Could I have imagined in 1994 that the multimedia work I was creating as an undergraduate would evolve to be a key part of my art practice over 30 years later.

 

Author Unknown is an interactive media work. The narrative follows a women's reflection on her life in relation to the technology that surrounds her.

 

Who inspired me

At the time I was very much interested in the work of Sherry Turkle, who would later go on to work extensively with robots in Japan. Her ideas on what she calls women's "non-linear" approach to the technology, the "soft mastery" and "bricolage" appealed to me. Her book Life on the Screen fueled my interest in philosophy, although at the time that I read it I was on a cattle farm on the northern rivers area of News South Wales and it would be almost nine years later that I would find myself walking up a Swiss mountain to have a class with Jean Baudrillard (see European Graduate School). One of my regrets is that I didn't think to follow her up when I was visiting MIT in 2018, as she lived alone near Boston.

 

The were two other women who inspired me in my early work. Linda Dement with her confrontational images of gashes, which lead to a late night nude session of photocopying body parts. And Suzanne Treister with her 1995 work Time travelling with Rosalind Bronsky, which I personally believe to be one of the most brilliant interactive narratives produced.

 

The impact of technology 

Author Unknown is influenced by technology at two key levels:

1. the narrative story which focuses on the impact of technology on the female character's identity 

2. the impact of technology on the creation of the digital work itself e.g. the tools used to author the work
    

The choice of technology used to author the project has always been influenced by what is available at the time.

• In 1994, that was Macromedia Director and Adobe Photoshop 2 and Premier (I think from memory). I found the software easy to use and picked-up the script 'lingo' readily. I generated human forms readily with Poser and tinkered with Bryce (but really didn't have a need for beautiful graphics of landscapes).

• By 2004, Director was no longer being widely used and the software of choice was Flash. So I re-authored the project which meant I needed to learn the scripting language 'ActionScript'.

• By 2014, Flash was losing favour in the industry and once again I considered remaking it but found the choice of authoring tools limited. An option may have been HTML 5. I could have used social media or video. At the time I was teaching in a college a number of the Adobe products like After Effects, Dreamweaver and Audition. But I couldn't reconcile what technology to pick to tell the story and the work stalled but more on that later.

• In 2024, the temptation to deconstruct the work using the technology of generative art has made me dust of the files and starting 'playing' again.

 

I had never set out purposely to integrate into the art process a consideration of the technology itself. However, as many digital artists in the 80s and 90's discovered, works simply stopped existing in a form because the technology needed to interact with the work was obsolete. I think Treister was brilliant to publish a 124 page full colour hardback book to house the CD-ROM, which has survived the inevitable obsolescence of the digital material.

I still have a copy but sadly can't play it. If anyone has an emulator let me know.

 

So as things evolved I realised that each technology does influence or even limit the work, sometimes stylistically and at other times in the difficulty to create the content.

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The story

Author Unknown explores a women's reflection on how technology has influenced her life. The video below provides a walk through the 2014 version of the work, given that it is now impossible to share the work in its original format (even if using an emulator).
You can also access the video from YouTube here.

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The interactive navigation devices

There are three key methods of navigating Author Unknown.

1. Temporal - her life stages from birth to launching her first website

2. Spatial - the metaphor of the rooms of the house she lives in

3. Conceptual - the different technologies that impact on her identify, such as a camera, a blender

 

1. Temporal (linear):

• The story progresses in a sequential timeline of a woman’s life, from birth to the moment she created her first web page—an act of digital self-authorship.

• There’s no explicit navigation element on the screen. Instead, the technology metaphors (camera, blender, button) subtly mirror the life stages.

2. Spatial:

• The blueprint of a house is a key navigation device and metaphor. Each room represents a significant stage in the character’s life.

  • Bedroom 1 (Birth): The character’s early years.

  • Bedroom 2 (Teenage Years): A space where personal identity is forming.

  • Kitchen (Domestic Adulthood): The kitchen is a typical domestic and traditional space for women. But the cyborg (within the character) is unhappy.

  • Study (Discovery of the Internet): This room reflects the character's entry into the digital world "the internet", where she can begin to build her digital identity.

3. Technology Metaphor:

• The navigation bar uses technology symbols that represent each life stage through metaphor:

  • Camera (Baby/Young Child): The camera is  symbolic of documentation and memory—how early moments are captured through the eyes of others—family, friends, and society. This represents the idea that the child’s identity is formed largely through external influences. 

