"Event Horizon" by James Hunter
A visual-media reflection on the dissonance of intermedia communication
"Event Horizon" is an investigation of how text, music, and video interact with one another and what effect chance may have on the collaboration of these different types of communication in electronic literature. The context of this e-chapter revolves around the idea of not responding to fear, which I believe all people have commonly experienced, in a way that causes you to miss out on what you could have had, had you not given place to the fear. The fact that it may be interpreted differently by individual audience members further proves that chance is at work. "Event Horizon" was produced using a Roland micro BR four track digital recorder, Sonar LE digital recording program, Audacity digital recording/editing program, Paint.net digital photo editing program, and Windows Movie Maker. Learning to use these programs while producing this e-chapter was difficult because of the many limitations they had; but it also helped shape what the final product is now by giving it the gritty texture that I was going for in the beginning, yet at that time was unsure how to obtain. "Event Horizon" is hopefully the first chapter of many different types of digital lit/art that I’ll go on to produce with the intent of confronting and investigating the different issues that people have in common.
Flim's perspective on "Event Horizon"
Upon first seeing James’s work for this e-book I have to admit one of the first feelings I got was fear. Not the kind of fear that you get from a scary story. The fear I got was one of being unfamiliar with everything I was being presented with. James’s work explored ideas from literature such as literal text vs. the interpretation of words and juxtaposed it with an onslaught of what seemed to be unrelated images and sound. My initial critique was that there was nothing as a viewer for me to hold onto (at that point the project consisted of images and sound without words). Instead of meeting my inexperience, he took the idea further into the unknown. Barely intelligible lyrics, text being thrown at you, glitch, smear, cut, repeat. The more the work developed the more it seemed to disassociate itself from any greater meaning or familiarity. But then reading the abstract of his work it all seemed so clear. That fear, that desperate reaching from meaning or comfort, that was the barrier. The rift between me and the work only existed because I was refusing to participate in that moment. A picture is an indexical record of a moment; music is sound relayed over a series of moments. Electronic literature, too, is a medium that works with the moment to create a new, composite moment within the framework of our own reality. So take a moment to collect yourself before embarking into "Event Horizon," or you might miss it.
