A R C H I V E1 9 9 7  
15th
  Ken Feingold
JCJ-Junkman
  Germany/USA 1996
Cd-rom, colour, mono
 
The central figure is the head of a ventriloquist's dummy (Jimmy Charlie Jimmy) who stares at you with a black background behind him. As soon as you click on his mouth, you hear a ‘funny’ sound fragment, for example a toilet being flushed, or a synthetic belch. There is a storm of images going round his head. The images surface, and disappear again only to reappear somewhere else. The image shower of web bites which race across the screen with the speed of a stroboscope, is fodder for click-happy interactors. You have to try to click the images, which is not easy. If you are fit enough and succeed in touching the logo, your reward is to hear a somewhat longer sound fragment. It is a varied collection of various messages spoken in different languages, or abstract sounds. They continue to repeat until you succeed in touching another sound bite. This game with a sort of zero interactivity, fascinates in an irritating kind of way. There is even a type of obtuse addiction attached to it. As soon as you allow yourself to be enticed into playing this ventriloquist game, you won't know what you have started, or how you can stop. You are trapped in visual and auditory junk that continually demands attention and eggs you on to go even further. All the material, With the exception of Jimmy's head, comes from the World Wide Web. It is hyper rubbish. The emotion stimulated by this game is one of intense indifference and the feeling that everything is actually okay, at least, as long as the click mania can continue. Because of all the voices that he can assume, the figure of the ventriloquist becomes a sort of meta personality who comments ironically on the rubbish that he himself generates, by providing even more rubbish. This makes Jimmy Charlie Jimmy's mouth itself a sort of technological trash can that vomits reflective, relativizing messages. The sympathetic aspect of this mechanical pig is that he warns that you can be vomited under with indigestible data from the stomach of our culture. Wired digerati eat your heart out!

– Willem van Weelden

Production Zentrum für Kunst- und Medientechnolgie Karlsruhe / Artintact 3



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