Before you begin...

“Mistaken Identities is an interactive CD-ROM inspired by the lives and work of ten famous women: Josephine Baker, Simone de Beauvoir, Catherine the Great, Colette, Marie Curie, Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, Frida Kahlo, Margaret Mead, and Gertrude Stein. These figures were chosen for their emblematic status as female role models. However, the CD-ROM examines them as complex figures whose identities are not essential or fixed, but contingent and mutable. Their identities are configured in the negotiated space between self and other, a negotiation that continues in my relation to them as narrator. The project has six sections: Portrait Gallery, Timeline, Scrapbook, TV movies, Morphologies and the Puzzle. A variety of rhetorical tropes are utilized to present text, sound, graphics and Quicktime movies interactively” (Tamblyn).

Here you have access to screen recordings, one for each of the ten women featured, as well as the introduction and TV movies section. As with the original CD-ROM, viewers can still choose how long to spend with it, what order to view it in, whether to repeat or skip sections altogether by hitting the pause, rewind, or fast forward buttons found on the YouTube video. Other materials are provided below to give the viewer more context about the CD-ROM and Tamblyn’s creative process.