Individual Work
ii -- in the white darkness: about [the fragility of] memory

ii -In the white darkness is an interactive piece about memory. The work was created by Reiner Strasser in collaboration with M.D. Coverley (Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink) over a period of 9 months in 2003/04.

It assimilates and reflects the experience with patients fallen ill with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's diseases, showing the fragility and fluidity of memory from a subjective point of view. ”It was not the erasure that mattered so much as the act of trying to recover what we no longer can identify.“ (M.D. Coverley)

From the pulsing dots of the background-interface different events can be started, played (and combined). In this process the experience of remembering and loss of memory can be re-created in the appearance and disappearance of words, pictures, animations and sounds. Memories (readable with a general metaphorical meaning) are unveiled and veiled in transition at the same time, arranged by or using your own memory.

Strasser and Coverley's visual poem is a multimedia meditation on the nature of memory. By choosing pulsing dots as if from behind a veil, the reader activates collages of photographs and ambient sounds, representing the process of trying to recover lost memories, which surface and fade in and out of intelligibility.

Screenshots: 
Author statement: 
This collaborative work by Strasser and Coverley was done without the two meeting in person. Strasser from Germany, Coverley from California worked together for two years by e-mail. The work was published in the Electronic Literature Organization’s ELC 1 October, 2006. The Flash piece was restored by The Next and was part of the AfterFlash Exhibition in 2021