Installation Review – Inanimate Alice

Not until very recent that I started to encounter with works of Digital Video Art. It is an unfamiliar genre to me, and I felt overwhelmed since most of works that I’ve seen are obscure as they are abstract and conceptual. In that sense, I found Inanimate Alice, a collaboration work by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, is much more self-explanatory and accessible. However, it adapts the features of game so strongly that it questions me about the essence of digital art, and its relation to the mass media.
The work takes us to a journey through the life of Alice, who grows up in the early years of the 21st century. It addresses issues of the younger generation becoming too involved into the computerized contemporary society, through the depiction of the alienated girl becoming even more alienated because of her obsession with her portable mini computer (ba-xi). It is an ongoing series of a web-based project, presented in multimedia with the combination of sound, text, images, and interactive art.

So far, three out of the ten stories have been completed, and each story captures a different stage of Alice’s growth as well as the very sentimental emotion of her reacting to the out world. Although the complex and sophisticated plot lines are also the significant aspects of the work, because it is an interactive flash animation, its style make the work no different from other Internet based media or materials, in which people seem to value more on the dynamicity and catchiness of graphic effects than its concept or ideas.
Due to the influences of mass media and the needs for the fast pacing commercial industry, many people are attached to things only through its surface these days. No thoughts but entertainments. People are reluctant to seek meanings behind works and receiving data insensitively, as the result, becoming the slaves to the mass medias and information technology.
Art is composed by its idea. Pop culture has served its purpose that people should start looking into the core of works more. Inanimate Alice challenges the boundary between art and media, and addresses issues of the contemporary culture through both its style and content of the work. It was presented on the Internet instead of a gallery space as if it is asking its audiences to discover the message behind.