Agnes Hegedüs
«Things Spoken»

Most people collect objects during their lives. These can be gifts, souvenirs, momentos, personal artifacts, found things, etc. Their significance for their 'collectors' are usually contextual and personal.
This CD-ROM presents a selection of about 50 objects that I have collected, put together in such a way that the viewer can make an interactive exploration of both their singularities and their possible (inter)relationships. Each object has been digitized on a flat-bed scanner, whose consequent transformation of the original object is a form of aesthetic reconstitution characteristic for 'multimedia'. Embedded in a machinal darkness, the objects reveal themselves insubstantially, idiosynchratically in the reflected red, green and blue light of the scanning process.
The viewer can sort these objects by various criteria such as size, weight, colour, function, or such as in the case of gifts, the gender of the persons who gave them to me. In this way that 'feverish' method by which digital archives can be reorganised according to any criteria is here applied in a manner that is as gratuitously personal as the objects themselves.
Each object is accompanied by my personal narrative that led me to keep these often trivial things and by the account of friends. The third layer of interactivity comes from within these spoken narratives. Specific words are hypertextually linked to any reoccurences of those words elsewhere. In this way the viewer can instantly make links between objects and their associated stories. These chance conjunctions in the narratives amplify potential relationships that let the viewer discover further layers of congruency and signification within this very personal of objects.
Agnes Hegedüs
(Source: update 2.0, ed. by Rudolf Frieling on behalf of Goethe-Institut, Munich, 2000)