DISSOLVING

Dissolving

Interactive CD-ROM Installation

Dissolving is an interactive work in CD-ROM, featuring poetry, sound, image map and Quick-Time movies. The central image, a B&W photograph of a seated figure engulfed in a cloud, forms a large image map which contain all the elements of the work. Entering inside the image, the viewer navigates through this ‘cloud body-map’ to discover the various interactive elements of the piece.

The dominant visual motif and primary source for the work, are the ruined photographic remains from Hurricane Opal's destruction of the Sturgeon family's entire photographic history. Also featured are videos shot among the black bog pools and desolate moors of north Germany.

The poetic texts question the ineffable structure of storage and retrieval in memory. The moor’s metaphorical qualities associate with a source of energy (fuel) and as a reservoir of memory. Their chemical composition preserves certain materials very well, while committing others to complete decay.

Cumulatively, the piece addresses family history, issues of parenting, fate and of the hidden meanings discovered in seeming chance events and catastrophe. There is cognition of similarities and affinity with others, with an acknowledgment of the power of heritage - cultural, social, familial, and genetic.

D i s s o l v i n g was created as an interactive CD-ROM, both or multi-media installation and a single viewer computer option. It was first exhibited as an installation at the Pittsburgh Biennial 2000, Pittsburgh, PA.

Radical Mysticality: The Work of John Sturgeon

Sturgeon’s most recent piece, Dissolving (2000), is his first foray into CD-ROMs. Here Sturgeon, as poetic archaeologist, excavates the rubble that was once his parent’s home, recently destroyed in a hurricane. Sturgeon documents the ruin while searching for the remains of the family archive. He asks what the nature of the archive is, particularly the personal archive. Must memory manifest in concrete form to be a legitimate record of reality? Due to their concrete longevity, are these manifestations ultimately more real and truer to the past than the once-lived experience of the events that archive represents? For Sturgeon, there is both desperation and relief that the archive is gone. On the one hand, it is as if shared family history has vanished, and without these artifacts generational alienation will increase, thus making memory all the more suspect, given its tendencies to reconfigure the past for its own comfort. On the other hand, the family is free of the burden of the archive; their subjectivities can now flow free of the inertia of history. Once again, Sturgeon is low-key but stages a compelling work with an interface that doesn’t distract from the concept. Happily, and like in all his work, technology does not take center stage. It remains a tool best left in the background.

Sturgeon’s work offers so much in that he consistently tries to bring us to that elsewhere of the transcendentalists, the mystics, and the philosophers of the nonrational, but does so without the fatalistic commitment or the rabid faith of the true believer. He shows that poetry is still tactically viable in an age of mechanical reproduction and appropriation and allows his viewers to wander in realms beyond the immediacy of political economy. In spite of the claims that history has a come to an end with the conclusion of the great east/west struggle, Sturgeon still argues that this point in time is just one more minor transition, as the world cycles ever onward, leaving us to stand there in wonder as we try to understand the impossible. But most significantly for you the reader, Sturgeon reminds us never to trust an archive—an important thought when one is viewing a retrospective.

Steven Kurtz, 9/2000

Dissolving - Interactive Image Map

video simulation: https://vimeo.com/46111546

Dissolving

Interactive CD-ROM Installation

Dissolving was installed as an interactive CD-ROM in conjunction with a data projector as a multi-media installation at the Pittsburgh Biennial 2000, Pittsburgh, PA.

Dissolving – is composed of damaged photographs from World War II era and the 1950s; spoken poetic text: "Skin"; sound compositions; performance sequences; and documentary video - expose the aftermath of Hurricane Opal on the Gulf Coast – September 1995.

Interactive strategies weave stories of loss and meaning through shared and personal history.

…a riddle of more than just here and there – but older dimensions that have their own theater more true and guided by an immense obscurity of will.

Reviews:

John Sturgeon’s interactive electronic media entices viewers into his drift of slow-motion memory. Quick-Time movies with poetic soundtracks transform his experiential postcards from lonely places into metaphors about personal history. A figure seated within a cloud becomes the point of entry for an image map that opens into the complex geography of Sturgeon’s mind.

Review: Alice Walker, “In the Mix” arts + entertainment,

Pittsburgh City Paper, September 6, 2000

Sturgeon draws on the personal and makes it universal in the mesmerizing interactive CD-ROM work, “Dissolving” which blends memory and disaster.

Review: Mary Thomas, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 14, 2000

John Sturgeon’s interactive CD-ROM “Dissolving”, explores questions of identity against the backdrop of a continuously shifting landscape. The surface of the water is compared to the surface of the skin. Things are hidden beneath these surfaces: stories, people, memories. Navigating through Sturgeon’s work, old photographs and home movies unexpectedly reveal themselves, immediately evoking a sense of nostalgia.

Review: Simone Jones, Art Papers Magazine, Vol. 25, May/June 2000

Observations:

“I loved the content, and am so intrigued with this form--there is

something about the way you allowed/enabled me to get deeper and deeper

into the piece as I learned how to maneuver through it that is very

different from other CD-ROM pieces I've experienced. And the flow of the

sound was really striking, different layers of recording, different

voices, natural sounds mixed with poetry. And I was very aware, by the

end of the hour, that I was "making" the piece--I ended it as I wanted

to--and to me this is what real interactivity is about--so far beyond

the click of the mouse that other artists have focused on as "the" thing

that makes a piece interactive.”

