From Kate Pullinger
Christine Wilks comes to new media with a background in film; her work is notable for its clarity and precision, and its strongly controlled narrative voice. ‘Fitting the Pattern’ is a piece of digital memoir unlike anything else I’ve seen, beautifully designed and written, the technical specifications inseparable from the content. I’ve seen Christine perform this piece in front of an audience on two occasions and it works as well live as it does online, with its interwoven layers of memory and history, humour and poignancy. Christine developed this piece for one of the modules she did on the MA in Creative Writing and New Media and now that she is a graduate I await her new creative pieces with great anticipation.
Project
Fitting the Pattern
or being a dressmaker’s daughter: a memoir in pieces
http://www.crissxross.net/elit/fitting_the_pattern.html
Cutting through memories, pinning down facts, stitching fabrications, unpicking the past - an interactive, animated memoir, created in Flash, exploring aspects of my relationship with my dressmaking mother.
Life’s mysteries are rarely uncovered by a logical, linear process of deduction. You arrive at answers, ideas, suspicions, intuitions…haphazardly in fragments. Over time you build the picture, piece by piece, shuffling and rearranging, until you start to see a pattern emerging. The structure of ‘Fitting the Pattern’ attempts to replicate this experience, hence it is a memoir in pieces that the reader can explore.
The visual design is based on the aesthetics of online open source sewing patterns. There are certain parallels between my mother’s craft process and my own in new media. These similarities, as well as our differences,are embedded in the digital media and text, literally drawn out through animation and dramatised through interactivity. Custom cursors designed as digital dressmaking tools fuse the interactive process into the narrative world, so the reader becomes actively involved in constructing and/orunpicking the narrative. The piece ends with a randomly generated sequence that functions as a metaphor for the intimate perplexity of the mother-daughter relationship.
I’m currently working on a rich media fiction in Flash called Underbelly. Once again the focus is on a woman and her handcrafting process, but thistime it’s an artist carving stone and the tone is both literally and metaphorically much darker. It depicts an underworld of the woman’srepressed fears and desires about her sexuality, potential maternity and worldly ambitions mashed up with the disregarded histories of 19th Century women who once worked underground mining coal on the site where the sculptor carves.
or being a dressmaker’s daughter: a memoir in pieces
http://www.crissxross.net/elit/fitting_the_pattern.html
Cutting through memories, pinning down facts, stitching fabrications, unpicking the past - an interactive, animated memoir, created in Flash, exploring aspects of my relationship with my dressmaking mother.
Life’s mysteries are rarely uncovered by a logical, linear process of deduction. You arrive at answers, ideas, suspicions, intuitions…haphazardly in fragments. Over time you build the picture, piece by piece, shuffling and rearranging, until you start to see a pattern emerging. The structure of ‘Fitting the Pattern’ attempts to replicate this experience, hence it is a memoir in pieces that the reader can explore.
The visual design is based on the aesthetics of online open source sewing patterns. There are certain parallels between my mother’s craft process and my own in new media. These similarities, as well as our differences,are embedded in the digital media and text, literally drawn out through animation and dramatised through interactivity. Custom cursors designed as digital dressmaking tools fuse the interactive process into the narrative world, so the reader becomes actively involved in constructing and/orunpicking the narrative. The piece ends with a randomly generated sequence that functions as a metaphor for the intimate perplexity of the mother-daughter relationship.
I’m currently working on a rich media fiction in Flash called Underbelly. Once again the focus is on a woman and her handcrafting process, but thistime it’s an artist carving stone and the tone is both literally and metaphorically much darker. It depicts an underworld of the woman’srepressed fears and desires about her sexuality, potential maternity and worldly ambitions mashed up with the disregarded histories of 19th Century women who once worked underground mining coal on the site where the sculptor carves.
Bio
British writer and artist Christine Wilks (aka crissxross) has been creating rich media works for the web since 2004. She is a regular contributor to remixworx.net, a collaborative digital remixing community. She has presented her personal works of e-literature and collaborative projects at festivals, conferences and live events in the UK and abroad,including Electronic Literature in Europe 2008 (Norway) and Interactive Futures 2007 (Canada). In 2008 she graduated with distinction from the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University. Before becoming engrossed in the web, she made short films, videos, animations, installations and wrote fiction and screenplays.
http://www.crissxross.net/
http://www.crissxross.net/