Angels
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Angels is a work-in-progress that focuses on the plight of an asylum-seeker, trying to survive in contemporary Britain.
Angels is the creative piece that I have developed as part of my research. The aim of this work-in-progress is to provide to the reader-participant with a direct experience of the aesthetics I have described in my theoretical work.
This work asks the reader to ‘play’ the role
of a ‘confessor’ or ‘guardian angel’ to the main protagonist,
Nolita, an asylum-seeker who is struggling to come terms with her past and present.
The text, and the progression of narratives revealed by the text, will mutate
as a result of the reader-participant’s actions. This will be achieved,
primarily, by the use of a series of disguised input forms, as well as by buttons,
and other interface objects placed in the text. However, in this work even the
reader’s delays, their avoidance of certain sections of the text and their
lack of answers to certain key questions will shape their reading as well. All
through this process the main protagonist will remind the reader-participant
of her dependence on their judgments. In doing so, this character will, I hope,
fulfil my artistic ambition for this piece, which is to make the reader-participant
intellectually and emotionally aware of their complicity in the refugee’s
plight.
The work will take the form of a networked computer-mediated text, featuring
an animated flash interface and actionscripts, connected to a series of PHP
scripts, which in turn will connect to a SQL database. This configuration will
allow the work to present the participative aesthetic to a wide audience via
the internet. For example, the animated interface will facilitate the production
of drag-able items, game-like substructures, temporally-structured passages
as well as tick boxes, forms and other standard data input interface. The PHP
and the database will be used to make the work flexible and capable of changing
its structure and contents in real-time.
You read a one-page production treatment of this project written in the pre-production phase. You can also follow a number of links on the Angel-links page to a number of organizations working in the area of refugees and forced migration.
Last Updated : 2nd June 2004 by Gavin Stewart