Long weekend/Langweekend 2005
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Long Weekend/ Langweekend
Online work
Watch here
Curated by Per Platou/PNEK
Kindly supported by BEK, PNEK, nrk ulyd.
2005
Online work
Watch here
Curated by Per Platou/PNEK
Kindly supported by BEK, PNEK, nrk ulyd.
2005
Langweekend is an old work, and featured here because I came across a recent article (Dichtung Digital, 2012, se below) which analyzes it, and which made me think of what this work actually meant for me. Visuality online has changed quite a bit since 2005, and this wasn´t very typical then either, so I will try to recall my motivation.
Langweekend was my first attempt to create an online story, based on the principles from my installations. I wasn´t especially interested in interaction on a click-level (click here, go there), but more on a story level, how the brain connects the dots.
Content of installations, and later Langweekend:
The more mundane and undramatic something was, the more I tried to remember it, photograph it, collect it, to record it, to write it down. In my world most things are communicated that way, through very ordinary expressions - even feelings of hopelessness and isolation are expressed that way, perhaps even more so. The drama happens in the juxtapostitions: the contrast between the impressions, their discrepancy or their cooperation. Sound, visuality, texture, taste, thoughts, dialogues. All these little pieces, a bit like drawing by numbers: they create forms of their own.
Form:
It was called fragmentation then, but my motivation was opposite, I didn´t do it to fragment the world, but to try bring it together from the pieces I had available, and that were true to me. Now, this is pretty obvious, but it wasn´t when I started working on the installations in 1997: I thought this method had something to do with the internet, and how we moved about there, trying to create coherent experiences from partly unrelated pieces of information. And sometimes succeeding.
The ordinary:
I thought - and still think and try to make happen: that a feeling or a situation can be build up just because someone choose to remember the unimaginative moments, the moments which makes up 80-90% of our lives, but hardly exist (or existed) in recorded history, because they are just normal, dull, you can almost not distinguish them from the time passing or in your everyday movements.
I am sure I didn´t manage to do all this in Langweekend, but that´s where this work coming from. Since then I have done several similar art works, every time trying to develop better methods for telling the story with as many layers as I can, and with one eye for the mundane detail which for me, makes the rest come to life.
Dichtung Digital - journal für digitale ästhetik 2012
A Short History of Electronic Literature and Communities in the Nordic Countries by Hans Kristian Rustad
Another example from the Nordic multimodal tradition is Langweekend ('Long Weekend') by Beathe C. Rønning, a bilingual work in Norwegian and English. The work was published in 2006 as a part of the NRK/PNEK project Digitale fortellinger. It represents a fragmented memory of a bank holiday weekend spent in a city. And the work displays typical incidents from places associated with spending a weekend in a city, such as inside the plane, inside a taxi, at cafés, and at the hotel.
Again, there is a combination of photos, written language, music, speech, and other sound elements. These different semiotic resources work together in what Roland Barthes would call “relay”. Barthes writes that in this kind of relationship "text (most often a snatch of dialogue) and image stand in a complementary relationship".
In Langweekend ('Long Weekend') the different semiotic resources tell us different stories, or give us different information about the place and the surroundings. The picture and the sounds combined generate the feeling of closeness to what is represented, and to create a kind of immediacy.
An interesting thing about this work is that in contrast to many other electronic works, the feeling of immediacy is carried mostly by the sounds. When we see the picture from the plane it is the sound of the captain speaking that catches our attention the most. And in the café, the noise from the café guests, sounds of footsteps etc. make the simulation of a café somewhat stronger. It is (almost) as if we’re inside an airplane or at a café.
But as we get the feeling of being inside an airplane or at a café, words and sentences start to appear on the screen, subverting the sense of immediacy. We are somewhat transported from immediacy and transparency to hypermediacy and reflectivity. The sentences do not create a coherent text, but are for instance in the café fragments from different conversations taking place at other tables. And these fragments underline how the work is caused by small pieces of memory from different places, distributed through different media, and represented in different modes.
Hans Kristian Rustad
Full article can be found here
Another example from the Nordic multimodal tradition is Langweekend ('Long Weekend') by Beathe C. Rønning, a bilingual work in Norwegian and English. The work was published in 2006 as a part of the NRK/PNEK project Digitale fortellinger. It represents a fragmented memory of a bank holiday weekend spent in a city. And the work displays typical incidents from places associated with spending a weekend in a city, such as inside the plane, inside a taxi, at cafés, and at the hotel.
Again, there is a combination of photos, written language, music, speech, and other sound elements. These different semiotic resources work together in what Roland Barthes would call “relay”. Barthes writes that in this kind of relationship "text (most often a snatch of dialogue) and image stand in a complementary relationship".
In Langweekend ('Long Weekend') the different semiotic resources tell us different stories, or give us different information about the place and the surroundings. The picture and the sounds combined generate the feeling of closeness to what is represented, and to create a kind of immediacy.
An interesting thing about this work is that in contrast to many other electronic works, the feeling of immediacy is carried mostly by the sounds. When we see the picture from the plane it is the sound of the captain speaking that catches our attention the most. And in the café, the noise from the café guests, sounds of footsteps etc. make the simulation of a café somewhat stronger. It is (almost) as if we’re inside an airplane or at a café.
But as we get the feeling of being inside an airplane or at a café, words and sentences start to appear on the screen, subverting the sense of immediacy. We are somewhat transported from immediacy and transparency to hypermediacy and reflectivity. The sentences do not create a coherent text, but are for instance in the café fragments from different conversations taking place at other tables. And these fragments underline how the work is caused by small pieces of memory from different places, distributed through different media, and represented in different modes.
Hans Kristian Rustad
Full article can be found here
