MOUCHETTE

Mouchette set up her first home page in 1996 and has maintained a constantly expanding web presence ever since. A fictional adolescent girl, fascinated by suicide and strangers, Mouchette is the long-running work of Amsterdam-based artist Martine Neddam. Her labyrinthine, ever-growing site makes use of expressive HTML elements to involve the viewer in the turbulent emotional world of an adolescent girl. Participation is central, and visitors are encouraged to talk about suicide, contribute fan art, and even adopt Mouchette's identity.

As a character who doubles as a platform for exchange, Mouchette has for two decades provoked her visitors into contributing in their own ways to a site that now stands as a singular and important archive of online culture—humorous, dark, and often surprisingly touching.

“THE WORKS HAD THAT SORT OF HERE AND NOW ENCOUNTER. THAT THING WAS ALWAYS OPEN, TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. IT WAS ALL THE TIME LIVE.” – MARTINE NEDDAM

Read "A Girl Made of Language" by Michael Connor on Rhizome.

Mouchette’s personal website, hosted at mouchette.org, is by now a vast trove of pages. Neddam continues to spend hours per week keeping it up to date, adding new works, moderating comments, and fixing deprecated code. Liveness is crucial to Neddam’s practice, so the work featured in this online exhibition is a direct link to her live site.
Mouchette's profile page from Why Not Sneeze? web zine, 1997.

One transparent gif on Why Not Sneeze? links back to Mouchette’s profile page, which drew on and amplified the playful kinds of self-presentation on the early web. Her bio, unchanged since the beginning of the project, expands on the classic internet mantra of Age/Sex/Location, but not by much. “My name is Mouchette. I live in Amsterdam. I am an artist. I am nearly 13 years old.”
"Here, I am in ThePalace, in the court room. I chose this room because it is the only one which has a computer."

At that time, Mouchette's own site also offered links to several multi-user virtual worlds that she frequented, including instructions for finding her, or an interactive bot that she created. She directed visitors to text-based worlds called MOOs and to a pictorial one known as ThePalace.


Screenshot of wattlechick.html from Mouchette's home page on xs4all.nl.

The text-based and programmable environment of the MOOs had a deep influence on Neddam, who has described her character as a “little girl made of language and made of text.” Early in the Mouchette project, Neddam built on this interest, using computer software to create nonsense words, from which Mouchette composed poetry.

Screen shot of fan page from mouchette.org.

Participation was also central to the project from the beginning. Contributions from the public, via CGI form or email, were as important to Mouchette's identity as any text written by Neddam or by computer software.

Image from Suicide Kit (1997)

One of the most active discussions on Mouchette's website was on the topic of suicide. “What is the best way to kill yourself when you’re 13?” Mouchette asked in 1997, inviting users to respond via a form. This discussion grew rapidly and changed as the web did. When it launched in 1998, it was a frank but sardonic conversation with an arts audience, but by 1999 it had become an increasingly urgent discussion of a social fact which had few other public arenas.

Fan art from Mouchette.org

In addition to serious discussions, users also submitted fan art, including net art works and comics featuring Mouchette. In 2003, Neddam expanded fan involvement by launching a new site, Mouchette.net, which allowed visitors to claim the identity of Mouchette, altering her personal website and sending email from her address.

For Neddam, the loading of a page is a performative event, often marked by a sound such as a coyote’s scream or the moaning of a young girl.

"THE WEB CHARACTER IS NOT SO MUCH A PORTRAIT AS A PLATFORM WITH A CERTAIN DESIGN...TO FIND A SITUATION WHERE PEOPLE EXCHANGE WITH EACH OTHER INSIDE THAT CHARACTER." – MARTINE NEDDAM