Shanidar, Safe Return

Extended until July 14 ! at Participant After Dark << Click on the link to enter the work

Drawing of skull of Neanderthal

A long-long time ago, if I can still remember…

Shanidar, Safe Return my interactive story, now being hosted by Participant After Dark, the ONLINE venue for Participant Inc. Gallery, NY, has been extended until July 14, 2024. Shanidar is curated by Itziar Barrios.

Timeline: 40,000 years BCE. In Shanidar, Safe Return, a band of Neanderthals and their Cro-Magnon companions ncluding Haizea, Esti, Oihana, Eneko and Uda, make an epic journey from what is now southern France to a place called Shanidar, a large cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, situated along tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Along the way they learn that humanity is blessed by its heritage of mixing and sharing everything, including genes. As in all things evolutionary – including food, shelter, community and love – it’s a matter of survival. Their shaman’s lion guide keeps them on the right path.

While writing Shanidar, I did extensive research into Paleolithic Eurasia, the human species that lived there, their probable habits, foods and methods of travel, as well as their music and art. Many of the graphics are my versions of specific Paleolithic artworks, some of which I have seen in person, but many of which I have copied from the drawings by André Leroi-Gourhan’s in his 1993 book Gesture and Speech. I used other sources as well including photos and drawings in works by Jean Clottes, Marjia Gimbutas, and Max Rafael. I composed the music and recorded effects for the soundtrack and borrowed, with credits, sound effects and music from other sources.  Shanidar is a work of speculative fiction backed up by a lot of research into the deep past. Who were we?

animated gif of a hand-drawn campfire

What is Interactive Fiction, and How Can You Experience Shanidar?

Shanidar is entirely online, a work of cyber-art, interactive fiction, a computer-based experience. It’s similar to playing a game, where you go to the link provided, https://participantafterdark.art/, view the video intro, and enter the story by clicking on the PLAY button.

Writers create all kinds of interactive stories – it’s a very active culture/sub-culture – using a variety of software platforms as a base, then adding text, images, videos, and a sound track to bring the reader/player closer to the action, or possibly even inside the action.

From Wikipedia:

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction

So, Shanidar, Safe Return is a web-based, interactive story. Have fun with it!


Cecilia Dougherty, Shanidar, Safe Return


April 14 – May 26, 2024
on participantafterdark.art


PARTICIPANT INC is pleased to present the AFTER DARK launch of Cecilia Dougherty, Shanidar, Safe Return, an interactive web-based work of speculative fiction on participantafterdark.art.
 
Timeline: 40,000 years BCE. In Shanidar, Safe Return, a band of Neanderthals and their Cro-Magnon companions, Haizea, Esti, Oihana, Eneko and Uda, make an epic journey from what is now southern France to a place called Shanidar, a large cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, situated along tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Along the way they learn that humanity is blessed by its heritage of mixing and sharing everything, including genes. Like everything – like food, shelter, and love – it’s a matter of survival. Their lion guide keeps them on the right path.
 
While writing Shanidar, Cecilia Dougherty did extensive research into Paleolithic Eurasia, the human species that lived there, their probable habits, foods, and methods of travel, as well as their music and art. Many of the graphics are Dougherty’s versions of specific Paleolithic artworks, some of which the artist has seen in person, but many of which were based on the drawings of André Leroi-Gourhan’s book Gesture and Speech, and other sources including photos and drawings in works by Jean Clottes, Marjia Gimbutas, and Max Rafael. Dougherty composed the music and recorded effects for the soundtrack, as well as borrowing, with credits, sound effects and music from other sources. 
 
There are 138 passages to this story – you can follow it linearly, but the best way to read it is to wander through it, criss-crossing backwards and forwards until you’ve read the whole story.
 
Shanidar, Safe Return is speculative fiction. The artist has taken many liberties with the science in imagining the temperaments, relationships, joys, sorrows, fears, spirituality, and essential humanity of people living in the deep past.

Curated by Itziar Barrio

A white outline of a hand with white shading around it is centered in the foreground of a distant, black starry sky. Drawing by Cecilia Dougherty for Shanidar, Safe Return, based on 40,000 year old hand stencil at the El Castillo cave complex in Puente Viesgo, Spain.
Drawing by Cecilia Dougherty for Shanidar, Safe Return, based on 40,000 year old hand stencil at the El Castillo cave complex in Puente Viesgo, Spain.


