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As my great-grandfather told stories, she wove in and out of the past
and present, the old country and America, English and Yiddish, business
and family, changing voice from first person to direct address to third
person. Each detail was part of the narrative continuum and was
potentially linked to several other stories or digressions, some of them
new, some of which I had heard before. However, both content and meaning
were affected by the context: the presence of other visitors, whether we
were baking together or looking at photos in her scrapbook, or if I
interrupted the flow of the story to ask for more details. It was as
if she had a chronological, topical and associative matrix that enabled
her to generate stories in which content, structure and context were
interdependent.
I have used my great-grandmother's storytelling style as a model to create an interactive multimedia installation that reveals how our family history has been constructed and passed down matrilinearly. A pictorial timeline of family photographs that date from 1890 to the present enables viewers to move through time on a Macintosh screen. By clicking on one of the headshots, viewers hear stories from my great- grandmother, mu mother and me that weave in and out of the past and present, the old country and America, English and Yiddish, business and family. We Make Memories is composed of a 9-megabyte Hypercard stack and a 30-min video disc. It requires a Macintosh II with at least 2 megabytes of random access memory (RAM) and a laserdisc player with a serial port, ideally a Pioneer 4200, and a video monitor. We Make Memories is available as an environmental installation that recreates my great- grandmother's study, with a wooden desk covered with informal family snapshots tucked under a piece of plexiglass and formal family portraits hanging on the walls. The computer and video monitor as well as the mouse sit side-by-side atop the desk, and the rest of the video and computer equipment is hidden from view.
Originally published in the Words on Works section of Leonardo 24:1, 1991, p.88 We Make Memories was exhibited in 1989 in the exhibition Revealing Conversations: Art and Technology in the Bay Area, at the Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA. An Interview with Abbe Don is available in "Conversations with Interactive Artists" - http://www.well.com/~couey/interactive/guests.html produced by Anna Couey and Judy Malloy on the Interactive Art Conference on Arts Wire in 1995. |