To be or not to be Mouchette
Me, Mouchette, the online virtual character, I have an unusual status of existence.
Regarding the art of my website I am the author and the creation at the same time, and yet through my remote internet life I remain invisible, anonymous, genderless, untouchable, neither alive or dead.
The participants of my interactive website confide in me in the most intimate way, because I am an imaginary being, living in their own head. With me people feel free to talk about everything because in the privacy of their own thoughts, no subject is taboo, fear, pain, life and death, or even the temptation of suicide.
With the reactions of the participants to my website I have composed animation films displaying many of the texts I received, spoken out through speech bubbles by pixellated characters who tell their most private thoughts.
One of these animation films takes place in a court room where people express their attraction for suicide and cry out for help. In another animation, inside a cartoonesque supernatural stage set, the characters speak about immortality and other metaphysical subjects while I’m repeatedly asking the same
question “How can I write this since I’m dead?”
My personality embraces all of my participants’ minds and together we form a collective consciousness pondering over questions of life and death in
the digital era.
And like in the famous Hamlet monologue, to be or not to be Mouchette, that is the question!
Titles of the animation films
and screen captures:
– Immortality
– Ghost city
– Suicide Kit
– Evenings
– Lullaby for a Dead Fly
– I Hate Mouchette
The work “Immortality” remains part of the collection of the Museum
of Contemporay Art in Siegen.
