Juvenate

About the work

‘Juvenate’ explores themes of memory, illness and rejuvenation. It was created by Perth-based artists Michelle Glaser, Andrew Hutchison and Marie-Louise Xavier on Macromedia Director with funding from the Australian Film Commission. The work received national and international awards including co-winner of the Mayne Award, the Multimedia category of the SA Festival Awards for Literature in 2002 and was exhibited internationally. The work is an open-ended hypertext narrative exploring the floating memories and thoughts of a dying man as he lies isolated in a hospital bed. It has a slow, hypnotic feel. Sounds, animations and images arrive and fade with a dreamlike flow activated by a mouse rollover that avoids the staccato feel and intent of the conventional point and click. The slight skewing of perspective and the saturated colour palette add to the hallucinatory quality of the work. The work is designed to be navigated through a hypertextual drifting through these memory spaces; the user can, however, summon a map to systematically traverse through the blurred landscape of recollections, realities and dreams.

In 2002, Glaser explained that the team of artists were “seeking to find a way to tell a story, without relying upon any spoken language and using minimal written text. The work is essentially about celebrating the ordinary, the extraordinary in the ordinary, so we wanted to keep it domestic, homey and familiar. As you move through the work you have that binary opposition of moving towards morning/summer/health/vitality or moving into evening/winter/sickness (Fenech, 2002:1). Writing in 2003, Hutchinson refers to ‘Juvenate’ as an open work, noting Umberto Eco’s notion of the open text, reflecting on how the reception of the work highlighted “the problem of how to create an interface that doesn’t get in the way of the experience” and that the interface can be the “experience in some works” (2003, 63).

Created from thirty-seven scenes each comprising a separate Director movie, ‘Juvenate’ signalled a potentially new form of narrative and prompted “the need for more detailed analysis of the practical workings of specific, designed interactive media experiences, particularly of those works that have narrative elements” (ibid). Marie-Louise Ryan also proposed that ‘Juvenate’ “may seem to stretch the term {narrative} to its limits, because it does not use language, and its various screens are connected by symbolic, analogical, or contrastive relations…rather than by the specifically narrative relations of causality and temporality (2006:165-166). Of ‘Juvenate’, Hutchinson writes that it is not a hypertext, nor a game, and certainly not a narrative by the standards of conventional literature. To analyse interactive experiences only by such classification runs the risk that new forms will be unstudied. It seems very unwise to exclude experiments, deviations and new developments from consideration” (2003:63). Ryan also concludes with a similar proposal that the “rare merit” of ‘Juvenate’ is that it is both map and labyrinth, offering a narrative experience of illness that can be both goal-driven and free-floating (2006:171).

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