In the Desert: A Webwork
Annette Barbier · Journal of Film and Video · 1997
In the Desert: A Webwork, directed by Edmond Chibeau; 1995; digital movie, 1 min.; 3.5 Mb; Web site, 5 pp. Available at http://www.rtvf.nwu.edu/people/chibeau. In the Desert: A Webwork is a hybrid media piece that includes a digital movie and several pages of graphically arranged words and images at an Internet address. What makes this work unique and an engaging example of what is possible on the Web is the relationship of the still images and the text to the moving image. In the Desert (the movie) is, like so much of Chibeau's work, a collage of material from various media. In it, he uses storyboards not only as the score but also as visual components. He includes these static materials, as well as a poetic explanation of the text, along with the movie itself on his Web site. These elements help us decode the movie's text components (which would otherwise be illegible because of its reduced size). Being able to consider these elements not only as background material but also as significant parts of the work redefines our traditional role as audience members. We are, in a sense, forced to become co-creators, piecing together phrases and motifs from the still images and text documents when watching the movie, recalling and inserting them when necessary to fill out an understanding of a movie that, in the quarter-size Quick Time movie format, doesn't stand on its own. The unfortunate loss of quality caused by the downsizing and compression artifacts makes the subtlety of the images present in the original video version very hard to see on a computer monitor. Rather than making a longer tape from which only a portion could be excerpted for the Web site, Chibeau chose to use a very short form in constructing his piece. The length and size of the movie portion of the site make it particularly appropriate for the Web, since the home viewer can reasonably download it (although, even on a 14,400-bps modem, it can take as long as 20 minutes). These size/length considerations raise some interesting issues. A major invention in the development of film-the Latham loopbrought us the possibility of longer films and allowed for the development of today's primary movie format, the feature-length motion picture. Ironically, in the 1990s, speed and bandwidth limitations have forced moviemakers interested in using the Web in precisely the opposite direction. Chibeau here turns what might otherwise be a hindrance-the need for brevity-into an asset. The haiku-like quality of his work- its sense of being pruned to the minimum and tightly packed- foreshadows the development of a style singularly suited to display on the Web, the digital movie. Brevity does not necessarily insure clarity or depth, however. Alvin Toffler describes ours as a blip culture, in which sound bytes that have maximum impact but minimum complexity are the preferred mode of communication. Chibeau's work, in contrast, closely resembles traditional high-quality artwork in that it yields more meaning upon closer inspection. The digital movie progresses as follows: The opening image, a text/painting on paper that served as a source for the piece, is pierced by an eye in the upper-left-hand corner. The video key threshold changes, revealing another eye, and the text she leaves crawls across the screen. The image breaks up, using a digital video effect to reveal a man (EdmondS in high contrast-keyed over another source document, and the whole is keyed over a moving background whose source may be a speeding train or a video signal rolling horizontally. …