It's nine-thirty
on a Wednesday morning in San Francisco, and Abbe Don has just given me
her keys. "I made coffee," she says, as if I were a member of her family,
"and there's fruit in the refrigerator if you get hungry. I should be back
by noon." As she bustles around the kitchen, showing me the cups and utensils,
Don can't help but laugh at herself, joking that, at heart, she's as much
like a Jewish mother as her great-grandmother, Annie Shapiro, whose photograph
hangs discreetly above the sink. Growing up in the 1970s, Don often spent
Sunday afternoons visiting her great-grandmother's Chicago kitchen, helping
knead the dough for homemade challah and listening to stories that brought
her family's past to life.
"My great-grandmother didn't use formal recipes," she recalls. "She would pour ingredients into her hands to eyeball them, and then she'd throw them into the bowl, saying, 'A bisel und a bisel machn a fule chisel.' A bit and a bit makes a full bowl." That simple idea stood at the core of Annie's approach to nearly everything, and three generations later, her great-granddaughter has integrated it into the very fiber of her being.
This morning is a case in point, as Don tries to balance my presence with her own set of pressures, which include having to get to a meeting by 10. While most people would hesitate to give a relative stranger the run of the house, she takes it in stride. Partly, that has to do with her experience as a professional problem-solver. As president of Abbe Don Interactive, her own Internet design and consulting firm, Don is an interface designer, working with companies such as Sun Microsystems to develop World Wide Web sites and enhance their presence on the Web. But there's a strong ingredient of intimacy and trust here, echoing Don's other work as an electronic storyteller whose art is rooted in the substance of her life. Over the past decade, she has devoted herself to two major family-based projects--the interactive gallery installation We Make Memories and the Web site Bubbe's Back Porch (http://www.bubbe.com)--which use multimedia techniques to recontextualize the anecdotes she first heard in her great-grandmother's kitchen. Both efforts function as virtual embodiments of the bisel und a bisel concept, with small, apparently unconnected story fragments adding up to a richly textured whole.
They have also made Don one of the leading voices in what is taking shape as a full-fledged digital storytelling movement, in which writers and other artists have adapted the capabilities of the computer to make their narratives more conversational, more interactive.
Inside Don's large, airy condominium, memorabilia and technology overlap in every corner, even as they resolve themselves in her work. The front hall features an intricate mosaic of family pictures, many recognizable from We Make Memories, while in the living room, a wall of computer work stations and monitors represents the soul of Don's professional life. On the bookshelves, collections of cyber-theory sit next to The First Hebrew Primer and The Torah: A Modern Commentary. Centering everything is another photograph, hung over the fireplace, in which Don's great-grandmother poses stiffly on her sofa with a 50th anniversary cameo of her husband and herself behind her head. Between the memories and the machinery, there's a feeling here of being balanced on the cusp of something, as if your great-grandmother had been reinvented as a cyber-star.
In many ways, of course, that's exactly what has happened. It is Annie whose stories frame We Make Memories, and it is Annie--or an extrapolation of her --who anchors Bubbe's Back Porch. For her part, Don is careful to distinguish between her real great-grandmother and the electronic version. "If Bubbe is based on Annie Shapiro, she's not Annie Shapiro," Don says. "Annie Shapiro was a specific person who lived from 1891 to 1984. Bubbe is a character who's a hybrid of Annie Shapiro and Abbe Don playing on the Web."
At the heart of this, Don suggests, is the elusive question of identity, which the Internet, by its very nature, has made more fluid than ever before. Bubbe is not a character like someone in a book or a movie; if nothing else, she has an e-mail address, which allows her to exist independently, as it were. Thinking about that, you start to see how even the possibility of interactivity can alter our experience of an artist's work. More than anything, this is what Don wants to investigate--the middle ground where medium and message play off each other, where we not only absorb her great-grandmother's stories but engage with them, as if we were standing in her kitchen ourselves.
The Digital Storytelling Festival takes place in the small mountain town of Crested Butte, Colo., where every September, storytellers, theorists and other enthusiasts come together to celebrate this developing form. Last year, Don was in Crested Butte to try a storytelling strategy that combined the best of the virtual and non-virtual worlds. Her idea was a simple one--to gather a group of people and encourage them to tell their stories, which she then uploaded directly to the Internet. Don calls this the "Digital Story Bee," a kind of high-tech version of the traditional quilting bee, where women gather to sew quilts and share stories of their lives.