  • Record player (Teenage): Music and media greatly influence her at this stage of life.

  • Blender (Adult Domesticity): The blender symbolizes the multifaceted roles the individual takes on in adulthood and how the technologies associated with domesticity can impact on agency.

  • Button (Discovery of the Internet): The computer ESC button symbolises the transition from external influences to the character’s growing agency and autonomy. This technology metaphor signifies a moment where the individual takes control and makes decisions that shape their adult life in a new, dynamic way.

The evolution from camera to blender to button signifies increasing agency and personal involvement with technology. In earlier stages, the character is largely shaped by external forces (camera = documentation by others). As the character grows and enters adulthood, they blend roles (blender = complex life navigation), and finally, in adulthood, they have the potential to interact with technology on their own terms (button = active discovery and control over their online identity).

 

Exhibition

• In 2007, I presented Author Unknown at "Rooms of Their Own/Des espaces bien à elles - Women and the Knowledge Economy conference".
  
  "In 1929 Virginia Woolf predicted that women in "another century or so," if given the opportunity and rooms of their own, will have "the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think" and see "human beings in relation to reality." Such opportunities are now more tangible for some, more elusive for others. Rooms of Their Own addresses the features of local and global cultures that encourage and impede women's active, creative, and critical participation in the knowledge economy and society. It considers the situation of women within and beyond the academy to heighten awareness, extend knowledge, and form practical recommendations."
   

  • Work: Author Unknown (online multimedia work)

  • Location: Canada

  • Event: Women's Spaces in the Visual and Performative Arts (II) Session Rooms of Their Own/Des espaces bien à elles - Women and the Knowledge Economy conference,

  • By: hosted by Royal Society of Canada - The Academies of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of Canada

  • Link: Link

 

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The tech timeline

 

1994

The use of Macromedia Director and CD-ROM as its medium places it within the early wave of digital storytelling.

Authoring tools:

Macromedia 9, Adobe Photoshop 2

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2004

The human

In 2004, I re-authored Author Unknown, primarily because the technology was changing.  There was no change to the narrative or the assets, it was simply a re-authoring so that the work could continue to be viewed. 
The technology

Director/Shockwave and CDROM technology was being replaced by Flash formats that could be shared on the web and accessed by a much wider audience.

​Authoring tools:

Adobe Flash, Adobe Premier

​Exhibited:

Exhibited in-person in Canada in 2007 and online (see artist bio for details)

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2014

The human

In 2014, I realised that life had mimicked art. I had unknowingly fallen into the same trap of domesticity as the woman in Author Unknown. 

With the birth of my second child—now 20 years after Author Unknown V1—I set an intention to explore how the character would navigate social media, a force that had reshaped the world and the ways people connect (or disconnect).

However, I felt completely overwhelmed, and the work did not progress.

I was grappling with the unsettling realisation about just how much humanity was externalising its self-perception, seeing itself through digital reflections rather than through internal understanding. 

The technology

Flash reached its End of Life on 31 December 2020. I explored HTML5 and decided that its interactivity was significantly reduced compared to Flash. In fact, I feel that no tool has truly replaced the level of rich media and interactivity that Flash had provided.

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2024

The human

A perfect storm—an urge to return to art practice, a desire to resurrect Author Unknown, and a period of deep reflection on how to capture the story of the character in a world that is disaggregated, disconnected, and data rich.

The technology

The character in Author Unknown reflects on her life through the lens of both social media and  AI and therefore a range of technology is used.

​Authoring tools:

There is still no single authoring tool I would recommend. I lament the loss of Flash. For now, Author Unknown exists as an evolving set of disaggregated experimental assets, which may one day be re-authored—just as we, too, may.

Current tools include: AI (Dall_E, Runway), Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR).

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Digital Archiving

Authoring tools:

As a digital artist creating interactive works, it's vital to capture these pieces in a more permanent format. Sadly, I have many works that now exist only as "zombie" files on discs I can no longer access. Fortunately, I have a video recording of Author Unknown V2 (2004). I was able to record the video because I had maintained a laptop with older browser versions, allowing me to continue using the Flash plugin. In the last few years those plugins have stopped working all together.

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