I Am A Singer

About the work

An interactive narrative, ‘I Am A Singer’ is an experiment in multimedia utilising its potential to fuse cinematic, musical and textual elements for nonlinear storytelling. It deploys the conceit of amnesia where the user must piece together fragments of the protagonist's memories. The user navigates through these small, discrete moments of memory and other traces, such as newspaper clippings, drawing out the story paralleling the journey of the protagonist as she tries to recover her sense of self through the fragments and disparate threads. As Heyward elaborates:

‘I Am A Singer’ is an interactive, non-linear narrative which sought to explore the potentials for narrative storytelling within the emerging digital interactive formats of the 1990s. Concerned with notions of memory, identity and pop culture, it tells the fictional story of an amnesiac who happens to be famous. Isabelle Jones, Australian musician and darling of the infotainment tabloids, is involved in an accident and suffers amnesia on the eve of a US tour. Although Jones knows her identity – she can read articles about herself, listen to interviews, review personal diaries – she cannot make a meaningful connection with who she is. In ‘I Am A Singer’, the user assists Jones as she attempts to reconstruct her identity and reconnect the public and private personas through exploring a range of content drawn from Jones’s life, such as tabloid media reports, personal diaries, therapy and dreams.

The journey in ‘I Am A Singer’ is towards making sense of the fragments of information and misinformation through to a deeper connection with Jones’ true self. The user is situated as Jones’ companion and co-voyager, helping her to navigate her way through to the person that has been obscured behind myriad public masks. There are three pathways for the user to explore – the media path, travel path and inward path. The media path is about Jones’ public identity and includes mock news reports, magazine articles, radio interviews, and documentary style footage. The travel path is concerned with memory fragments, diary entries and memories triggered by locations found within her passport. The inward path draws on psychological approaches such as hypnosis, free association, analysis and dream. Overall there are two ways in the work for Jones to regain her memory and regain a meaningful sense of self.

‘I Am A Singer’ features original music tracks – ‘I Am A Singer’ and ‘Going Down’ – by renowned Australian songwriter and musician Phil Kakulas (The Black Eyed Susans), that were written and recorded specifically for this work. It also includes digitised Super 8 footage and a large amount of photography, animation and audio content alongside textual elements. Apart from the two songs produced by Phil Kakulas, all content – image, text, video, animation, audio as well as all programming – was created and undertaken by Megan Heyward over an approximately three year period 1993-1996. ‘I Am A Singer’ began as Megan’s MFA by research major work in interactive media at UNSW, and received project completion funding from The Australian Film Commission in 1996.

‘I Am A Singer’ premiered at the MILIA New Talent Pavilion in Cannes, France in February 1997 followed by an Australian premiere at Matinaze (1997) at AGNSW. It was exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally, including Digital Storytelling Festival, (USA, 1997), Transmediale (Germany 1998), Viper (Switzerland, 1998), Festival of Cinema and New Media (Canada, 1998), Women in the Director’s Chair (USA, 1999) and Cyberfeminist Working Days (Belgium, 2000) and received awards nationally (AIMIA 1998) and internationally (INVISION 1998) for digital storytelling, sound design and individual excellence (2024).

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