If the Story Bee seems like a quintessentially contemporary exercise, it's really just a natural extension of the work Don has done throughout her life. As early as junior high school, she began to interview her great-grandmother for a project on memory and storytelling, and once she got to Pomona College in the early '80s, she melded those impulses with the brave new world of postmodern theory, seeking a framework that might be true to both her great-grandmother and herself.
From the outset, Don was less interested in stories for their sentimental value than as a type of alternate history, where the process of remembering was as important as the content. Even more to the point was the idea of representing not just the stories but the form of the stories. Don's first attempt at this was her Pomona senior thesis, an interactive artist's book called No Soup, Just Matzo Balls, which used the model of her great-grandmother's scrapbook to present a mix of photos and story fragments, filtered through Annie's voice.
"My great-grandmother told fragmented stories," Don explains. "She would start a fragment, and something would interrupt us, or she'd pick it up later. The scrapbook lends itself to that."
Fragmentation, of course, is nothing if not a postmodern strategy, a way of breaking down what might otherwise seem a fixed, reliable narrative and opening it to the subjectivity of the reader, who must take all these bits and pieces and arrange them to make sense. It's also a pretty good description of how digital storytelling works, where meaning is dependent on the interplay between artist and audience, to a nearly collaborative extent.
After graduating from Pomona, Don spent a year at California Institute of the Arts, where she experimented with video, before helping put together a multimedia oral history exhibition called The Peoples of Los Angeles as part of the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984. Around the same time, Don bought her first computer. "It seemed there was a potential to do something with the computer that was going to be fundamentally different, both in the creation and, more important, in the reader/viewer experience," she remembers. "I didn't know what it was going to be like, but I had this intuition that it was going to be the medium of my generation, and I wanted to be part of that."
To explore this intuition further, Don moved to New York and enrolled in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she earned a master's degree in 1989. At NYU, she developed her first substantial interactive piece--We Make Memories, which combined video clips of herself, her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother, along with photographs and audio recordings, to trace her family's history from 1890 to the present day. Among the challenges was to construct an operating system that, like the scrapbook format of No Soup, Just Matzo Balls, would reflect her great-grandmother's storytelling style. To do this, she created a literal time line of family pictures that a viewer could scroll through, clicking on images to move back and forth among fragments of narrative. But for all its innovations, We Make Memories lacked one key component--a mechanism for its viewers to add stories of their own. Between 1989 and 1992, as the piece toured museums and galleries from Chicago to Helsinki, Don sought to address this by installing a second computer work station where visitors could scan in pictures and record personal narratives in an embryonic version of the Story Bee. The technology, however, was unwieldy and Don was never fully satisfied.
The turning point occurred in September 1994, when, at a friend's suggestion, Don went on a contemporary vision quest, working for two weeks with a Paiute-trained facilitator before heading for Mount Shasta, in Northern California, where she spent three days and nights in the woods, alone but for the shadows of her mind.
Up on the mountainside, fasting, meditating, Don had a series of revelations. "By the second day," she notes, "I wouldn't say you hallucinate, but you start to have something akin to visions, certainly on some other level of consciousness. I saw figures, mostly female figures, purple, liquidy, illuminated, in the shape of Hebrew letters. At that point, I didn't know Hebrew. I just knew that there was some kind of message in those letters, and I tried to write down what I was seeing. Then, on the last night, I had an experience where I basically thought I was going to die, which often happens on these things, and then you're sort of reborn. And that night at the very end, I saw my great-grandmother. Her face appeared in the mountain, and it was extremely powerful. And I came back knowing that I needed to work on my own work, and really trust my instincts about my personal truth and not be so vulnerable to all kinds of external messages, in particular the hype and seduction factor about technology."
