Fitting the Pattern

• CreatorChristine Wilks
• Year Published2008
• Originally Published AtAuthor's Site

Published at the author's site, "Fitting the Pattern" was later featured in the Electronic Literature Collection 2 in 2011. The author says of her work: "Cutting through memories, pinning down facts, stitching fabrications, unpicking the past - an interactive, animated memoir, created in Flash, exploring aspects of my relationship with my dressmaking mother. Life's mysteries are rarely uncovered by a logical, linear process of deduction. You arrive at answers, ideas, suspicions, intuitions, haphazardly in fragments. Over time you build the picture, piece by piece, shuffling and rearranging, until you start to see a pattern emerging. The structure of 'Fitting the Pattern' attempts to replicate this experience; hence it is a memoir in pieces that the reader can explore, to some extent, in a non-linear fashion. There are certain parallels between my mother's creative craft process and my own in new media; therefore the visual design of the piece is based on the aesthetics of sewing patterns. These similarities, as well as our differences, are embedded in the digital media and text, literally drawn out through animation and dramatized through interactivity. Custom cursors designed as digital dressmaking tools fuse the interactive process into the narrative world, so the reader becomes actively involved in constructing and/or unpicking the narrative."--From Electronic Literature Collection 2