About HOME

by Annette Barbier and Drew Browning

Skip introduction and enter Unreal Estates.

A house is for sale - it has been abandoned by its owners. It reverberates to the memories of those who lived there, and whose most private moments still inhabit the half empty spaces. Outside, the house looks normal. It fits into the happy, suburban street filled with quirky, playful homes. Once inside, though, things start to change. Space stretches and falls apart, walls fall away, each room is a small plateau hanging in emptiness, resounding with the lives of those who still haunt it.

Home, an interactive work-in-progress, contains the work of 14 artists. These include: a screenwriter, a photographer, a set designer, film and video makers, and computer artists. Each has a unique perspective on the meaning of home, this most universal and basic of necessities.

The interface is a 3-D world created in the computer using VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), and includes a soundscape composed of spoken narrative fragments (written by Dave Tolchinsky) and a musical ambient score (composed by John Loesel). The viewer can explore numerous rooms, each of which contains several links to the work of individual artists. For example, in the living room, a family photograph hanging on the wall links to the interactive computer piece "Buckaroo Boy" by Art Nomura, which explores his background as an Asian American growing up in 1950s California and enamored of cowboys.

The work is available via the internet and will be available on CDROM later this year.

In the VRML world, you are able to navigate down the street to view all the houses, each of which reacts to you in a unique way. However, you can only enter the house at the end of the street.