Scenes from Out of the Labyrinth

Aleksandra Dulic: interactive animation and perfomance
Kenneth Newby: music composition and perfomance

presented at:

ELEKTRA - Arts numériques / Digital Arts, 2006
INTERACTIVE FUTURES: New Media Crossing Boundaries, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria. Victoria International Film and Video Festival, Victoria 2006

Scenes from Out of the Labyrinth is a re-telling of the Greek narrative of master engineer Daedalus and his ill-fated son Icarus. The narrative is retold in a form that speaks to the contemporary dilemma of a world dominated by a ubiquitous technological apparatus and overwhelmed with an engineered decay of social relations that disrupt time and space and the particulars of place, the local, and the communal.

The tension of the story builds as Daedalus, intoxicated with his technical prowess, abandons morality at several key junctures of the narrative and invents his way out of the challenges he encounters. His mastery of technique ultimately fails him leading him to a final tragic loss of his own son. The narrative is rich in symbolism, not only related to our technologically intense present but also to notions of deviance in relation to the relations of the human to nature and the role of the female in mediating these relations.