Simple Tricks
a review of Sawad Brooks's "Lapses & Erasures"
http://www.thing.net/~sawad/erase/

Do you like zoetropes? flickbooks? lenticular pictures? (you know, like
those kitsch winking jesus key-rings) camera lucidas?

There's something satisfying about these elegantly executed tricks,
something that seems simple, but has an effect all the greater because
of its apparent simplicity. Early photographic toys are a good example
of what makes good tricks effective. They're endlessly facinating, not
because they are that realistic as illusions (at least not by the terms
of state-of-the-art "godzilla" sgi stuff) but precisely because they
don't pretend to *be* that sophisticated. You can work out the trick
pretty easily, but the illusion doesn't diminish because of this.

I've always liked Sawad Brooks's work for pretty much the same reasons.
His pieces are elegant exercises using java applets, but with an
ergonomic sense–a feeling for how the user interacts with the
applets–that reminds me a lot of using those early photographic toys.

All of the works in "Lapses & Erasures" need some form of sustained user
interaction to "work." In "Shutter," blurred photographic images move
around the space framed by boxes that lazily track the movement of the
cursor. Every time the boxes overlay each other a new image is revealed.
"Focus" forces the user to rapidly move the cursor to enlarge a window
revealing a paragraph of a story underneath.

Both these pieces make obvious links with photography, but it is more
with the physical demands of early photography than the effortless
point-and-click of snapshot cameras.

Anyone who has used large-format cameras knows how difficult it is to
line up images projected in reverse on a ground-glass screen, or to
track images moving through the cross-hairs of a rangefinder. These two
applets are just as frustrating. In "Register" this is taken further,
with the user's cursor movement causing the image to split and skew off
to the sides, disappearing out of the applet box and gliding back in
ever-decreasing paths.

There is a deeper photographic metaphor for these works. Sawad makes the
user aware that looking is a deliberate act, raising the overtones of
voyeurism that critical theory has attached to the photographic image.
If photography is thought of as an act of desired acquisition, a
representation of the viewers need to "capture" an image, then these
applets repeatedly frustrate this desire, making the image a fugitive
form that never quite lets you see what you think you're going to. I'm
not about to do an _October_ essay here, but "Lapses & Erasures" works
on deeper levels than its surface image-play. Like his earlier "mystic
writing pad," references to psychonalytic theory are there if you want
to draw them, but the work itself wears the references lightly.

Less satisfying is "Annotater," an applet that lets users append text to
a series of images of train stations, cities and other "snap-shot"
scenes. Text can be "fixed" to the image in a variety of colours and
font sizes, with basic animation effects possible by entering multiple
text entries that the script cycles through like an animated GIF. The
interface itself is very nice, with minimal but effective icons allowing
users to select type colour and size, but the piece isn't really that
compelling. On this occasion, I can admire Brooks's programming skills,
but am not convinced by the "trick."

Brooks's work is most successful when the interface/applet marries a
sophisticated ergonomic sensibility with arresting content. One of my
favourite pieces of his is an applet that huddles the letters from
individual lines of an Eliot poem around the cursor. To be able to read
the line, the cursor has to be trailed around the applet space, causing
the line to expand and become legible. Every time the movement stops,
the letters returns to their huddle and a new line is formed. Like
"Register" and "Focus," the act of looking/reading is made physical–not
a bad trick in a supposedly "virtual" space.