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The Watch Detail

Bill Seaman
1990

Bill Seaman's first major interactive work was entitled The Watch Detail. Video images, sound and text that addressed the subject of time were explored interactively. This work employed Macintosh Hypercard media, that was used to control an interactive laserdisc. Thus the work became a meta-media time piece. A large database of time-oriented images, and texts could be navigated, juxtaposed and/or re-oriented in time.

The media-time of the image could also be explored where a participant could move forward, backward, stay still, as well as move fast forward and fast backward. An elaborate poetic text made of short individual observations about time was made available to the user of the system.

The participant could juxtapose any of the video and still material, move from chapter to chapter, edit segments, trigger sequences of encoded database material in relation to chosen selected textual criteria, view a set of still images with text superimpositions, or view material in a linear mode. A linear video also exists with this title.

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