Tennessee Rice Dixon and Jim Gasperini

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SALON: How did "ScruTiny in the Great Round" develop?

Jim Gasperini: Tennessee and I met at a Unitarian church years ago and became friends, and I've been collecting her work since then. I always thought that her technique of layering, and of changing images from one page to the next, was very morph-like already. I thought if I could convince her to start working on a computer, it would be an interesting tool for her, and she would do a lot for the medium itself.

Tennessee Rice Dixon: About two years ago Jim and I started to work on this, and before that I hadn't worked on a computer before. I have always liked animation. I found it really gratifying that a computer was able to create animation so immediately. I've been making books for a long time. And a book is a time-based thing -- it suggests movement and transition. So it was a natural step to go into moving images. And then adding sound was yet another great dimension. I often start with texts when I'm making a picture, so I liked being able to incorporate text -- either spoken or embedded in another layer.

Jim and I wanted to work together on something, and then we decided on using the images from one of my books. The idea wasn't to redo a book in a CD-ROM form. But the subject matter of the book was far from being completed in my mind -- there was a lot to work with. The book and the CD are two different things with different qualities. Some things are lost and others gained. When I look at the book, I'm holding something. When I see the moving images, they're so satisfying, and it kind of goes into more depth, it fleshes out the page. It's a bit more abstract, though, and there's some loss of things like color. But it doesn't seem to matter so much, because the images are quite graphic, and they can withstand being reduced to pretty low resolution.

SALON: A lot of multimedia developers get frustrated with the technical limitations of CD-ROMs.

Gasperini: Think of the way a composer composes for an orchestra. There's a certain range of freedom you have -- but you have to understand the physical limitations, too. We like to think of the user as the last collaborator in an artistic process. They're performing the work, too, in a way. They choose which way to go through it, what to do, how long, how many times to repeat a certain thing.

SALON: How do people react to "ScruTiny"?

Gasperini: It's fascinating for us to watch somebody go through it. Each person has their own style. I watched one guy go back and forth from the sun to the moon to the sun to the moon, entranced. I wanted to put my hand in front of his eyes!

Dixon: Some people don't really get it at first, but then they get caught later. It turns around and affects them in some way they weren't quite sensitive to the first time. In this country, people don't read much poetry, often because they haven't read something that's really grabbed them. But when they do, then they're more open to reading other poetry -- they get that poetry has an effect, and that it's very wonderful. It takes time to become receptive.

Gasperini: Still, from the very beginning we've been getting extraordinarily powerful reactions from people. One woman, she was Italian, she said she hadn't had such a "spiritual frappe" since she was confirmed at age 13 in St. Peter's! Another guy, his wife had been trying to convince him to have a baby for years. He spent some time with "ScruTiny," and now, well, their baby has just been born.

SALON: What do you tell people that "ScruTiny" is "about"?

Dixon: The meaning just grows as time goes on. I like to talk about, not what I was trying to convey, but what the material was conveying as we were putting it together. Collage works that way -- you bring stuff together and then meaning starts to unfold. There is a story-line of cycles of life, and masculine and feminine, and pregnancy and birth. But the images that we've used have come from traditions and histories that are already embedded with meaning, and I'm just passing them on. I'm still learning, when I'm looking at it, what it's conveying.

Gasperini: The end-result is an evocation, that's what I like to say. I've suggested to the publisher that they call it "An Interactive Evocation," but that was just a bit too obscure for them. I can see why!