The Art of Navigation
Lionel Dersot
The progressive removal of the gigantic collection of the Paris National Library to a new and larger set of buildings closer to the Seine River has left the original 17th-century depository palace with a number of temporarily empty rooms. It was in one of these naked spaces, stripped of books, that a digital installation -- conceived of as a loving homage to the book -- was on display for 20 days during March and April 1999. A Shadow in Your Window is the name of both the installation and the CD-ROM version of the software at the Spartan core of the exhibit's single computer, giant screen and printer.
In creating this exhibit, thirty-five-year-old French sculptor and plastics artist Jean-Michel Othoniel spent five years weaving together a navigable web of 1,300 photographs and 109 video clips and texts produced by him over the past decade. These artifacts serve as an intimate and mostly visual diary of Othoniel's own travels and creative life.
A Shadow in Your Window is organized into 26 stories, or paths, that correspond to each letter of the alphabet. No rules or explicit purpose are intended, and the user/reader is free to jump "intuitively" from one story string to another. Behind the apparently unsophisticated scenes, a movement-monitoring programming scheme tracks the user's style of navigation. Stripped of any background music or sound effects, A Shadow in Your Window leaves the user totally alone, feeling perhaps like a visitor to a desolate Zen rock garden. He or she may sense that in the nakedness of the exhibit, a God-like machine "intelligence" is subtly coordinating the flow of screens as it implicitly suggests specific paths between stories matching the user's own navigation patterns.
"Intuitive navigation" has become such a worn out expression in describing artists' interactive digital works, especially on CD-ROM, that one wishes the artist himself would have come up with a different term to explain his own work. But navigation is not the ultimate purpose of A Shadow in Your Window. Although there is no limit to exploration, the user may decide to leave whenever it pleases her or him. At this point, a screen appears offering to print out a double copy of an in-quarto booklet featuring images exemplifying the unique path followed by the user. One copy is for him or her, whereas the other is to be deposited at the library itself. This paper output of one's experience of A Shadow in Your Window is a unique version of what is called an "artist book," a publication legally qualified for submission to the French National Library. Jean-Michel Othoniel has produced several artist books of his own work, designed not only as mere catalogs but as works of art as well.
A signed, limited edition of 500 copies of the CD-ROM version of A Shadow in Your Window was released at the time of the exhibition. In the less grandiose setting of one's own home, the happy owner of this unique software can taste to some extent an experience similar to that of the original installation. On the computer desktop, A Shadow in Your Window suffers a bit from the lack of a giant screen and the presence of other voyeuristic visitors inquisitively watching one's wayward navigation. And one's CD-ROM drive's constant humming may be an unwelcome distraction, but the printing function is fully available, including the cunning suggestion to submit a copy to one's own national library!
A Shadow in Your Window installation has been acquired by a French bank as part of its cultural patronage activities. It is scheduled for display in Bilbao, Spain, in December 1999, and in New York in 2000. The trilingual (French, English, Spanish) CD-ROM is available directly from the artist. A Website provides detailed information and a glimpse at the work. |