CityFish

Contenu

Titre
FR CityFish
Créateur
FR J.R. Carpenter
Date de création
FR 2010
Langue
FR Anglais
Résumé
FR « CityFish » est une œuvre présentée comme une page web défilant à l'horizontal (vers la droite). Sur un fond d'écran blanc et bleu (division horizontale, le blanc est en haut et le bleu en bas), l'artiste présente des textes, des photographies, des vidéos et des illustrations dans le but de créer une histoire, celle de Lynne, une jeune femme de la Nouvelle-Écosse qui visite New York. Le lecteur lit donc l'œuvre en faisant défiler la page vers la droite jusqu'à ce qu'il se rende à la fin du texte. Une carte de New York avec des étoiles menant à des vidéo des endroits est aussi disponible sur l'œuvre.
Description
FR « CityFish is a hybrid word, title of a hybrid work, tale of a hybrid creature. Part classical parable, part children’s picture book, CityFish is a web-based intertextual hypermedia transmutation of Aesop’s Town Mouse Country Mouse fable. Winters, a Canadian girl named Lynne freezes in Celsius in the fishing village of Brooklyn, Nova Scotia (Canada), a few minutes walk from a white sandy beach. Summers, she suffers her city cousins sweltering in Fahrenheit in Queens, New York (USA). By now Lynne knows everyone knows it’s supposed to be the other way around. Lynne is a fish out of water. In the country, her knowledge of the city separates her from her school of friends. In the city, her foreignness marks her as exotic. Meanwhile, the real city fish lie in scaly heaps on long ice-packed tables in hot and narrow Chinatown streets. CityFish represents asynchronous relationships between people, places, perspectives and times through a horizontally scrolling browser window, suggestive of a panorama, a diorama, a horizon line, a skyline, a timeline, a Torah scroll. The panorama and the diorama have traditionally been used in museums and landscape photography to establish hierarchies of value and meaning. CityFish interrupts a seemingly linear narrative with poetic texts, quotations, Quicktime videos, DHTML animations, Google Maps and a myriad of visual images. Combining contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms creates a new hybrid, a lo-fi web collage cabinet of curiosities. The story of Lynne and the city fish unfolds in this strange horizontally scrolling world of absences and empty spaces – furious, intimate, and surreal.

There is a Google Map satellite view of Coney Island embed in CityFish, which - for now - shows the beach, boardwalk, amusement park, and bordering neighbourhoods in pristine condition. Coney Island was but one of the many coastal communities in the tri-state area hard hit by Superstorm Sandy in October 2012. Eventually the Google Maps satellite view will be updated to reflect the effect of climate change on this coastline, but the new images will reveal little of the loss experienced by these communities. My thoughts are with these families.
JRC November 2012

CityFish is a work of fiction, I swear. Any resemblance to real-life mothers, uncles, aunts or cousins anywhere may be attributed to the common craziness of all families everywhere. »

Mention de genre autodéclarée : « Part classical parable, part children’s picture book, CityFish is a web-based intertextual hypermedia transmutation of Aesop’s Town Mouse Country Mouse fable »
Nature
Genre
Thèmes
FR Voyage
New York
Nouvelle-Écosse
Métro
Support
Principe d'organisation
Technique
Extraits de l'œuvre
FR « That Lynne lived up the road from a fishing village called Brooklyn, that was not the real Brooklyn, was a sad fact the Flushing cousins would never let Lynne live down. How far away is it? They taunted. Farther than Far Rockaway? It's farther than Fulton Street, where the Chinatown fish comes from. It's farther than you can see from the torch arm of the Statue of Liberty. Lynne and her mother lived up the hill from the far edge of a raw grey ocean that spread out for days and days. »
Personne ayant créé la fiche
FR Aude Meunier-Rochon
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