Michael O'Rourke Digital Print

At any time, the user could resume slowly controlling the object. After a random amount of time and without any input from the user, the ge-le object would suddenly disappear from its current location, reappearing momentarily on top of the original object from which it had emerged. It would then glow briefly, and then extinquish itself. The user could elect to hit the button again to restart the process. Simultaneously to all this, the user could also, with another three-dimensional joystick, change the location of his/her point of view and thus move around through the space of the whole composition.

The inspiration and title for this piece come from a tradition of the Mossi people of West Africa, among whom I lived for two years. Infant mortality was high in that region. To explain the sudden death of an apparently healthy child during the night, the Mossi had the story of a "ge-le", a woman who, unbeknowst to herself or anyone else, was a sort of witch. The spirit of this gel-le witch would rise up out of her body at night, float through the air, and descend into the hut of another family, where it would eat the soul of a sleeping child. It would then return to the body of the ge-le woman. In the morning, the child would be found dead by its parents.

In the interactive virtual sculpture, a cube-like object hovers in one location. At the press of a button by the user, a duplicate of this object rises slowly up out of the original object. This duplicate (the "ge-le") would then float slowly through the space. The user could control its movement with a three-dimensional joystick, but when they stopped doing so, the object would continue to drift of its own accord, beyond the control of the user.