SURREAL JOURNEY
When two programs share the same place in a computer's memory, it's bad news -- the digital equivalent of a nervous breakdown. But when two ideas share the same place in a human memory, we feel a rush of inspiration -- we've made a psychological connection, or found a pattern.
Computers interpret ambiguity as error, whereas people interpret it as epiphany. The gray areas that make systems crash make us dream.
Ambiguity is the natural mode of "ScruTiny in the Great Round" -- a collage of found images and sounds, texts and textures, musings, music and morphing animations. "ScruTiny" is one vast gray area: there are no buttons or windows here, and precious few straight lines. The impulse behind the work is less informational than contemplative. "ScruTiny's" creators abandon the norms of digital design, in which all states are clearly defined, for a more fluid realm where all states are transitional.
In the CD's opening screen, a trout and an eagle emerge from the dark boughs of opposing trees and exchange places in a shadowy, stately processional. As you wander deeper into "ScruTiny's" forest, crickets chirp, water rushes and clocks tick in the background. The cursor mutates from sun to moon to fish to coiled, double-helix-like rope.
Recumbent nudes fade in and out of vision. Roses grow to fill the screen. Horses gallop by the seaside. A spiral staircase winds into darkness. A baby floats in a starry void, morphing first into a kind of wind-up-toy shell and then melting into a ring-shaped version of itself. Recitals of texts from the Song of Songs, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bhagavad-Gita and William Blake fade in and out. There is no single path through the work, but there's a loosely circular design, packed with enough variation and depth to make multiple journeys appealing.
Unlike many multimedia-art abstractions, "ScruTiny in the Great Round" is most definitely about something: the cycle of death and rebirth as animated by male and female principles, represented on the CD by alternate "sun" and "moon" versions of each iconic tableau. (Jungians will be very much at home here.) If the plethora of eggs and wombs and fruit doesn't make the focus clear enough for the literal-minded, the names of the screens that you find on the CD's index page -- like "conception," "pregnancy," "nesting" and "progeny" -- leave no room for doubt.
Evocations of the eternal masculine and feminine can easily degenerate into New Age-style vapidity or unwitting gender stereotyping. (Men fight; women nurture.) What saves "ScruTiny" creators Tennessee Rice Dixon and Jim Gasperini is their own artistry and taste.
Dixon first conceived of "ScruTiny" as an expensive, limited-edition foldout book of collages; multimedia designer Gasperini collaborated with her in transforming "ScruTiny" from book to CD-ROM. But there's no feeling here of a work crudely "ported" from one medium to another. Instead, "ScruTiny's" origins on physical paper lend the CD's images and textures a hand-crafted quality more subtle and complex than anything an artist could generate with Photoshop filters.
If it works on paper, why, then, put it on disk? First of all, a $35 CD-ROM can reach a much wider audience than a $1700 handmade book. More important, the mysterious soundtrack (by composer Charlie Morrow) and the subtly transmuting animations turn the static tableaux of Dixon's collages into an enveloping, dynamic world with its own sense of time and drama.
In the CD-ROM medium, excess is the norm; Dixon and Gasperini exercise restraint instead. "ScruTiny's" color scheme is limited to dark tans, blacks and highlights of red, and the morph effects summoned with a mouse-click tend to be slow, delicate processes limited to small corners of the screen -- they invite you to find them, instead of shouting, "Over here!"
"ScruTiny's" expressive palette is broader than we're used to finding in CD-ROM-based art -- suggesting that the limitations of so many CDs are less those of the medium itself, as people often conclude, than those of the artists working in it. What today's multimedia demands is creators who can imagine new uses for the computer as an artistic platform -- uses for which it was never originally designed.
Dixon and Gasperini aren't afraid of being blurry and nebulous along the way to being absorbing and evocative. Along with kindred artists like Laurie Anderson -- whose "Puppet Motel" shares some of "ScruTiny's" atmospheres, if not its concerns -- they are making multimedia safe for ambiguity.
Next page: An interview with ScruTiny's creators
