‘to arrive by chance’ (yes, all lower case) is an interactive digital artwork and a piece of digital literature. It uses HTML5 to navigate a world made from watercolour, oil pastel, paint, photography, digital drawing, and moving image. The real and the digital combine to tell four poems – The Fish, The Bird, The Dog, and The Cat. The viewer must click through to delve into each poem, in a choose your own adventure style, where they are offered multiple outcomes depending on where they click. In this way, this piece marries together the worlds of digital technology, interactive narrative, art game, hypertext, poetry, and drawing. This piece is also tablet/touch screen compatible, so that you can use your finger, rather than a mouse, to navigate the world.
These four poems represent both the naivety and dysfunction of human character, asking the viewer to draw simultaneously on different emotions though a combination of text, visual image, and sound. At the same time, they represent the constant struggle between human and animal, and play on the notion of that somewhat awkward borderline between human and wildlife, where sits the ‘domesticated animal’. All nods go to Donna Haraway of course!
‘to arrive by chance’ questions what is vital, and plays with the notion of life and death, and human evolution/devolution, by mixing absurdist, dark, and naive styles of art and animation. Viewers interact with this piece by finding the hidden hyperlinks on each page. Each animal is accompanied by a poem that explores the grey area between life and death, human and animal, and asks us to question what it is that animates life – personally and scientifically. How to we know we are alive? The same signs can’t be attributed to everyone…
to arrive by chance in this version made its American debut in 2014 at the SciArt Centre, East Broadway, New York for their ‘Un-Natural Nature’ virtual exhibition, curated by Julia Buntaine.
See the catalogue here: http://read.uberflip.com/i/
to arrive by chance was also selected for touring in the Queensland Regional Arts Awards touring exhibition. This will tour around Australia between 2015 and 2016. Curated by Dr Lisa Chandler. See some images below of my piece in the IMA, Brisbane as part of this exhibition. See the online gallery.
to arrive by chance, the sound art version, has also been chosen to tour Italy for a year in 2015/2016 as part of the Di-Stanze Community Festival of Sound Arts, in the Web Installation category.
Catalogue page for Un-Natural Nature exhibition
Un-Natural Nature screen print – to arrive by chance
List of accepted artists – stand by for further info!