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
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

notes

Ken Feingold 1995/96