I love 
. Do you? Click here.
This was one of 11 pieces in an Easter 1998 art exhibition at Cityside Baptist Church, Auckland, by members of the Cityside congregation. The exhibition's theme was "Stations of the Cross" (it was the second annual exhibition on this theme).
For the station "Jesus is Nailed to the Cross", I used John's account (19:19-22) of the sign which Pilate - to the scandal of the Jewish authorities - had erected above Jesus' head. Traditionally, these signs said why the person was being crucified, and Pilate's sign said "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews".
The sign was in Aramaic (the local language), Greek (the most commonly understood language), and Latin (the official language). I have substituted English for Aramaic, not only because English is my local language and I didn't want the sign to be completely incomprehensible to non-classically-educated viewers, but because I didn't have time to find the Aramaic version of the words. The sign changes between the three versions, and once every four cycles asks a question in the words of Jesus himself.
The sign gave me the idea of placing changing texts to either side of the cross as well, giving what various other people through the ages have said about Jesus' identity. In the end I placed the biblical texts on the (viewer's) right, and the non-biblical texts on the left. They are equal in number. I don't necessarily endorse all the non-biblical texts (notably that by Albert Schweitzer), but have allowed the different texts to comment on each other by placing them side by side.
The piece was originally displayed on (and hence optimised for) my own computer, a Pentium 266 with a 17" monitor, set for this purpose to 1152 x 864 pixels, and using MS Internet Explorer 4.0 in full screen mode with the toolbar on auto-hide. If you have a monitor with maximum resolution under about 1024 x 768, and/or can't use the whole of the screen as your viewing area, you won't be able to see the whole piece at once.
It was also run locally, and even over a 56K modem it's frankly a bit slow to load. But once it's there it should run OK. Contact me if it doesn't.
I sketched the background image in three parts with an HB pencil on cartridge paper, then scanned it using a Umax Astra 600P scanner in black and white photograph mode. I then manipulated it in Adobe Photoshop 4.0.
The two hands were originally the same image, drawn at a larger scale than the body to make it easier to get them looking right; the feet were also drawn separately. The greyscales were added during this process.
The Java applet used is "WildView" by ModernMinds. For those familiar with WildView, I used three instances of the WVPanelFX module, triggered by two instances of WVPanelTimer, to do the fades between texts.
The sign was created in Microsoft Word 97 using several fonts (Symbol for the Greek, Perpetua Titling MT for the Latin, Cooper Black for the English, and Footlight MT Light for the question), pasted into Microsoft Image Composer 1.5 and saved as a .GIF, and used as the basis for a hidden WVPanelImage panel called by one WVPanelFX instance. (Different parts of the image are shown at different times, rather than using four images, to speed up loading and reduce the number of files managed).
The side panels are hidden WVPanelText panels which are changed by the timer, then called by the corresponding WVPanelFX instances (again triggered by the timer).
A total of nine files (one html, one jpeg, one gif, the main WildView applet class and four of its module classes, and a text file to co-ordinate the WildView modules and supply the side panel texts) work together to produce the effect. They add up to about 100KB.
I love |
You are visitor number to this page since 2
May 1998.