Scrutiny In The Great Round – Review

Scrutiny In The Great Round

(Calliope)
by Lex Marburger

How can an artist express the wheel of life – not only birth and death, but the seasons, completions of thought, or even dreams? Endless cycles, wheels within wheels, life undulating all around us. How to make sense of it all in some sort of collapsible, easily graspable format? It can’t be done through conventional means, though it seems that Calliope Productions has found an answer.

Stemming from the $1700 limited edition visionary collage work by Tennessee Rice, Scrutiny in the Great Round CD ROM (Calliope) is a multi-media piece involving poetry, music, art and concept. Presented with a cyclical, multi-level display, we travel between light and dark, Sun and Moon, as we see two sides to an endless story. As each page progresses, we have a chance to see an altered version of the same pattern in the other world (Sun/Moon). We are presented with no rules except for a simple guide on how the program works. Advance pages, click on hot spots to activate animation, music, or speech, or enjoy a continual performance, forgoing interactivity to see what the creators “intended.” But as easy as it sounds, Scrutiny… takes several trips around to comprehend what the designers are getting at. Nothing is clear, all is surreal. Everything is based on a circular pattern, and advancing one page further brings you closer to the beginning. If you view it backwards, well, you see a whole new approach to life. The Birth page as beginning, the remembrance of the past as ending, the images grow beyond the artist’s original scope. The vase that becomes a goddess that becomes a stairway means one thing when viewed forwards, and a completely different thing seen in reverse. There’s even an option which allows you to travel in between pages, non-linearly, seeing a whole new version of “the story,” the story of beauty, love, sex, death, birth, life, recapitulation, and regret.

One of the more wonderful parts about Scrutiny… is the fact that the viewer can make her or his own decision about the images presented. There’s no definite story or plot or point or moral. It simply tells of a fact, presented as conceptual art, and we interpret it as we must. Surreal motifs, such as birds being devoured by prehistoric fish, sea horses, a three-sperm mandala and humans with horse’s heads may overload the frontal lobes and access directly into the back brain, filling it with the information needed to advance as a species. This is truly multi-media art. Images that astound and enlighten, morphs of contradictions, text and tales of love and sex and birth and love… I can’t communicate how easy it is to become absorbed by this CD ROM.