Waxweb
"Waxweb" (1993-1999) is the webversion of the film "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" (1991), both created by David Blair.
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Synopsis:
Jacob Maker is a beekeeper who designs flight simulators. One day, the past arrives out of the future, and Jacob enters WAXWEB.
Waxweb is created by David Blair (1993-1999, final version). It is the hypermedia version of the theatrically-distributed electronic feature film WAX or the discovery of television among the bees (1991). Visitors of the website can play the movie from beginning to end, as an 85 minute theatrical feature, or click the "hypervideo" at any time.
The movie has is 85min long, and has 1200 shots. Every shot is recomposed inside 25 unique pages/spaces.
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/wax/
Wax and the Discovery of Television among the Bees twists the linear character of film by using computertechnology and non-linear narrative. It is an extensive project of electronic cinema and hypertext, first produced as a film of 85 minutes in 1991 and later poured into the net in 1993. As one of the first expanded videos online, it is amplified with several thousand hypertext links, thousands of stills and more than 500 segments which viewers have access to. The film, a virtual surreality resonating with flashy techno-poetics, lead the viewer through labyrinths of space and time, life, death, memory annihilation and rebirth. The equivalent of white-water rafting through history, the occult and militarism: metamorphosis a constant in the cult movie. Its strange story of the mysterious Mesopotamian Bees, envelope the main character Jakob, in a 'grotesque miasma' of past and synthetic realities. The space suited, bee-bonneted figure of Jakob, who otherwise designs gunsight displays at a flight simulation factory, finds himself 'transported' by the telepathic bees to spaces of the past and living present. Summary is defied, as photography and archive material form the backbone of its hypermedia context - the film was edited digitally, allowing the integration of archival film, location video and computer animation to expand its one-linear layering of references - "it's a book with moving images".
