My sister is in town, and I went with her to pick up her wedding dress. It’s quite nice. I said it was cute, and I got scolded for that. We meandered through the A.G.O. and some some interesting pieces of art. I insisted on seeing the ‘Europe from 1100-1800’ section, but we saw the group of seven and the modern art sections too. Good fun. I saw one exhibit that interested me…it kind of reminded me of MOOspace, oddly enough. It consisted of a film projector showing a loop of a girl in a red dress dancing, and a room filled with speakers on poles, and the artist reading loops of text. It was at that point that I started to wonder if I couldn’t convince my sister to consider MOOspace as artistic space. She was talking about making her usually static dolls move and do things….she sounded like me getting frustrated with my static MOO project and wanting to make it interact and engage the reader. My sister is mostly terrified of technology, so that may or may not go very far.

On the topic of my own project: my first verb! I brought the plague to Bingen! When you visit the Butcher’s living quarters, and touch the fuzzy little animal there (actually a rat), you begin a 15 minute sequence of messages that simulates the symptoms of the plague. What pleases me most is that it keeps affecting the reader even when they leave the room and walk around. Some of the gruesome details:

You feel an uncomfortable heat in your armpits, neck, and groin and you lean over to throw up more blood.
You reach up and touch your neck. You feel large, hard, bulging nodes that seem to be causing the pain you’ve been feeling.
The swelling under your arms hurts you terribly, and then suddenly, the glands burst. You find yourself a mess of pus and blood.

15 minutes of it, yes. Oh, I’m so proud. Jason has yet to get the plague. It’s a goal for me. Having a terrible craving for guacomole. Must go satisfy it.