Postcard from Tunis

About the work

Writing about ‘Postcard from Tunis’, Darren Tofts notes how Pryor has embraced all the rich possibilities of the new vocabulary of multimedia with its interlacing of sound, writing and image to capture the intoxicating sensation of a flaneur in a foreign city. But it is writing, he explains, that is the subject of the work, particularly Pryor’s academic interest in integrationist concepts (2005: 108-109). Integrationist theory rejects a rule-based model of language and "written words on paper" (Pryor, 2023), and emphasises instead that language is more contextual as expressed in the weave of images and sounds with words and text made possible by CD-ROM.

After interacting with her artwork in emulation in 2023, Pryor offered the following reflections on the work she designed, directed and programmed.

ln the end, an artwork must speak for itself and, to continue the metaphor, the work will probably say something different to each viewer. So my intentions for this work are only part of the story. However, I will add some notes here to supplement the interview recorded in case they are of assistance.

Why? I make creative work to get to what the artist Joan Brassil once called 'the place I never dreamt of'. I only have a hazy idea of what I'm trying to create and why. So naturally I didn't start ‘Postcard from Tunis’ by thinking about the target audience. I made it to please myself. I made it to express, to share and in fact to understand powerful personal experiences in Tunisia. I made it to explore ideas about writing and the human-computer interface. I made it to improve my ability to read Arabic. I made it to integrate parts of myself, for example, the programmer who loves writing structured, functional code and the artist who wants to create beautiful expressive imagery and audio.

And I made it as a research method. As explained in my PhD, the work is an lntegrationist exploration of writing and its transformation at the human-computer interface. lt's set in a personal portrait of Tunis, a city with a rich history of writing. User interaction with the work, particularly rollover activity, creates a variety of dynamic signs that cannot be theorised by a bipartite theory of signs (signifier/signified) and that transcend a distinction between the verbal and the non-verbal altogether. These signs include kinetic and dynamically reflexive written signs that indicate in writing, but not in words, how the user is to read them.

‘Postcard From Tunis’ offers users who are not Arabic-literate the perception that there are actually no fixed boundaries between writing and pictures, as both are based on spatial configurations. lt suggests that the question of what is writing will differ from person to person (and moment to moment).

How? The production process ran for a number of years and through multiple iterations. There are an enormous number of moving parts (images, sounds, texts, English/French translations, soundtracks, etc). Looking through my notes it's clear I spent a lot of time sorting out and addressing the navigation, the user interactions (l was trying to break away from clicking and jumping to a new screen, but I needed to test this with users), performance issues on less than high-powered computers (e.g. in schools), aesthetic challenges of using 8bit images, etc etc.

I found this quote from an interview I did in 1995, appropriate: "l always did like programming but I never really liked writing accounts receivable applications in COBOL. I love [working with Lingo in] Director because you're working with delicious image and text and sound. And you can make it a plastic, fluid, responsive thing, it's really exciting. Sometimes when I've had an intense Director day, I leave and it's like I'm high, High as a kite, like I've had this incredibly wonderful experience. And if I see someone at the lift I can barely speak to them!"

It's also clear that I couldn't have made this work without the financial support of the universities where I taught and studied, the people who are credited in my CD and federal and state government bodies.

Festivals and awards? ‘Postcard From Tunis’ became an internationally award-winning work and was screened in many countries. This required a great deal of effort on my part, which l've detailed in the Arist as Self-Publisher (1998).

References