JCJ-Junkman (1995) 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 files found on the
Internet - debris, more or less. The choices presented are made significant only
by one's ability, or
Ken Feingold 1995/96
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
JCJ-Junkman was created with the Shockwave plugin in 1995
Since it doesn't work in modern browsers, it is being updated and is currently offline