Morfill, S. & Dorrian, E., 2002.

My Voice in Your Head

'My Voice in Your Head' by Edward Dorrian and Sally Morfill was a new work resulting from an invitation from Variablemedia, a site created by Michelle Deignan and Simon Goodwin in 2001 to explore notions of place, process, temporality and artistic practice. They have co-ordinated a series of web projects involving artists making work specifically for their www.variablemedia.org site. Artists occupy the site's space for a period of between one and three months. This empty space is available for the artist(s) to change, update and add to during their project's run. A criteria for these projects is that the artists present work over time through this medium which lends itself to temporality, change and development. Variablemedia.org presents the artists’ work in an unmediated form; all explanatory material and archives are held at the sister www.variablemedia.info site.

This new piece involved the artists working for a medium that they had not previously explored as a means of showing work. As an inevitably site-specific work, they chose to deal with issues of simple interactivity and navigation, responding to the existing architecture of the browser window. The outcome was a ten episode 'story' that was updated on a weekly basis.

The user is presented with a frame-by-frame sequence from a video, showing the face of a man hearing and subsequently reciting a story. Each video frame is contained in a separate web page, the title bar of which contains a full sentence from the same story. Clicking on the image reveals the next frame in the sequence, as well as revealing the sentence-by-sentence narrative. The full sequence of page titles reviewed via a browser's "history" function makes apparent the text of a full episode.

Site structure, navigation and the nature of the 'performance' combine in fracturing the temporal experience of the narrative. The actor's speech is frustrated by his listening and recounting process and also by the fragmentation of the video media. The disjunction between the breadth of information provided by image and text is amplified by the variance in download times of the web page structure - page title and content – video still.

To mark the end of the first year of online residencies Variablemedia co-ordinated an event/exhibition of work that elaborated on the 6 pieces that they had hosted. Sally Morfill and Edward Dorrian collaborated on a two screen video work that re-presented the material produced for My Voice in Your Head. The event was called VM01; it ran from 20/06/03 – 22/06/03 at Hoxton Distillery, London N1. The work is referenced on Hoxton Distillery’s online archive, see www.hoxtondistillery.org.uk