Suits: A Narrative of About Twenty-Seven Hours, More or Less

Submitted by Joël Gauthier on Wed, 12/19/2012 - 10:57

Author(s):

Suits est une oeuvre hypermédiatique de Jennifer L. Smith qui explore les thèmes de la mort et du deuil. Au centre de l'écran, on voit l'image d'un veston d'habit assorti à une chemise et à une cravate. En cliquant sur le veston, l'internaute déclenche la lecture d'un court extrait audio accompagné d'un fragment de texte. Le texte apparaît en double: fixe, en bleu, au-dessus du veston; et mobile, en gris, en surimpression. Dans les extraits audio, on entend une voix faire la narration d'extraits du récit de Suits. À chaque fois que l'internaute clique sur le veston, un nouvel extrait audio accompagné de texte est appelé au hasard.

Suits raconte la visite d'une jeune femme dans un salon funéraire. Venant de perdre son père, elle doit apporter les vêtements dans lequel il sera mis en terre. Une version linéaire du texte est accessible à partir de la section «about» de l'oeuvre.

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The kind man wrinkles his brow as I point at my dad, in my picture, in this funeral home meant for strangers. The kind man is not quite sure of my point. Finally, I ask, mumbling, quickly, if that is the same man they have in the back - the same man who is dead back there. He sighs. He nods. He removes his hand from my shoulder and steps further back into the hallway, where it is darker and I can no longer see his face.

Notes

Methods: This piece tells the story of a character's response to her father's death. In creating this piece, I worked in Flash ActionScript 3.0 to code a random trigger function, so that when you click on the suit icon a random sound file plays and an associated text appears on the screen. Theory: The randomness of the click is not accidental; in generating this piece I worked to explore the nature of narrative and the development of a coherent story. The majority of stories that we hear, read, or tell are linear in pattern or chronologically organized (A leads to B, B leads to C, C leads to D, End of Story). Yet our self-narratives, as we experience them and as we remember them, are rarely so neatly packaged. Frequently, we come to know to the stories of self only through loosely-connected, non-temporally located vignettes. When we think of who we are, we do not first think of the first day that we were born, and work our way up from there. Instead we construct our sense of self, like a patchwork, in bits and pieces that fragment our autobiography. Yet when we present this personal narrative to others, we clean it, presenting an amalgam of what actually happened and what we think we remember happening. As history has shown time and again, frequently these remembrances are, objectively speaking, faulty in some way or another. This piece is a reaction to that “faultiness,” suggesting instead that in terms of the truth of any event and its impact on an individual person, these linked, yet scattered remembrances may be significantly more factual. Frequently this piece pulls up a single scene more than once, occasionally returning to it several times. I made the decision to allow repetition within the piece consciously, again in deference to the rhizomatic, nodal structure of the mind and memory and the process of narrative creation. This piece works in conversation with other new media art, such as Deena Larsen’s “Carving in Possiblities,” which reveals snippets of text only as the user mousse over parts of an image to reveal the sculpture of David underneath. Another piece that I drew inspiration from while working on this narrative was Thom Swiss, Motomichi Nakamura, and Robot Friend’s 2004 “Fresh Icons,” in which the user interactions causes doors to open and close and reveal figures in silhouette having short bursts of conversation with each other. Both of these works integrate user participation with the process of uncovering, revealing their full text only as the user makes use of the apparatus before him or her. The narrative, then, for these texts and my own, is stunted, fragmented, changing and reliant upon someone else to be made whole, to become understandable in any true sense.

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Suits: A Narrative of About Twenty-Seven Hours, More or Less

Smith, Jennifer L.