Alice is an "interactive museum" in Macintosh CD-ROM format, created by three artists: Kuniyoshi Kaneko, who works in oils, India inks, and ceramics; Kazuhiko Kato, composer and musician; and Haruhiko Shono, interactive media expert and Macromedia Director artist.
This is the second interesting high-tech jam on Alice in Wonderland I've seen - the other being video artist Gary Hill's weirdly great tape, Why Do Things Get in a Muddle (Hold on Petunia). In that piece, Alice and her dad converse in phonetically enunciated backwards speech, recorded and played backwards again to make it sound "normal," (a technique later deftly borrowed by David Lynch for Mike the Dwarf's lines in Twin Peaks). Their conversation is a metalogue - an increasingly muddled conversation about how things get increasingly muddled. Through the self-referential looking glass.
Which brings us to this Alice. Here, the viewer falls into a three- dimensional rendering of Kaneko's room, its walls lined with his paintings, to the atmospheric ramblings of Kato's instrumental music. Just about every artwork or objet d'art does something when tickled and clicked, in the Manhole/Warlock Cosmic Osmo interactive manner.
The best stuff bends reality as only the reactive computer can; as when, in one painting, two women frolic in a sitting room, upon whose wall hangs a painting of the very same scene. Click on the small rendition of the painting and it grows to fill the screen, replacing the original rendition. Of course, that little homunculus of a painting still hangs on the wall. Click on it again, and again, and again, and you're diving through the recursive rabbit hole of post-linear art.
Not everything in Alice is so self-referentially neat, but why quibble? Alice is obviously a labor of love and not of commerce, for which we should be grateful.
So buy it!
Alice: $99. East-West Communications: (800) 833 8339, +1 (213) 848 8436.
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Alice
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