Le Livre des Morts

More than 30 centuries after the Egyptian Book of the Dead, written in hieratic on papyrus, why we propose a Book of the Dead on a computer screen? Firstly because it is a real work of writing, and no adjustment of any of the Books of the Dead known. But this is not just a work of writing. On the home screen you can read the names of two authors, Xavier Malbreil for text, but Gerard Dalmon for "staging." The Book of the Dead is a story and "kinetic" in movement, in which the text is displayed dynamically and jointly operates temporal dimension and multimedia dimension.

If this work is decidedly multimedia (combining animated sequences, music, text), it is also interactive: not only interactive navigation or manipulation of semiotic forms on the screen, but also inputting data. "The reader makes his own fictitious journey to the afterlife. "During this trip, he is led to answer questions. These responses are included in the course of the story, but can also be consulted independently of "reading paths" through a "writing course." The reader will find in a subsequent reading, may modify and read the answers given by the other players in the "reading room." Some entries are thus very moving, contributors engaged in working memory very intimate. As the Book of the Dead is primarily a reflection and work on memory. According Malbreil, it is to "give a place on the network where the memory is invited to ask about computer memory. [...] This memorialis liber is a notebook that will keep our memory, but will keep it alive. "

The Book of the Dead is as a play on the frontiers between life and death, of course, but between reading and writing, between reality and fiction (the reader answers questions in the context of fiction, memory located thereby "fictionalisée"), between the personal and the public (the innermost responses can, if desired, be made public), between memory and forgetting (if the player changes his answers, he not keep track of the previous version). In this sense, it is indeed a writing specifically exploiting the dynamic support and network size to offer us more than a product, an evolving process.

(Source: trans. of Serge Bouchardon's "Un jeu sur les frontières" http://www.apelse.asso.fr/concours2003/resultats.htm)