Continuing the videocentric week we're having here at CCLaP, today's obsession is of an odd little online project I just discovered a couple of days ago, which is strange given how well-known an organization it comes from...

HBO Voyeur is a truly strange hybrid project from the respected cable channel -- part television show, part interactive fiction, part silent-film series, as well as a showcase for cutting-edge implementation of Adobe Flash. It is in fact somewhere around a dozen fictional stories all taking place at once, all set in various apartments throughout New York (including half of them in just one building); the stories are presented by actually filming them in cross-section apartment sets, without any dialogue. If you're a subscriber, then, to HBO's "On Demand" satellite service, you'll see regular episodes of the series where all the stories are presented on-screen at once, as if you're watching an entire apartment building go throughout its daily routines; and if you go to the HBO Voyeur website, you can hop from one apartment to the next, watching just one story at a time.

It's an ingenious way to present multiple overlapping fictional stories, I think, something we used to talk about all the time in the '90s when it came to hyperfiction, longing for the day when the technology available would let an author do this; to actually create a physical environment that the audience member can move around in, getting access to different sections of the story based on where in that environment they are. I mean, sure, in the case of HBO Voyeur, the project turns out to be kind of a mess -- it's difficult to tell the dramatic point of many of their vignettes, and in their case it's also difficult to tell how many episodes have already taken place before you've visited, what the backstory of each character is, and how to access old videos you haven't yet seen. Plus, apparently HBO made a bold marketing move and hired an independent multimedia expert to chronicle the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the show, which I guess became something of a fiasco after the third-party writer got sick of the show and start posting critical comments at the HBO-sponsored blog (or something like that; it's hard to tell at that blog what exactly went wrong over there). Plus, for a show from a company as big as HBO, "Voyeur" has generated barely any press or publicity at all, in the four months it's now been online; and in a world where every sneeze by every celebrity is covered by some news organization on the planet, this is certainly not a very good sign for the show's long-term fate.

But still! I thought it was very interesting to see a group as mainstream as HBO try something like this, a challenging and truly complex project that's usually more at home at a cutting-edge art gallery run by a bunch of Swedish postmodernists. Just thought I'd point it out to everyone so they could check it out themselves, before HBO finally calls the entire experiment a disaster and yanks it all from the web.