TRIPWIRED - Graham Budgett 2002

Made for user-motion-tracking and projected installation in a set architectural space [represented here by the red dotted rectangle and activated by your cursor within it], this alternate web manifestation of the interactive audio-visual environment, TRIPWIRED, originally posited video of an intimate personal trip with randomly encountered internet radio broadcasts streaming live in public space.

'CAMERA LUCIDA' by Rolande Barthes provided the 'studium' - or general drift of meaning - for TRIPWIRED: the interaction of public and private domains. According to Barthes, any 'punctum', or point of personal access for a user to an author's work, is first felt as incidental personal meaning, consequently recognised as poignant and only then perhaps as significant. The punctum's point, its personal poignancy, interrupts the linear narrative of the author's studium. As Barthes concluded in his essay, The Death of the Author, "the life of the reader is at the expense of the death of the author".

TRIPWIRED is similarly structured by the interference of point and line; preconfigured 'noise' generates the montage or 'cut'. Your [mouse] movement in the image-space of TRIPWIRED triggers a stream of imagery and sound, but no particular trajectory will restore coherent narrative structure to this 'movie'.

TRIPWIRED offers no semantic closure, but an open public archive constituted as a number of frames sampled at regular intervals from an uncut miniDV cassette documenting a family trip to Northumbria, in the north of England.