Zenith’s Epoch /Jessica Helfand

Ms. Hefland teaches at The Yale School of Art and New York University’s Interactive telecommunications Program. Her articulate and thoughtful writings about graphic design appear in a variety of venues. Her most recent book is entitled "Six essays on Design and New Media." Her web site "Zenith’s Epoch" is an experimental site created in her studio. Based on an old photographic album found in an antique store, the site weaves together the pictures with the text both factual and fictional. An introductory screen notes, "If interaction challenges the standard chronology of narrative form, then the way we shape information must be recorded to reflect this change. We see this site as an opportunity to reconsider word/image relationships to tell old stories in new ways." Hefland juxtapositions narratives from another time and place to the present, mapping them into a new age "retro" story for the World Wide Web. Her narrative has no center, but is rather a matrix of nodes and links. Her interactive project is about a journey, fascination and discovery of junkyard and antique sale artifacts combined with her own personal adaptation and expression. Ms. Hefland manipulates the audience to feel certain things.


Hefland’s Studio is a small design consultancy that concentrates on editorial design and the development of new models for new media. In an effort to better define and articulate the impact of technology on the design professions, Ms. Hefland is a contributing editor to ID Magazine and a media consultant for Eye Magazine, and is a visiting lecturer at Yale School of Art and New York University’s Program in Interactive Telecommunications. Her focus according to her autobiography lies in mapping a new kind of editorial process for the strategic development of electronic media, including CD-ROM’s, internet web sites, film titles, and theoretical projects that introduce alternative conceptual paradigms for communication design.


The Songlines/Anna Thomas

According to her thesis, Anna Thomas was inspired by the ancestral stories of the Aboriginal people of Australia. The religious life of the Aboriginal people centers on the Dreaming. Dreaming described their spiritual, natural and moral order of the cosmos. Dreamings were stories of Ancestral Beings whose spirits passed to their descendants. Groups of individuals are bonded by the same totem. Dreamings travel over vast distances and connect different lands. When Dreamings move about, they form a landscape, creating plants, animals and people. Dreamings are eternally present and do not die. This aboriginal aesthetic sense is traditional in the belief that the world is made of signs. There is no dichotomy between the spiritual, material, sacred or secular. Artworks and artists hence become elements themselves of a larger system of meaning. Anna Thomas inspired by these dreamings creates a mythical story called "The Luminous Ones."


"The Luminous Ones" is a mythical story set in Manhattan. It is about a journey taken by two brothers, though this mythical land. This particular net-based journey starts from Ellis Island to the final transformation of the brothers in the financial district to the brilliant Twin Towers. They both seek immortality. They finally achieve this through their transformation into two pillars of rock. Each event is presented as a page in which animals and plants depicted as figurative or schematic images are encountered along the way.


What captured my attention to Anna’s thesis was not her images, which were extremely engaging, but it was her interesting research writing. According to her Research Paper, she states that the acquisition of knowledge, not material possession, is the way Aboriginal people acquire status in their culture, and art is a expression of this knowledge. Through art, an individual expresses his/her knowledge of the land. Aboriginal artists use this influence to bring about change and innovation to their culture.


The idea of the land or terrain as the narrative is interesting to me because there is no geography without meaning or without history. Hence whether a virtual web site or a sculpture are created by the inspiration of these Dreamings, they possess a history and a sense of place within the cosmos. According to the overall theme of her work,Dreamings are born, they have life, but most importantly they are eternally present and become elements of a larger system.


Witness/Beliz Brother

Beliz Brother’s "Witness" is a result of exceedingly careful craft and enormous research. Brother’s work is both deeply political and profoundly ambiguous. It is the subject of death and destruction, yet it glistens with elegance. "Witness" was initiated in 1994 with an invitation to use the downtown Seattle Art Museum’s Northwest art gallery to create her work. As she refined her plans, she chose to address what she called the "threshold of sympathy" _ our current inability to respond with empathy, after an initial impact, to the political catastrophes and environmental tragedies that have enveloped man as the century ends. Brother connects this modern indifference with the invention and proliferating use of photography, starting with Mathew B. Brady’s images of the American Civil War to CNN TV news. The specific ironies of the later usages of Brady’s Civil War glass negatives inspired the forms of "Witness": a greenhouse wall,telescope,and fulcrum beneath a row of photographs. As she was developing the specific forms for her Seattle Art Museum Exhibit , she was considering a world poised beyond "threshold of sympathy" and learning about a newly-recognized malaise known as "post-traumatic blindness." During this period Brother had become aware of refuge groups, primarily women, who became blind after repeatedly seeing killings and human rights abuses.


All of Beliz’s installations reveal a survivor’s awareness of mortality. A clear turning point in her life and art was her being diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 1988. As she explained at the time , "A large part of my artistic work is faith_ the things that I set out to do always seem impossible, but I’ve got faith that they’ll be realized."


Beliz Brother sees her work as a cosmic intersection of her life and world events. Speaking on January 26th, 1995 on the opening day of "Witness", she reminded the audience that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the release of prisoners from Auschwitz and that three days later would be thousandth day of the war in Bosnia. Beliz combines the personal, the political, and the metaphorical creating an environment that uplifts the spirit to the realm of the ethereal.

© Copyright 1997 Denise Urban