LIJA MARKUS
I AM YOU – I am dead and so are you
“Mouchette ‘rapes’ our reality, by imposing her identity to us, prosecuting us as the killer. As much as we provoke Mouchette, Mouchette provokes us. This feedback loops of Mouchette describes a communally constructed identity, reachable in the realm of the virtual.”
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I remembered internet at the back of my head as the dial up modem which sounds like UFO (even though I have never seen or heard UFO before, but know that that is UFO sound) which the connection dropped every time the phone rings.
Back then the internet is a very simple place, complete with tacky ‘friendster’ pages, where we could use whatever name that we could made up, like b0bMaarleyy or lOmbr3Lot4tLudic0loo, complete with tacky miss-tiled background, back when my internet wasn’t strong enough to load a single picture.
The site Mouchette.net and Mouchette.Org and all the sister-sites reminded me of those days, where preteen girl created their own web pages. Mouchette is a persona, an identity first created by Martine Needam, but soon act as a mirror, as a splice of every bit of information that the visitor of the website, either attracted or ‘seduced’ by her naivety.
Aside from its naivety, Mouchette often presents us by existential questions.
Mouchette’s feedback loop exist by mouchette’s link and pages, which interacts in weird and unexpected ways. Some pages contains response box, where Mouchette asks some questions and the user’s email address. Some pages (eg. Rhizome) could only be accessed by killing Mouchette’s cat, in which Mouchette proceed to asks some of the ‘cat-killers’ their reason of killing the cat. Those informations thus posted back to the website in form of a forum.
The questions are often disturbing and uncanny, which evoke -sometimes- sympathy, but more often than not, results in equally disturbing answers. Some of which we could clearly see that it is a ‘troll’ answer, but some made us question the sanity of the writer.
Funny word play is often used in the blog, such as m.org.ue, which leads us to a picture with a pair of foot wit toenails painted pink with morgue tag on it.
Some of Mouchette’s page seems to be suggestive, like ‘striped penis’.
Other than being suggestive, Mouchette’s pages seemed to revolve around death, death of a cat, death of fly, or the m.org.ue.
One particular Mouchette page which disturbs me the most is the ‘songs’, which there claims to be an interactive songs, but all I found was an empty page with a – mark in pink, accompanied by what seemed to be a cross between sexual moaning and suffering sounds.
