World of Awe: a traveler's journal
http://www.worldofawe.net/
reviewed by Valerie Lamontagne

+ + +

Looking for a treasure, lost in the desert. These seem like appropriate
metaphors for anyone spending a good part of their day browsing on the
"information" highway. "World of Awe 1.0" [WOA] produced by Yael Kanarek
over the last 5 years chronicles the adventures of a traveler in search
of a lost treasure. Taking place somewhere on the sunset/sunrise, the
premise of this work is based on the idea of a "found" laptop containing
the now–presumably lost–owner's story. WOA beckons one's participation
in much the same way that "surfing" the net can make a whole day
collapse into one long endless search, luring one away from initial
destinations and inviting one to take various salacious promise-filled
off-ramps. If WOA is a parallel meta-universe to the one many of us
spend the better part of our days working, researching and navigating on
it is also a far brighter, candy coloured, magic-egg and speaking-
object filled universe to the one customarily negotiated.

+geography+

When entering WOA we immediately notice the desktop iconography: a cross
between Apple OS 8 and the Windows 2000 operating system. According to
the journals contained within, the laptop would have been built in
"Silicon Canyon–a graveyard for old software and hardware." The
interface is in fact based on the Graphical User Interface (GUI)
originally developed in the ebullient 1970's years of the Xerox labs
when and where computer nerds plotted our present. You are invited to
peruse the materials "left" on the desktop such as: images, tools and
journal logs tracing the protagonist's trials and tribulations as told
through a series of love letters still in the process of being decoded
(that is, according to the artist, the newfound proprietor of this
silicon history.) The proposed geography–the navigation and landscape
represented in the images–is predominantly a grey, austere sand dune
with a sprinkle of candy crumbs. It is reminiscent of the dreamlike yet
arid planets visited by Saint-Exupery's Petit Prince. If one recalls, in
"Le Petit Prince," the protagonist visits a myriad of desolate planets
with variously obsessive characters (accountants) and habits (a man
obsessively lighting a street lamp) only to discover that his one and
only true love is the capricious rose that inhabits his dry and almost
desert-like planet.

+absence+

WOA's protagonist similarly travels through a deserted terrain only to
discover the meaning of attachment through absence. Love letters found
on the WOA hardrive are addressed to an absent, abandoned, or perhaps
lost loved one. The letters outline a state of melancholia and solitude
as experienced by the author in her plight for connectivity and
intimacy. Says the author in Travel Log 76-7/4 "In the past few days
I've been sensing too clearly the outermostlayer of my body. The surface
of my flesh is burning. I attribute this to the growing awareness that I
haven't seen a living soul for too long." In the romantic lexicon, "A
Lover's Discourse," Roland Barthes describes absent love as a self-
sustaining and disquieting dialogue leaving one neither anchored in the
present nor the past. I quote: "Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the
beloved's absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is
absent as referent, present as allocutory. The singular distortion
generates a kind of insupportable present; I am wedged between two
tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution: you have gone
(which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I
know what the present, that difficult tense, is: a pure portion of
anxiety" [1].

And anxiety is, in many ways, the modus operandi of our protagonist in
her migration through this uncanny world and it's various provinces:
Silicon Canyon, The Point of No Return and Nowhereness. Many of the
WOA's texts veer towards the Burroughsesque in their hallucinatory tone
and descriptions. Witness an encounter with a "rotten" egg in LOVE
LETTER 7579/65. "I'm green and yellowish-brown inside. I stink inside.
I'm rotten. But my shell is still real pretty-white as a bride-not a
crack, not a wrinkle. Touch me! Feel me!" cries the egg to her as it
subsequently begs her to eat it with an "Oh, please, please have me,
PLEASE!" WOA's definitively postmodernist narration is a whimsical,
mordant, fluid collage, negating linear developments or conclusive
finales all-the-while abiding to an Alice in Wonderland ethos of things
being not what they aren't and contrariwise.

+space/time+

Travelling, and getting lost for that matter, have often been used as
metaphors and practices for discovering oneself. Wunderlust has been the
impetus and lifestyle behind many seminal works of literature. From Jack
Kerouac's "On the Road" to "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne
we have been fascinated by the lure of distant worlds, perilous terrain
and most of all the angst-fueled travels of the poetic soul. Perhaps one
of the most captivating images of the Twentieth Century remains the
fl