Mauve Dessert
Adriene Jenik, 1997

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Mélanie is a fifteen year-old of the memory. She steals her mother's Meteor
every chance she gets and drives away from her mother's lover Lorna
and toward the dawn. Maude Laures is the middle-aged academic who stumbles upon Mélanie's life in a second-hand bookshop and translates her into another tongue.
Adriene Jenik is the road-running video artist who drives MAUVE DESERT
from Montréal to the Southwest, from print to pixel, from night to day,
from one generation of women to another.[source]

Towards the mid-to-tale end of the CD-ROM boom emerged Adriene Jenik's highly stylized, aesthetically rich, interactive translation of Nicole Brossard's experimental novel, Le Desert Mauve. The work allows the user to navigate the fifteen year-old heroine's journey while reinventing the story each time based on the user's choices, layering the page with video/ audio/ images/ animation/ text and randomized events, and providing an interface characterized by cinematic vision and painterly composition.

This piece has always stuck with my after I first encountered it in the late 90s. At a time the CD-Rom posed as either children's games, or a depot for artists' portfolios, or an artwork consisting of a series of disembodied animated-gif or flash movies interspliced with 320x240 stray quicktime movies reminescent of early net art---Jenik's piece challenged the CD-Rom to go further as both an interactive experience, artistic endeavor, and a means of relocating and galvanizing story-telling. The content--adult, surreal, and provocative--feeds Jenik's unique deconstruction and re-synthesis of narrative.

Submitted by
Ashleigh Nankivell

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