Simon Biggs’ The Great Wall of China is a cross-media work published as an artist’s book and interactive CD-ROM and also produced as a gallery-based installation. The piece takes its title, and much of its inspiration, from the work of the novelist Franz Kafka, whose classic writings still provide us with some of our most compelling metaphorical insights into the complex, proliferating information networks which increasingly dominate our lives.

The Great Wall of China is effectively a story-telling machine: a wall of words (all derived from the original Kafka story), which re-combine in ever-changing conjunctions as the reader interacts with the work. In some areas of the Wall, words are composed as short prose fragments, which evolve in relation to each other, and within themselves, such that themes and events gradually emerge.

Other components are structured more as poems; yet others as Koans or Chinese aphorisms. Interaction with (the reading of) any one text will not only transform that text, but also all the other texts. Each text is completely fluid. Nothing has been pre-written. It is only through the process of reading that the texts come into existence. In this way, an apparently infinite number of stories are (re)constructed.

The Great Wall of China by Simon Biggs.

Audio by Stuart Jones.

Produced by Film and Video Umbrella.

CD-ROM published with ellipsis, London, March 1999. ISBN 1 899858 64 4

£20.00

http://www.ellipsis.com/catalogue/

http://www.beyond2000.co.uk/umbrellarchive/