Full announcement here

Cyland Media Art Laboratory Picks up my Cyber Art for Distribution and Archiving

Drawing from interactive fiction by Cecilia Dougherty based on drawing of a mammoth from El Castillo paleolithic site in Spain.

Three web-based pieces: Time Before Memory (Interactive Fiction 2019), Drift (interactive photo essay, 2020), and my newest piece, Shanidar, Safe Return (Interactive Fiction, 2023). These works are viewable on my website and are now a part of an international collection of web-based works.

From their website: https://videoarchive.cyland.org/

CYLAND VIDEO ARCHIVE
International Digital Online Archive

The CYLAND Video Archive (since 2008) is one of the first systematized online video art platform of its kind: most of the works gathered here are accessible for view on the internet at the archive website. 

The idea to make video art works and films open for the public viewing online comes from the beginning. It was a very progressive thing to demonstrate and promote video art online and to have this exchange between classic and young artists and to make an international networking platform. CYLAND Video Archive is a great information and educational resource. Each year the Cyland Video Archive produces an international competition video art program for the CYFEST media art festival.

One of the tasks of the archive is to build an open and accessible collection, to protect works of art from being locked in private collections, and to prevent their technical basis from becoming outdated. The archive is structured in two parts: videos on the website with open access (artists personal pages), and the offline collection for professionals accessible at the archive office. Currently, the collection comprises over 600 videos from different countries. The collection includes video art, experimental films, computer graphics, 3D animation, stop-motion animation, poetic video, video documentation of art and education projects on cutting-edge technologies. 

Shanidar, Safe Return

Find Shanidar here: https://shanidar.ceciliadougherty.com/

What is Interactive Fiction? It’s a way to tell a story by having the reader, or visitor to the story site, “play” the story by making choices about what part of the story to go to next – the reader can navigate forwards and backwards throughout the story. There is no directly linear way to experience Interactive Fiction, and much of it has not only text – the story – but also graphics, animation, and sound. It provides a rich, inviting and immersive pathway into narratives.

Trailer for Shanidar, Safe Return, launched Oct. 23, 2023

Shanidar, Safe Return is an interactive story that places a young Neanderthal woman named Haizea in the center of a community’s struggle for survival, as the Cro-Magnins (Homo sapiens) migrate to their once-peaceful territories. Haizea and her band of mixed – Neanderthal and Cro-Magnin – travelers must walk the distance from danger in what is now southern France to safety in their old refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, a place called Shanidar. They meet a group of Denisovans on the way, and receive guidance from the old H. heidelbergensis shaman, Bihotz.

Created in Twine.

CYFEST 13, St. Petersburg, 2021

The show was in November, 2021, before all hell broke loose. And the catalogue just came out, June 2022.

Image from the CYFEST 13 catalogue showing gallery installation of my web-based essay , “Drift”

Cecilia Dougherty (USA)
DRIFT
web-based art, 2020

“Drift” tells the story of a walk the artist took in March, 2020, along the North Shore of Staten Island, NY, just as it was beginning to dawn on people that
leisurely strolls might be a bad idea at the present moment. The project
was created using basic HTML/CSS coding, and the images were taken
with an iPhone. The artist takes a final stroll through favorite parts of her neighborhood before lockdown.

Descriptions of the surroundings and a chronicle of events of the pandemic are mixed with critical thoughts on virus capitalism, such as the experience of
resisting the virus in the USA and the inaction of the Trump administration.


I like the way my piece, Drift, is displayed – it’s a good size – not gigantic and not tiny, and it’s at a height and an angle that looks pretty accessible to me. Thank you, CYFEST!

Find Drift here: https://drift.ceciliadougherty.com/

a circle is a thought pattern

Hand stencil, drawing by Cecilia Dougherty

a show of work by

Cecilia Dougherty
Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola
Anthony Leslie

Curated by Jamie Chan

February 4 – March 5, 2022 (opening: Feb 5, 12-6)
Essex Flowers
19 Monroe St.
New York, NY 10002

As you listen, the particles of sound (phonos) decide to be heard. Listening affects what is sounding. The relationship is symbiotic.

