David Clark – Halifax, NS.
March 4th – April 9th, 2011.
David Clark’s interactive, non-linear net.art piece “88 Constellations for Wittgenstein” features a series of animated vignettes created in Flash that variously explore the life and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Each of the 88 sections corresponds to one of the 88 constellations in the night sky, and, in turn, each constellation becomes a navigation device for the viewer to negotiate the associative relationships between these vignettes. As well, viewers can interact with the animations using their left hand to trigger events from the computer keyboard (in homage to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brother Paul – a concert pianist who lost his right arm in WWI but continued his career performing piano works composed for the Left Hand). This work considers questions that Ludwig Wittgenstein pondered in his career as a philosopher: logic, language, the nature of thinking, and the limits of knowledge – all in relation to our contemporary digital world.
This work is a continuation of David Clark’s interest in long form experimental narrative art that he has explored in his award-winning website ‘A is for Apple’ (2002) and his feature film ‘Maxwell’s Demon’ (2002). The work is an attempt to find a new form of narrative experience that corresponds a distinctive characteristic of the internet; that is, the non-linear way in which we browse for information on the web. This is a work that attempts to create a kind of ‘narrative vertigo’ for the viewer as they see the interconnected stories and associations. The work is made for the internet and in some ways reflects the way that stories are now told on the internet.
