When pressing the “Enter” key on a keyboard, frames of a comic are displayed one by one. Each frame is retrieved from a database of images drawn by the artist herself. Some of the frames feature visitors, photographed with a camera and instantly transformed into comic style drawings. The finished comic strips can be sent as e-mail attachments, enabling the main characters to subsequently create their own stories out of the sequences of frames with dialogues they are free to insert in blank speech bubbles.

“Ideogenetic” in the title refers to mental processes based on sensations and images alone, without any use of verbal expression. Accordingly, no verbal language is involved in this work’s process of producing comics. The comics made from individual frames that seem disconnected from each other, with images of visitors and speech bubbles, feel like embodiments of our streams of consciousness.

At the same time, viewers will surely realize that the act of imagining contexts and building one’s own narrative from the single frames of the finished comic resembles very much the way we extract and abstract logic from all the disjointed ideas in our minds, and finally express them in words.

Support: Eyebeam Art and Technology Center
Technical collaborator: Jake JEFFERIES