"Paradise Tossed" by Jill Scott gives the opportunity - from the point of view of a woman - to explore four different apartments and their technical equipment in different time periods.

"Paradise Lost" or "Tossed"?
"Paradise Tossed" is a dreamy computer animated survey of technological terrain, idealism and design from four young women's points of view. It uses Macro-Mind Director's lingo to access sections of a twelve minute 3D animation on a Sony laserdisc player. The menus are laid out like pages from a photo album and by touching the screen the participant can not only choose segments to be played on another screen but can also construct timeless associations. Margaret Mead once said.. 'Utopia is built on the great diversity of human propensity and gift and it must be ... redundant enough to catch the developed imagination of each different member of society'.
This insight into the redundancy of the human condition was inspirational as a beginning point for research that led me to a series of archetypical assumptions. Carrying on from "Machinedreams" I continued to research and compare eras,(1900s, 1930s, 1960s and 1990s) conscious that although they exist a generation apart, together they encapsulate the tremendous extent of environmental and domestic change we have witnessed since the beginning of this century. It occurred to me that interactivity could provide people with archetypical scenarios that they would be curious to visit and in doing so may question the reason for their choices and why so many people's ideals were similar. In "Paradise Tossed" participants can enter dream homes from the history of design which are marked with the caption "Step into the home of your dreams?" The four animations with architectural styles: Art Noveaux, Art Deco, Opp Art and Space Age, unfold accordingly. The choices are redundant enough to reaffirm utopian cliches, but I thought, by putting them in the mosaic framework of the interactive design, they could all transpose time and stand together as current valid options of desire even today.
It is this "timelessness of desire" as emphasized by the title "Paradise Tossed", I was aiming to present as an interactive playground. In fact, the heraldic pun of the title itself indicates "the tossing of desire", which part of the proverbial "salad" of idealism will the participant choose to "eat" next? Another section provides a set of choices within the technological terrain. Here, domestic technology is used as a metaphor for the history of the machine-human interface, and again the change and manipulation within the women's workplace becomes apparent as domestic appliances seductively present themselves over a landscape which flows with curves of the female body. A very typical advertisement slogan is used to reaffirm this, the viewer is asked "Just step into the technology of Tomorrow".
At another point the viewer can also "Flip through these Eyecatching Headlines" which gives them authentic pages displaying magazine headlines from each era. Another menu displays the caption "Travel with us into Another World" and this allows the participant to witness transport on a boat, a train, a car and a plane respective of the shift in mobility development that took place over this century. The heraldic statements are intentionally seductive and reminiscent of the selling methods used to convince the average buyer. It was hoped, in "Paradise Tossed", that the participant would see through the seduction.


Technical Background

HW: IBM, Macintosh
SW: Topaz, Lumena, MMD, Photoshop

Jill Scott (AUS), born 1952, lives and works in Germany. Master of Fine Arts and Communications at San Francisco State University. Teacher training at the Melbourne Teachers College at Melbourne University. Art and Design graduate of the Prahan College of Advanced Education, Melbourne. She is currently a professor at the Saar College of the Plastic Arts in Saarbrücken and works in video art, video drawings, and computer graphics, as well as interactive installations and performance. Numerous exhibitions, most recently at SIGGRAPH '91 and '92, the Montbilliard Video Festival '92 and the São Paolo Video Festival '92.