North
‹North› is an online adaptation of the same named german novel ‹nord› by Felix Zbinden. The work is an audiovisual, digital, crime-detective story in the full length of a feature film. The three chapters of north tell a story of a woman called Ly who is commissioned to shadow a man.
Her search for clues is recorded in text, audio and image. Folllowing the three different chapters of the online fiction, the story breaks apart in chapter two and gets fully out of control in chapter three.
PART 1: It starts with a man's voice telling us that drivers travelling north are four times more likely to be involved in a crash than those heading south. The screen is split in four small windows. Per mouseclick on an image or an underlined text the content of one or several windows changes. The story of Ly and how she is looking for the wanted man, named T, is told in a associative, fragmentary way. Ly travels around by car, takes photographs, records voices, shoots films, writes her reports, but she fails over and over again to find some evidence for the existence of T.
PART 2: Ly decides to start again from the beginning, this time with herself as the subject of her investigation. 'T' is not mentioned anymore. The story falls apart. Each of the four windows follows its own action; fragments, particles of the story. The central motifs in the second chapter are Ly's self reflection, references to her identity and her language.
PART 3: The story gets out of control. The story breaks away. There is no story. The user can't interact no more. He watches how windows layer one above the other, disappearing and showing up again. Known elements from part one and part two appear again, new ones arrive, until at the end everything empties and you find yourself again at the start page where everything began.