Linda Dusman, musician and sound artist - 2000

“I’m not sure if I’ve found all the doorways nestled in that swirl or not. A condition of not-knowing that does motivate return trips to find out – an interesting feature of its “interactivity.” A condition of wanting to find out what I still don’t know - that movies, even those with deliberate cliff-hanger endings can’t quite generate in an equivalent way.

The fact that you can and inevitably will tend to move through the piece following differing sequences of doorways on different days gives the piece a kind of implied infinity (of both space and meanings). The components can be stitched together in an endless variety of possible combinations and given that sometimes text voices can be made to overlap compounds this sense of “boundlessness.”

I think it’s very effective to work across a range of “voices” from factually based to poetic. The hurricane, the marks it leaves, the people pictured, the tortured rubble all have a concreteness that can’t be totally transcended or transformed. So, you’re drawing meanings, poetical and metaphorical and also practical through voice-over and image combinations and sequencing possibilities is a process that can operate with enormous freedom. The underlying (generative) realities provide a center of gravity that keeps it honest and grounded.

The act-of-God kind of humbling that that hurricane inflicted on real lives and on real things almost demands that it be given meanings. And who better to give those meanings than its victims (or their kin)?”

Fred Worden, filmmaker – 2006

SKIN

slip up under this shadow's embrace

lumbering along, ask not whose -

pursued by secrets murmured up

from hidden things, long thought sunk into the ooze

history has left just a crease,

where the body was

a hollow wound folded into a shape

where the dark chapter worked its will

above, all is reflected clearly

in the angle of incidence

well dried from childhood things

after disappearing below the water's skin

sunken, dropped into the body

hidden there, all is not as it might suppose-

it's more stubborn, like the story of family stone itself-

at home in layers... folded one upon the other, waiting.

snuggled under the guardian's wrap

an inexplicable knowledge of vulnerability-

its own human and terrible unhumanness

within these thoughtless wrappings,

small smotherings, little drownings,

tucked between the strata

of ligaments and muscle (close to bone)

waiting for their reason to be ungnarled

before thoughts-

deeper than the shadows that bore them...

little crooked hands clutch up

from the darkness

and steal the light force

back through the water's womb

this simple thing of skin-

of the hide to surface separating water from reflection

is- a riddle of more than just here and there -

but, older dimensions that have their own theater

more true and guided by an immense obscurity of will

John Sturgeon,

primary text from Dissolving, CD-ROM @2000

Hurricane Opal

the hurricane had been pressing into the news for days

stalled out in the Gulf

pre-dawn, the phone call

evacuation - immediate,

the chest of photographs remains

consigned to the basement

as under things

there again, the same sharp thumb

as the great descender approaches land-fall,

so this wash dissolves,

a saline ebb to ritual form

drained,

the family sifts its gather

an atlas of photographs,

the way

now, so opaque

John Sturgeon,

a text from Dissolving, CD-ROM @2000

Freud Faints

There is that well-known story from Jung's autobiography about the time when he met Freud in Bremen, Germany. There was a lively discussion between them prompted by Jung's fascination with the recent discovery of the Bogmen in the moors near Bremen.

With Jung's enthusiasm and animated interest at the discovery - Freud became increasingly uncomfortable. Finally, he accused Jung, who it was widely assumed would be Freud's successor, of wishing his death with this "obsession" over the Bogmen. Freud felt it must be some secret jealousy held by the "son toward the father."

According to Jung, by the end of this rather difficult discussion Freud reached such a highly agitated state - that Freud fainted.

John Sturgeon,

primary text from Dissolving, CD-ROM @2000

Moor Leichen

In German these Bogmen are known as - moor leichen. That is - corpses found preserved by the unique, highly acidic environment of the moors, which once formed a large part of the environment across northern Europe. Bodies buried in such a way - oddly, are selectively preserved with certain body parts, like skin, hair or fingernails completely intact, while almost totally decaying others - such as the bones. It's as if the moor was a large storage vat of selective memory - keeping some things close to consciousness, while dissolving the rest - lost to the void.

John Sturgeon,

a text from Dissolving, CD-ROM @2000

Dissolving

Interactive CD-ROM, Pittsburgh Biennial 2000

Dissolving features poetry, sounds, videos and photographs. The central image, a B&W photograph of a seated figure engulfed in a cloud, forms a large image-map which contains all the elements of the work.

Clicking the mouse’s “hurricane cursor” on this initial primary image-map, the viewer is zoomed inside the image map. Imbedded in this map are 17 active photo-icon windows, which contain 22 Quick-Time Movies and numerous photographic images.

Navigating the large image map is achieved by using the cursor to move the edges of the active central square. Finding (scrolling over) an active “hot” icon, one clicks to open windows and clicks again to play movies, with poetic text.

By clicking the Quick-Time window, one returns to navigating the main image. After approximately two minutes of inactivity – Dissolving resets to its initial image outside the image map.

by John Sturgeon

Credits:

CD-ROM concept, video production and editing:

John Sturgeon

Director lingo coding:

Diego Jose Diaz-Garcia

Adam Gulkis

Quick Time movies and voice overs featuring:

Donald Sturgeon

Jane Sturgeon

Kate Sturgeon & friends

Boudewijn Payens

Jörg Haberland

8mm film - Quick Time movies:

Sturgeon family collection

poetry, text and voice over:

John Sturgeon

Hurricane Opal damaged photographs:

Sturgeon and Funkhouser families

additional source material - altered Quick Time movies:

National Hurricane Center Archives

National Climatic Data Center

Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, Austria

video recorded:

Fort Morgan, Alabama

Gulf Shores, Alabama

Camarillo, California

Witte Moor - northern Germany