VOICE GARDEN: LABYRINTH OF LOVE , LABYRINTH OF DESIRE


Interactive multimedia CD-ROM

Story & Images by
BEVERLY REISER & HANS REISER

All music performed and composed by
BILL FLEMING

A Project of Life on a Slice


Labyrinths murmur and archaic spirits beckon in this tale of Love and Desire
told in the style of Magical Realism.

Uncover the echoes of almost forgotten Goddesses in the Labyrinth of Love or journey with your minotaur past hungering walls, through the Eye of Desire and into the caverns of your heart.

A poetic gift for someone who loves, Voice Garden contains rich 64k(16 bit) color images and animations, a full musical score, mystical voices, puzzles, and a Zen monk raking.




Beverly Reiser has been president of Ylem / Artists Using Science & Technology , a not -for-profit arts organization for 11 years. for info : beverly@idiom.com
or write:

Ylem, PO Box 749, Orinda, CA, USA
our web site art gallery URL is http://www.ylem.org/ylem/
or write: Life On A Slice, 6979 Exeter Dr., Oakland, CA, 94611, USA
our URL is http://www.ylem.org/ylem/artists/loas.html

As a child, I was a pathologically shy but lyrical Romantic. Now I'm an old lyrical romantic squatting in the Techno-Artso Frog Pond. The Frog Pond of late has grown rank with various strains of hopelessness and cynicism. But what do I care? I can float here on my emerald pad and remember the dreams of a pathological child.

For the last 30 years, I've worked through a range of light emitting media from stained glass to large-scale kinetic neon and glass walls with computer controlled light sequencing. When personal computers came along it seemed a natural transition. What surprised me ( and delighted ) me the most however was that as Voice Garden emerged, I began to reach back into lessons I had learned in Chinese brush painting with my teacher Shiou Jang Hsieh. While these pictures were generated in the computer, not on paper, ones heart has a sureness about what sensibilities to store and replant some later spring.

Which brings us to Voice Garden.
Voice Garden, Labyrinth of Love, Labyrinth of Desire is a metaphor. You can consider it your own personal epic theater. Will you make the heroic choice at the " Boundary between Self and
Desire "? Don't forget , amidst all the "strum and drang", to read the ancient love poems from ancient Indian, Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese and Sufi traditions in the Labyrinth of Love. These are topped off with a contemporary poem ( perhaps of a Celtic sensibility) by my son Hans Reiser .

Beverly Reiser


A pretty picture is one thing, but how much more powerful it is with a poem of love, how much more alive an animation is when with sounds of hips swishing, how much better that yin be filled by yang.... I've always been a cynical idealist at heart, and in working with a lyrical romantic with decades of drawing experience, and with a talented musician like Bill, I think we have done so much more than we could have done separately.
It has been frustrating and deeply rewarding to work with my mother in bringing poem, picture, and Bill's guitar into a new art form. At the time I write, there is no art CD-ROM market, and there is no CD-ROM one would think to give a beautiful woman on Valentine's day, and yet I know that in but a few years it will all change. A new medium is born, listen to it scream not enough conventional memory. Smack it please, and then give it a bottle.
Hans Reiser

Poetry and programming mostly by Hans Reiser