h y p e r b l o g

Description

We are surrounded by pieces of the past—concrete messages from lives that have gone before us. Yet these artifacts are largely ignored in our world of planned obsolescence and digital communication. Who Is Flora combines unsuspecting messages from a past life, my interpretations of those messages, and a computer interface through which to understand them.

In the summer of 1998 I discovered a number of postcards from the year 1942. They were sent by a twenty-something woman named Flora who traveled the United States alone, sending postcards to her family. The postcards moved me because Flora and I have many things in common: our ages, upbringing, and struggles, and our travels. This piece focuses on studying the cards, the messages they shared, and my own impressions gathered from them. I was able to categorize the cards into four dominant themes: age, sense of place, time, and communication (primarily with family), and from those themes I created a storyline. The storyline here deals with the marriage of a friend and the tension between independence and love.

Who Is Flora was originally completed with two main storylines, as an interactive CD-ROM using Macromedia Director, but was later modified and re-released using Flash.

Rhizome Terms: animation, Flash, gender, Historical, identity, Internet, memory, Narrative

Artist Terms: 1942, Americana, Arkansas, Copper Harbor, Dayton, Flora, IL, interactive story, Little Rock, Michigan, mid-century, MidWest, New Jersey, nostalgia, Ohio, past, Peoria, postcard, progressive narrative, Seaside Heights, self-discovery, travel, West Texas