Grandfather Gets a House, is a hypermedia work expressly developed for the Internet. The Web site houses a visually enhanced diary containing a series of texts written to the email list of a small group of Net-active writers and artists. The emails were written over a year, starting in August, 2000, and chronicle a canadian artists travels to Transylvania, the Hungarian region of Romania and the subsequent efforts of the group to help an impoverished Gypsy family.
The emails are presented as de facto as possible, complete with email headers. With the aid of graphically enhanced navigational elements and subject indexes, it is possible to explore the narrative.
The navigational elements are constructed in such a way that the viewer is also encouraged to venture to another level, that of stories, poetry and other content informed by the experiences described in the edited emails. These are works that link only to themselves; however, they also link to and from the singular emails that are being referenced.
As a third added level of information, the navigational elements also encourage the reader to access a complete and searchable archive of all the unedited communications of the mailing list.
The site seeks to publicize the plight of a much-maligned and marginalized people in Eastern Europe and equally importantly, seeks to lay bare the process by which art is made.