Talk by Flick Harrison

Description:

Western Front hosted artist Flick Harrison for a talk as part of an external Upgrade! Vancouver program organized by Kate Armstrong.

Harrison discussed his experimental interactive DVD project Marie Tyrell. The film depicted the life of a revolutionary on death row, as seen through her lover's song, her psych report, her videotaped messages, and her teenage diaries.

The DVD presented narrative on two different levels: the first as a linear dramatic piece, while the second offered a mechanism for the viewer to click on objects within the drama to interrogate the politics, authorship, and production of the work. 

These interrogations formed narrative tesseracts, temporary leaps outside the linear narrative: the viewer always returned to the same moment from which they "clicked away." They detoured the omniscient fictional voice of the drama, but re-primed the viewer to see the same scenes again with new information and awareness.