JCJ-Junkman
1995

cd-rom project for artintact3, published by the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, 1996

The central figure on the screen is an image of the ventriloquist puppet-head I used in an earlier work, Jimmy Charlie Jimmy (1992), a worn-out relic with a glazed eye and peeling skin. The initial screen reveals this head floating against black, surrounded by a whirling storm of ever-changing, appearing and disappearing "buttons" of many varieties. If one manages to "click" on one of the buttons, a piece of concrete sound is heard, and the puppet-head begins to speak, moving his mouth and repeating phrases. Sometimes a click will silence him. There is no beginning and no end, no other levels, no score. It is "interactivity" reduced to a zero-degree, as thousands of narrative fragments displace each other, fueled by a raw desire to get something.

All of the "buttons" and sounds in the work were made from public domain archive files found on the Internet - debris, more or less. The choices presented are made significant only by one’s ability, or inability, to catch them. The emotion produced is that any choice will do, and so the work becomes a very peculiar game. Through this coming together of clicking mania and network debris, one finds his speech patterns evoking something like a personality, but since there is no fixed voice, it is something of a meta-personality, a cutup. Its program is driven by approximations of randomness and data cast adrift by others.
-kf 1995

online version

exhibition history:
Postmasters Gallery, New York, "Can You Digit?", 1996
Centro de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 1996
Goethe Institute, London, 1996
"Artifices 4"; Saint-Denis, 1996
ZKM-Schaufenster, Karlsruhe, 1996
Recontres Arts Electroniques, Rennes; 1998
Goethe Institute Singapore; 1999
Dark Room, Museo Universitario Contempránero de Arte, Mexico; 1999
Lasipalatsi Film and Media Centre, Helsinki; 1999
Beall Center for Art & Technology,UC Irvine; "SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games & Art" 2000
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, "Devices of Wonder", Nov 2001 - Feb 2002
Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, "Contaminados"; San Jose, Costa Rica, April-May 2002