JONAH'S MEMORIES
by Cynthia Beth Rubin

Water is a timeless force. It reminds us that the world is timeless, and the moments of our own lives and experiences are the smallest part of the story. Perhaps it is for this reason that we are fascinated by the incessant movement of waves. They calm us by pulling us out of our individual selves, displaying a natural rhythm that exists despite anything that transpires in our lives.

Jonah's Memories is an interactive web based work that begins with the ceaseless, even motion of waves. Drifting within the cultural constructs of the web, these animated waves are anything but timeless, and yet, at this moment, they seem able to ebb and flow forever. The Internet grants the images a different kind of universality : they have a global life, however fleeting.

Below the surface of the first waves is a series of stories, frozen moments, and natural images that emerge from their own sea of waves, some of which remind us of the specificity of our lives, and others which recall the commonality of nature. Jonah's Memories is a play between the eternity of the waters of the world, and singular moments and thoughts that emerge from this eternity.

That this work is built for the most universal browsers is intentional, as the work was meant to be visible even by those using the slowest computers and web connections in 1998, when the work was completed. The project was begun during the first R.A.T. workshop (Réseau Art Technologie) sponsored by CYPRES (Centre Interculturel de Pratiques Recherches et Echanges Transdisciplinaires) in 1997, at the l'Ecole des Beaux Arts d'Aix-en-Provence. Perhaps it was because I was working with artists from Russia and Brazil, as well as the United States and France (Marseilles) that I felt that universality was essential. But I think that this commitment also came from a deeper desire to promote the web as a new medium of dissemination of thought that can reach people who otherwise might be outside of the ordinary art world.

The actual theme of the work came from a misunderstanding, resulting in a novel interpretation of the Biblical story of Jonah. I understood that Bob Gluck was composing music based on the sounds that Jonah heard as the whale was throwing him into the air. Since we had previously collaborated in producing a computer animation, I wanted to work on a related theme. The idea that Jonah saw the whole world flash before him in this moment is not in the Bible, or in known commentaries, but it became my commentary. In email correspondence to Aix-en-Provence, Bob encouraged me to write my own commentary on the Bible, and to make the metaphor my own.

Thus, I developed the metaphor of the moment when the whale threw Jonah back into the waves to invite the viewer to reflect on the world outside of the contemporary construct of linear time. I imagined that at this moment Jonah, be he real or legendary, transcended the immediacy of his own life, and that he had the power to envision all of eternity as a single event, comprised of details of history and of nature. From the depths of the watery whale, Jonah was thrown into both the changing and unchanging realities of the world.

The images for " Jonah's Memories " are derived from still photographs of real places. Using the software Adobe Photoshop, AfterEffects, and Gifbuilder, the images evolved into a form suited for the web : few colors, but still carrying reference and meaning. The transformation process rendered the images more personal while making them more accessible.

Created from a few web-safe colors, the waves of the introductory page are distilled from photographs of the rippling water in the Providence River, near where the Narragansett Indians once lived. In these animated gifs, the imagery is developed into a universal representation of water.

The eight sections of " Jonah's Memories " reflect very different parts of our world. The question " Did he foresee the walls of Fear and Defense ? ", for example, refers to a time when communities enclosed themselves with physical walls, but the phrase makes us also recall recent acts of insular communities fighting against each other. The future tense of the question keeps this open-ended, as new walls are put in place. The images in this section come from the walls of Avignon (France), Cordoba (Spain), and Demante ( Morocco). The structures seem old to us, but in the greater scheme of time they are recent.

A number of sequences based on nature attest to the timelessness of the world. The water itself, and the clouds, have not changed visually since Biblical times. The desert may have changed location, but deserts persist. If we believe that there was a Jonah, he would have known the same water and sky that we know, and known the empty beauty of the desert.

But what of the things that are alive? If there was a Jonah, would he have known the same trees? The actual trees in this sequence came from Butte, Montana, where I spent a winter many years ago. Thinking that I might leave painting for photography, one day I shot a roll of black and white film of trees. I never seriously photographed again, but these tree shots have appeared many times in my work, each time taking on different personalities. These trees are North American mountain trees, twisted into universal trees.

Similarly, the butterflies and the flowers move from the specific to the general. They came from one part of the world, but they remind us of life forms throughout the world. Flowers and butterflies are especially beautiful among plants and insects, and they merit remembering.

A part of the site is personal. The imagery in " Did he envision my North American World? " comes from Rochester, New York, where I was born. It intersperses the house were I lived as a child with the building where my father had his office. It recalls not my North American world of today, but the post-war North America of the 1950s.

And finally, the section, " Did he envision the Texts of Remembering ? ", is comprised of Torah scrolls from Morocco and Spain, and a page from the Marseilles Bible, a Hebrew manuscript from 1260 Toledo, which today is in the Bibliothèque Municipale in Marseilles. Only part of the Bible is in this collection, but perhaps this contains the parts that tell Jonah's story.

Did Jonah foresee the retelling of his own story in a medium as fluid and uncontainable as the water which almost drowned him, and ultimately provided a new vision ?

Credits

Jonah's Memories is a work by Cynthia Beth Rubin

This project was initiated during the 1997 R.A.T workshop organized by CYPRES and l' Ecole d'art d'Aix-en-Provence