When Don talks about the hype and seduction of technology, she touches on one of the central issues faced by any artist who works in an electronic medium: the extent to which machinery's bells and whistles fulfill, or fail to, the requirements of art. Nowhere is this more relevant than in regard to the Internet, which Don discovered in early 1994. Although she admits that "the first time I saw it, I wanted to put No Soup, Just Matzo Balls on the Web," Don was initially skeptical about the medium. "As multimedia designers, we have to ask ourselves: Are we in some way addressing a need that somebody actually has or cares about? Or is it just a need that we as media designers are going to impose?"
Such questions reside at the very center of Bubbe's Back Porch, a Web site that eschews the flashier applications of the Internet, relying on the interplay of text and image to create a sense of place. There is no video here, no audio, no technological iterations to overwhelm the eyes. Instead, we find ourselves slowly submerged in a sea of family stories, loosely arranged by theme and content, anchored by the comforting rhythms of Bubbe's words.
"We use stories," Don says, "as a way to construct our own selves, our own identities. There are hypotheses that people who lose their homeland, or are forced to leave a homeland, actively construct a sense of self because there isn't a tangible place to look back to. In a way, my great-grandmother created her own mythology of who she was with her very well-documented scrapbooks."
In the three years that Bubbe's Back Porch has been on the Web, Don has systematically replaced all but two of Annie's stories--the digital version of No Soup, Just Matzo Balls, and a riveting piece called "Cold Forceps," which recounts the experience of giving birth to twins in 1913--with other people's memories, some solicited, the rest randomly submitted by Bubbe's virtual guests. Like Annie's stories, they are mostly anecdotal, bits of history preserved like fabric remnants, only to be stitched into the patchwork logic of the site. There's a certain chaotic element to this, if only in the way that opening the project so directly strips away the most basic aspects of authorial control. "Sometimes it works," she says, "and sometimes it doesn't. But because of my training as an interface designer, my impulse is to develop a framework that's software based, dynamic, and isn't fully created until the audience has participated for itself."
This, of course, may be the most radical innovation digital storytelling has to offer us--that by ceding absolute power over your work, you open it up to a deeper authority, the authority of the community, where art becomes, finally, more than a monologue.
It's a Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco, and Abbe Don is back at home. She settles into a chair in front of a computer and searches for a program to illustrate where she plans to go from here. Even before her vision quest, Don was active in the Jewish Renewal movement--a politically progressive, spiritually focused form of Judaism that has flowered in recent years on the West Coast--but after Mount Shasta, she is learning Hebrew and studying for the bat mitzvah she never had. She is also working with The Jewish Museum San Francisco to adapt electronic storytelling to a computer-based form of midrash (a way of interpreting the Torah) she calls Digital Drash. It's a natural progression, since Don's work has been steeped in her Jewishness all along. As she says, "We Make Memories and Bubbe's Back Porch take personal stories and make them mythical. And Digital Drash takes mythical stories and makes them personal."
Don clicks on an icon, and the monitor fills with the image of a mountain, behind which Hebrew letters float like clouds upon a changing sky. There are the sounds of drums and women singing Middle Eastern songs, while above them, Don enunciates precisely, delivering a narrative that conflates her experience on Mount Shasta with the story of Sinai, and imagines her among the faithful, waiting for Moses to come down from the Mount. It's hypnotic, rhythmic, building to its final image, in which these parallel strands come together, and the voice I hear is solely Don's. "I was completely alone," she intones through the speaker. "Though I could not see the others, I was aware of their presence. A voice called out to each of us simultaneously a chorus of individual meanings. 'You are woman. Woman who loves women. Woman free from fear.'"
Listening to Don recite her midrash, I'm reminded once again that among the prevailing myths of cyberspace is the idea that it enables us to free ourselves of history, which, in a way, is true. But in another way, it also operates a lot like memory, full of circularity and lapses, and a meandering logic that doesn't let on where you're going until you're there. This is what Don is working toward, and in the end, it's another trait she and her great-grandmother share. After all, as Annie herself tells us, "Sometimes when my eyes hurt so bad, I close them and watch the images on the back of my eyelids, just enough light comes through and I can see everything in my imagination clearly, actually, it's not so much my imagination as my memory: like the little brook in the back of our house in the old country. I don't have to tell you when you're as old as I am, you have a lot of children, but you also have a lot of memories."
David L. Ulin is a free-lance writer living in Los Angeles. This article was originally published in the Chicago Tribune Magazine.
