Zoey, fifteen, unsatisfied with her boring life with her single mother, surfs endlessly on her computer. The Web offers a much more attractive life than the one with her post-hippie mother who understands nothing about technology. Her favourite site is U&I dOT cOM, a kind of dating community for adolescents. Zoey, who can give free rein to her awakening sexuality in this on-line community, flourishes. She does of course meet her dream-flirt in cyberspace: a boy as innocent as she is. That U&I dOT cOM takes good care of its on-line customers is apparent when Zoey wins something that augments her virtual enjoyment: a flexcam. Her 'boyfriend' has one too, so now the cyberflirts have telematic video contact via the Web and the sparks truly start flying. They are, in a video-virtual way, inseparable. In spite of the mother's pedagogic protests the daughter's rapture is so strong that Mom's resistance falls away and she agrees to visit a site suitable to her situation: 'parents without partners'. But virtual influence over the daughter goes so far that the adolescent love threatens to take an Oedipal turn. The ultimate 'trigger' for a 'shoot 'em up' scene (Quake) in which Zoey chases her mother virtually. Whether or not the technophobic woman actually plays the game is unclear. But everything turns out for the best in the end and the Web triumphs as family therapist and lonely hearts bureau. The virtual world Zoey lives in is only partly geared to current WWW interfaces and is more a slightly primitive hallucination of possible telepresentation (including the shabby edges, blue screen shots/video-esthetics). Nevertheless Miller does succeed with this instruction tape in extracting enough patience for the skimpy theme. The Web Rules O.K.! (Also for curious little girls).
– Willem van Weelden |
Camera: Craig Lewis
Sound: Paul Herspiegel
Set design, costumes: Amanda Ramos
Cyber art: Laurie Brown
Music: Manders
Effects: Craig McPherson
Computer technique: Rhonda Lynn, Julian Hall
Advies: David Miller
With: Zoey Newman-Hughes, Jane Newman, Mike Antonakos
Editing: Kristi Macauly, Lucas van Dyk
Make-up: Samatha Rumball
Production: Banff Center for the Arts
Branda Miller, 1952, New York (USA)
Lives and works in New York (USA)
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