Wicked (2004-2005) Wicked is computer-screen based with netscape open and on a news page (http://news.bbc.co.uk/). The work is an interactive piece for your personal computer at home and functions as a model for an infinitely changing digital piece with the image of your choice.

By playing the movie the existing screen is doubled and the viewer/user is asked to engage with the skin-like screen image as if distorting it, transforming it. Interacting with this “open surface” a painterly or sculptural dimension is revealed generating a site of technology for non-productive action and imaginative play. This however is suddenly interrupted by a warning: The computer system has been corrupted. Please refer to the manufacturer to reconfigure the system firmware. - followed by a black screen.

Wicked engages with question of: (fear of) losing control (the ambiguous relation to technology; the user is always confronted with a likely virus or something that 'destroys' her/his computer hardware); doubling; the physicality of the computer screen; the use of time: the moment in relation to a narrative; losing authorship (no control over the piece and its use); the 'black screen'.

The specific software used in this piece for doubling the pre-existing screen, gives the work the structure of a dynamic work that changes infinitely. Each time you play the movie it is different, a variable of the pre-existing screen. Thus it is multiple and never the same. The piece is most effective with the news page open when (the meaning of the) daily news are constantly de-formed, or re-configured by the inter-active viewer/user.

The work has been developed out of my interest in the way non-commercial animation, or animation as an artwork, can articulate the idea of a creative potential in our relation to the computer as well as pointing out its non-productive and imaginative aspects. Along these lines I particularly explore limits that come with the image produced and consumed within the digital leading to visually incomplete images. - or the image as multiplicity.

Wicked is published here as part of /seconds (http://www.slashseconds.org/), an online publishing project initiated and edited by Derek Horton and Peter Lewis.