The interface to Planet Usher: An Interactive Home Movie (the illustration and sample provide no access to content) turns every browsing selection into a repeating sequence of images. While the organisation of the interface facilitates a spatial mode of searching, scrolling and looping (orbiting), it also fragments and freezes narrative in a graphic depiction of what Lev Manovich might call a "loop as a narrative engine". This figure allows for dramatic movement and development within otherwise static fields. Planet Usher draws upon a similar figure in the guise of 'the remembered home movie'. This is an aesthetic ploy which responds to the fact that my brother's blindness ensures the video archive is at best frozen, and at worst lost, and yet might be meaningfully re-articulated as visual memory that is persistent, moving and dramatically evolving. i

This interface can be understood as a device that:

1. functions as both a selection and projection machine, aesthetically recalling the database logic of the home video archive

2. reinforces the current selection through emphatic repetition, thereby inviting activation

3. suggests that any single narrative is only ever a fragment of a narrative

4. suggests that any narrative fragment is only one of many possible instances of that narrative fragment

5. insists on memory and all its frailty as a precondition of navigation