Investigating Imaginary Evidence

Editor's Introduction

"On the surface, Investigating Imaginary Evidence documents the intensive creative process behind Forced Entertainment's construction of a CD-ROM project in detail, helping chart the debates and interactions among collaborators in order to demonstrate the eventual synthesis of key ideas that make the project what it is. However, Investigating Imaginary Evidence goes well beyond merely offering an extensive behind-the-scenes examination of the intricate matrix of reflections about creativity, interactivity, and the status of 'evidence' to embody a larger issue, namely the phenomenological relationship between creator and user.

Using a pared back, minimal aesthetic, the hypertext structure brings to the fore the generous reaching out of both creator and user; both move towards each other in a reciprocal dance of questioning and answering, of offering and receiving, each invested in the conjuring of imaginary evidence. The results of the investigation are not a given; instead, they emerge gradually.

While this issue of Vectors is about evidence, it is difficult not to reflect on the 'imaginary' in the title of this project. 'Imaginary' here isn't just the whimsical musings contained in a mind, but might reference as well Lacan's imaginary, the place where boundaries dissolve in a fluid matrix. What is the imaginary of evidence in this context? In its thematizing of user/creator intersection, Investigating Imaginary Evidence helps point us toward an answer." – Tara McPherson and Steve Anderson, Vectors Editors

Author's Statement

"Investigating Imaginary Evidence:
What can ever truly represent evidence of nearly twenty years creating work in performance, installation, live art and digital media? What separates archive from experience? Is there ever an appropriate balance between fiction and information? Forced Entertainment's recent CD-ROM, Imaginary Evidence, grew from those questions.

Declaring evidence as imaginary immediately places it in a position to be contested, disbelieved, used for one's own means. How we, as users, separate that work from which a piece of video or text has evolved and the narrative emerging before us defines our experience of Imaginary Evidence. How those negotiations were constructed and what decisions were made to shape possible outcomes are concerns that drive this work, Investigating Imaginary Evidence.

As the digital author of this and other of Forced Entertainment's interactive projects, I often worked quite far away from the rest of the company, meeting only periodically during the development of interactive projects to participate in intensely focused but rather rare collaborative periods. Imaginary Evidence, however, grew from a large series of meetings with the entire company and key collaborators over a number of years. Those meetings were speculative and evolutionary. They led to numerous periods of intensive work, negotiations and discussions. Those elements drove the creation of Imaginary Evidence, taking it, in many ways, into the territory of devising performance. That developmental process, its reliance on certain elements used in the creating of performance and its duration, was extraordinary, complex and revelatory.

Digital media is often used to document or provide some form of evidence of live performance, installation and other less tangible media. Investigating Imaginary Evidence, like the CD and creative processes upon which its investigations are based, seeks to utilize the very things that confound our readings of evidence. The user is asked to participate by utilizing memory, structure and placement to discover otherwise invisible elements of a creative process. Investigating Imaginary Evidence affords access to some of those fluid, fluctuating and unique discussions (and negotiations) that involved the entire company and collaborators of Forced Entertainment.

The design of Investigating Imaginary Evidence purposefully relies only upon the simplest of browser conventions (the pull-down menu and text-based links) as its primary interface. The screen has been stripped of decoration in an attempt to leave only a textual or interactive element and negative space upon which you, the user, may project your own structure, constructions and connections. The questions and revisions that evolved from developing Imaginary Evidence exist here as a series of inter-connected elements each alluding to another and all a part of the whole.

-- Mary Agnes Krell

Mary Agnes Krell is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Practice and Theory at the University of Sussex. She has worked as a digital author and artist in the UK and the USA for over a decade and has been an associate member of England's Forced Entertainment. More information about Mary Agnes and her current research including Lee Miller: Echoes of St. Malo is available online at: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/mak23/" -- from Vectors, Volume 1, Issue 1, Fall 2005

Project Credits

"Work on Investigating Imaginary Evidence was influenced, in part, by my AHRB-Funded generative film experiment, The Somnambulist. It was also made possible through the generous support of Dr. Caroline Bassett, the School of Humanities Research Fund at Sussex University, The Diamond Family Archive, Dr. Petra Gemeinboeck, Daniel Gosling, Forced Entertainment and (of course) Tim Etchells." -- from Vectors, Volume 1, Issue 1, Fall 2005