-Pauline Oliveros

Curator’s Statement, Jamie Chan:

I wanted to see a collection of artworks together that could speak about daily life and art but outside of categories or commentary, sort of like a stream of water, a walk, a place to rest the mind. Thereness, but not at all reductive. Works that communicate intimately to the viewer through stories with a soft focus. Doesn’t represent a dialog, but represents the relationship between thought process and idea formation. A circle is a thought pattern. Not fiction or nonfiction, neither formal nor informal. Works that are grounded in specific places, groups of people, and rest in fluid qualities of time. A sense of resolution that lingers.

Works not exactly being in service of “process” – not ephemera or document – but concretely living and direct. The form of the works themselves is materially lightweight, diffuse and comprises accumulated gestures, yet is emphatically manual and sourced from the materiality of life and the senses. The works also all resemble piles – larger trajectories and practices exceeding the sense of time that they exist in. These artists capture our attention in both the front and back of our minds, skillfully folding time into a narrative movement that smolders, and the implication of that movement circles us back to elemental and early experiences of the earth and of place, individuals in groups connecting back to the source. JC

Cecilia Dougherty’s small drawings (pencil and conté crayon on paper, various sizes, 2021-22) have been created as the background drawings for episodes from the story she has developed over several visits and much research into the Paleolithic cave art in Spain and France. The story follows Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons on a migration through France, Italy, the Balkans and southward to what is now Iraqi Kurdistan, to a site called Shanidar, the location of the well-documented Neanderthal flower burial. Cecilia Dougherty is a visual artist living in New York.

In the work of Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, two decaying leaves reveal their venation patterns where hidden traces suggest a map of movement. She brings landscape to the foreground–the words root, rot and rotation are repeated in her ritual typewritings, and her drawings are made upon uneven ground. Lucía is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Mexico City, and the editor of diSONARE, an experimental editorial project. Her time-based practice explores the fluidity of language through investigative poetics, resulting in a corpus of visual, sonic, and text-based works. Her expanded poetry practice involves an engagement with the environment and collecting natural and found objects. 

Anthony Leslie’s 2014-22 sound diaries are the products of an ongoing daily practice that combines field recording, concentrated listening and first-person narrative. They represent an extensive and growing archive of his sound memories, mostly from his time spent living, working and caregiving in and around Los Angeles. They contain public sounds, domestic sounds, sounds from the world of nature and of music, the voices of friends, family, people on the street, poets, protestors, and others. 

Neanderthals and Cro Magnons on the Horizon

Alasne, a Neanderthal child circa 33,000 BCE, from my web-based story, Shanidar.

I’m creating a web-based interactive story called Shanidar, a sequel to my 2019 piece, Time Before Memory (https://paleolithic.ceciliadougherty.com). Shanidar takes place in Paleolithic times and tells a story of a small band of Neanderthals and Cro Magnons on a migration through France, Italy, the Balkans and southward to what is now Iraqi Kurdistan, to a site called Shanidar, which is the location of the famous Neanderthal “flower burial.”

I started Shanidar, while we were, more or less, in lockdown. And while I had traveled to sites in Spain and France to research Time Before Memory,  I had to do a most of my research for Shanidar from my desktop. Unable to travel to Europe to gather source materials and take photographs of paleolithic sites, I decided to draw the background imagery for the story and imagine my fictional characters more clearly as people and less as (pre)historical elements.

Both stories have involved research into human species, climate change, patterns of human migration over thousands of years, and most wonderfully, into Paleolithic art, ritual, and behavior. There’s queer and trans influence in the storyline and characters as well, acknowledging a long history of multiplicities of gender.

Shanidar is speculative fiction, and is not science. It questions and critiques scientific findings and observations, nonetheless. I expect to finish this piece in mid-2022. I’m using Twine game software to create the story and am adding not only original imagery, but also an original soundtrack.

Ride

The ferry, the bus, the subway. Walk, too. Walk around the neighborhood in the early morning hours, especially, when few people are up and about and you can occasionally take off your mask and enjoy the air, the colors of dawn, and the fragrance of the fall.

Announcing the launch of my new web-based essay, RIDE, about what it feels like being in public and being on public transit in New York. A complete environment for daydreaming, people-watching, and finding your place, your role, in the city.

Click the link below!

Ride is here.