whether painted, drawn, gathered, photographed or produced electronically, the original source falls to the background as each series or narrative develops. Once I feel the work itself has gained independence from its source, it is complete.

I am now, more than ever, concerned with the accessibility of art and its dissemination into the wider world. Most of my recent work has been on the Internet, where there is an opportunity to effect change through immediate communication. The problems associated with the creation of objects and the attendant devaluation of those objects through commerce and institutionalization are avoided. Here all the trappings of institutions are dropped, and the maker is freed of structural constraints and critical limitations. The medium changes before critical appraisal is possible. As the rest of society is discovering, the speed at which we are moving into a new age is unprecedented. Art should not be a refuge from this quickening, but should actively involve itself in these changes and hopefully help shape the communities of the future.
The works I have created on the Web often combine human emotions---real, dreamed or imagined. Presenting these kinds of feelings in what can be an anonymous medium attacks that anonymity and makes some uncomfortable. In The Doorway(Fig. 1.) [1] the nature of the Web allowed me to explore my own feelings in ways that other media could not. The language of hypertext and images (both still and motion) can plumb the psyche, often revealing new insights and avenues while we are immersed in the act of programming and development. Thoughts link and connect, we wander and then focus. The Doorway is not a recreation of a place but a presentation of feelings born of reflection and how ambiguous emotions can remain unresolved.

(Fig 1)
The actual, physical doorway is situated just west of Toronto near the town of Bellfontaine. Chiyoko Slavnics [2] and I had left the city one weekend in March. The snow had fallen all day. As we drove towards the Forks of the Credit river she took a less traveled road.

The first link in the Web site takes one to an assemblage of 20 images that form a complete vision of the physical doorway itself. Each cell acts as a hyperlinked doorway to a different section of thoughts and feelings. Moving through the work in the manner of reading text (from left to right) results in the work following a structure loosely based on classical musical composition.

The subsequent documents disassemble the image and then slowly, through minor changes, images and ideas are introduced that recur later in the work. Slavnics's image and my own are presented, repeated and then merged. The silo, a tall dilapidated structure beside the doorway, enters the work and the fear of its collapse initiates a flight by Slavnics and me. At this point the images and text become dissonant, with a sense of loss and abandonment prevailing. The last three documents are sequenced but return eventually to the opening page, where, again and again, the day is replayed.

This is an interactive Web project that requires some time to complete. The word "doorway" refers both to the actual physical doorway seen in the opening web page and to the virtual doorway of hypermedia images and text that allow the viewer to navigate the site. Through the use of repetition and table structure, even subtle changes to the document become significant. In navigating the site, the audience will find that the first page will take a minute or so to load. By following in sequence, from top left to bottom right, the viewer finds the images and subsequent documents come in quickly (a few seconds). The active link and visited links are colored differently so the viewer may choose to follow the site in a random manner.

Tapping into the non-linear nature of the Internet, the layout of the work allows the visitor to go back and forth in the site's history to relive an event or experience it differently.

Unconnected to art's historical distribution systems and yet more widely distributed, Web works cannot be referenced by object-based criticism. What is a Web work? Where does it reside? What form will it take? On the Web the immaterial and indeterminate nature of the presentation create fugitive forms, indefinite with no mass or weight. As the reduction of the object continues, the closeness of the communication increases.

The audience interacts with the work, each person differently, each seeing it as new. With this interaction, the viewer becomes partner to the artist in the creation of the work---the line between author and audience collapses.

"The center of the web is active and passive by turns and in a great variety of ways---hence the sense of disorder that is characteristic of dreams" [3].

References and Notes

1.

The work was created in HTML 3.2. The film used was an inexpensive drugstore brand; the camera, a Nikon FM. The photos were scanned on a Hewlett-Packard Flatbed scanner and reworked and reduced using popular shareware programs. The programming of the work was made with a notepad-style editor. Ownership of the work is public domain.

2.

Chiyoko Slavnics is a Canadian new music composer, ensemble performer and multidisciplinary artist.

3.

Denis Diderot, D'Alembert's Dream (1769).

Figure 1:

Eric Dymond, the central image of The Doorway, Web artwork located at http://web.idirect.com/~artseen/door.htm, 1997.

Eric Dymond, 299 Glenlake Ave., Apt. 301, Toronto, Ontario, M6P 4A6 Canada. E-mail: artseen@direct.com

Web site: http://web.idirect.com/~artseen/door.htm

| Copyright 1998 ISAST |




Words on Works







                            |  order  |  index  |  map  | |  Leonardo On-Line  |