"Last Entry: Bombay, 1st of July..."

A Travel Log through Time, Space and Identity

...started as a collaborative documentary in june last year: by tracing back with the user's help the adventures of a person, identity and gender are unknown, a flaneur in the cultural space of the internet.

The project is inspired by the novel "Orlando", written by Virginia Woolf in England in 1928, that reads like a visionary metaphor of the internet, as a biography on a figure, traveling through time and space, centuries and cultures. In "Orlando", kings and princesses, poets and lovers, war and peace come and go. Carrying two souls in the chest, Orlando has to undergo a cutting change in life, when he - all of a sudden turns into she, Lady Orlando.

Extending the adventures of Orlando in the network space and time, users are requested to involve Orlando in their own sphere and bring him (or her?) into contact with other people (or themselves?). Last Entry: Bombay, 1st of July... creates an identity in the net by collecting the episodes around Orlando at different locations worldwide. He or she is a visitor in the users space and cultural background, they are invited to design their own meeting places: They can choose Orlando's gender and personal attributes and further more their own role in this scenario.

No user - no project!

Interactivity is taken very far in this project as the development of the plot/Orlando's destiny is totally dependent on the users input. The project experiments with this term in different ways:

Participation as identification - In planned contradiction to "usual" hyperfiction as a worldwide tool to join text to text as fast and easy as possible, the user is not only asked to add a few quick lines, but he/she has to identify necessarily first with the whole complex and then add his/her part to the storyboard - by designing and integrating a personal (story) room. In that sense an exchange of the real and virtual takes place: most of the entries reveal that the participation becomes a play with imaginations, real existences and virtual sketches, personal dreams and thoughts - within a carefully designed scenic location.

Mental Community - as an addition to the collaborative effect: by sharing the same compagnion - Orlando - all the participants somehow have to share the same visions and intimate thoughts in this collective diary, whilst the figure Orlando overtakes the function of an avatar as a projection field for the very personal self.

Orlando's story therefore mirrors the virtual space by establishing an intimate platform, a residence in an artificial life, by stepping onto a stage, by slipping into identities and virtual profiles in a networked community of realities and fictions.

Workshop and work in progress - when the project started, the quite intense interactive angle seemed to be a burdon to begin with. Yet after the first announcements and invitations in the net and its mailing lists and meeting spots, interest was growing fast. From a research and design point of view this is surely in direct relation to its literature roots - the well known Orlando Novel itself as a historical web of an oscillating character offers a logical metaphore as a grid for the intended dramaturgy of a virtual gender shift, myth and mystery. Most of the reactions referred to this as an inspiring spot and therefore to a fortunate practicality of the project. As the entries demonstrate, the personal creative level is a very diversive one, ranging from rather ellaborate attempts using browser techniques or animations to minimalistic methods of adding snapshots, little poems and e-mails. Besides the self organized development of identity and scenario this is the most challenging part of the work: on the one hand suspense is built up by how far the user might take his/her practical and conceptual involvement and on the other hand the project is still accessible to everybody, from all fields and interests to join and add their contribution.

Empty faces - and the most beautiful thoughts behind them

According to the grammatical method of an open frame, of a story line as a growing membran, the entries show a manifold variety of linking content to context. "Mille Viaggi" for instance, a contribution from Italy, adds to some simple snapshots the most beautiful poetic texts and precious personal moments, being inspired by the main topical issues like sentimental journeys, never taken, aging and memory. "Flashback" goes back to days spent in New York, accompanied by a friend's poem, graphics and text being very carefully arranged in this example, even a little game - where the links are at the same time letters which form a keyword - is included. A similar personal angle is chosen in "Memory", observations and diary notes by the author during a travel connection at Moscow airport, refreshed and transported through the medium Orlando.

Other entries, like "Topography" seem to concentrate on reflecting the self in words which don't belong to daily life; or they play in a very graphical, metaphorical and funny angle with keywords as in "Covers" - a little fruit scenario on an identity problem or "Thin Ice" - a little animated flick book in the style of a silent movie about the gender question. Even similar to a film is the exhaustive online photo story "Games", which shows a very high level of identification with the project, as a group of women went out to test and document in "real life", in the Berlin subculture, what it means to swap your gender and play with your identity.

Dispersed within all the entries are also hidden postcards from the past, using the original antique text to form a seperate virtual trail of the net passenger Orlando.

What's on a person's mind? - "Inter - Facial" design

As the different contributions tend to be rather multilayered already, including many dramaturgical side steps, which are even not so easy to find on the first glance, the navigation system and interface of the project should be rather clear. To avoid confusion and disorientation, therefore the emphasis here is not so much concentrating on a second parallel network , but on graphics forming analogies to the intention of the project. While the very first index page, the turning cube, refers as a trailer to the issue of the split identities and morphing characters, the main navigation page, the head formed by faces, expresses the multileveled imagination and vision based on the different users/personalities to be discovered behind these empty appearances. As a consequence the map structure as the central interface is not only used for technical reasons, but rather to refer to a topology of "mind-mapping" as a general idea of the work. The head functions as a mental travel log, a point of start and return, a kind of keyhole perspective even, not only to document the paths of Orlando outside into the (net)world, but even importantly to cruise inside the different personal facettes now being hosted in this figure - as a circular system of the participants reflections, plans and déjà-vu's within past, present and future.

Because of this unpredictable action flow the project represents a patchwork of individual ideas and presentation, framed in an associative montage concept as a critical discussion of net creativity. By combining different means of expression and interactive art practice - literature and legend, diary, scenic/cinematic modellage, photography as well as browser tools and html techniques, the project is not so much part of the net.art movement, with its more self referential and iconic attributes, but it rather belongs to a net.dramaturgy category - as an open and permanently growing process of dialogue with the user in a network of public and personal experiences, anecdote and archetype, memories and interventions.

Andrea Zapp, Berlin 1997/98