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Description: Barry Smylie’s “1969/99” features multiple hyperlinked web pages and flash animation. When viewed in Internet Explorer, the user can reveal superimposed text by mousing over images. It is dominated by graphics and sound from popular culture of the 1960s and 1990s. In particular, “1969/99” draws heavily on the themes and images of Fail Safe (1962) by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, in which machine malfunctions and humanity’s blind faith in the infallibility of technology accidentally cause a nuclear war. Burdick and Wheeler’s book was adapted for film in 1964 and for television in 2000. Created during the Y2K frenzy, “1969/99” offers a complex (and sometimes comic) cultural commentary and comparison between Cold War America and that of the Millennium. For example, one page titled "the b52s" juxtaposes images of a B-52 strategic bomber with those of the New Wave band The B-52s. The B-52s song "Meet the Flintstones" is the featured audio track on another page, "evolution," where the cartoon images of the Flintstones (1960-66) are superimposed on the cast photo of The Flintstones Movie (1994). In “beatitude,” Smylie quotes from Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl,” “I saw the best minds of my generation,” while the soundtrack repeats “starving, hysterical, naked,” thus leaving the user to fill in the omitted portion of the line “destroyed by madness.” Entry drafted by: Crystal Alberts
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Subject: Flash, html/dhtml , audio
Creator: Barry Smylie
Collector: ELO
Description: The Unknown is a collaborative hypertext novel written on the World Wide Web during the turn of the millennium. It is a text about a book tour that takes on the excesses of a rock tour. The work is notorious for breaking the "comedy barrier" in electronic literature, replacing the pretentious modernism and self-consciousness of previous hypertext works with a pretentious postmodernism and self-absorption that is more satirical in nature. The Unknown includes several sections or "lines" of content including a sickeningly decadent hypertext novel, metafictional bullshit, documentary material, correspondence, art projects, documentation of live readings, a press kit, and more. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, network novel, encyclopedic, metafiction, comedy, collaborative, postmodern, fiction, parody/satire, html/dhtml , network forms
Creator: William Gillespie, Frank Marquardt, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton
Collector: ELO
Description: "The Jew's Daughter" is an interactive, non-linear, multivalent narrative. A hypertext, but one that transforms the text (rather than just linking from one stable text to another). As soon as the reader moves the mouse over highlighted keywords (links), segments of a page replace one another fluidly. While always remaining syntactically and semantically intact, passages are replaced by a new text within a static rectangular text-space. The work's content corresponds to the unstable form: Characters, for example, are not fixed identities; they can be, by turns, contemporary and historical. The algorithmic text generation calls on readers to explore a text that changes with the addition or deletion of passages at random throughout the narrative. By placing authors and readers in direct relation to machine-generated text, this piece has helped ground debates on electronic literature. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, collaboration, interactive, generative text, html/dhtml
Description: l0ve0ne is a hypertext of 129 lexias and was the first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop. The text is the diary of a hacker and WebMOO aficionado, Gweneth, and recounts her relationship with a German hacker named Gunter. The text explores the possibilities of emotional, sexual, and even human relationships in a world augmented by and through mediated computer technologies. In reading Gweneth's experiences as she travels across the United States and Europe with and looking for Gunter--who might be posing as his own cousin, Stefan, and consequently remains an unstable and mysterious figure throughout the text--one is reminded of Thomas Pynchon's novel V. Even more like V. herself, however, is the character Aimee. She first appears (depending on the order in which you read the text) as a non-player character (NPC)in a game being designed by the German hacker collective Schinkenbrotchen. Surprisingly, Gweneth later meets Aimee in the flesh and learns that she might have stolen Gunter/Stefan away from Gweneth. The indeterminacy of these characters, the unending search for them, as well as the machine-augmented bodies and sexuality of the characters seems to descend from Pynchon's frequent concerns. One of the first hypertexts written for the World Wide Web, l0ve0ne consists of white text against a black, blue, green, or red background; the black background is most frequent. The links are not words within the text but are rather underscored gaps that appear within the passages. The text can be read with or without frames, and the choice determines with which lexia the text opens. l0ve0ne's last lexia, "reset," directs the reader to another Malloy hypertext, The Roar of Destiny Emanated from the Refrigerator. Entry drafted by: Brian Croxall
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Subject: hypertext, fiction, html/dhtml , cyberculture, webfiction, codework
Creator: Judy Malloy
Collector: ELO
Description: Like Nabokov in Pale Fire, Holeton presents a metafictional parodic exegesis on the academic discourse of early hypertext criticism. Designed in the form of a hypertextual FAQ webpage document, Holeton's short fiction emanates from a poem composed of anagrams of the word "hypertext". Clicking on links produces tongue-in-cheek interpretations of the fictional poem along with perspectives on Language Poetry, cultural studies, feminism, and transgender studies. Nine answers to frequently asked questions offer up "the story with the fan fiction and the double murder." Entry drafted by: Patrricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext, network forms, fiction, html/dhtml , parody/satire
Creator: Richard Holeton
Collector: ELO
Description: Jim Andrews’ “Seattle Drift” is a play on motion and stasis, surface and depth. Its initially simple presentation consists of a self-described “bad text,” a subversive poem that moves and stutters around the screen when given the instruction to do so. A series of simple controls written in Dynamic HTML allows a user to guide its movement: one is given the option to “do” the text (which makes it drift around the screen), “stop” it (which freezes the letters mid-drift), or “discipline” it (which returns the letters to their original position). Stopping and starting the text allows the user to create new linguistic and visual configurations for the poem, and this flexibility is the cause of the text’s status as “bad”—it “used to be a poem, but drifted from the scene.” The poem dares its user with a come-on—“I just want you to do me”—that complicates the supposed transparency and stasis of the traditional written word, and makes the user an accomplice in this transformation. The poem itself has the experimental, minimalist quality that characterizes much of mid-90s net art, exploring the role of particular code functions in the construction of Web aesthetics while also playing with the code’s distance from (and closeness to) the surface of the Web browser. An Easter egg awaits those curious enough to explore the source code. Entry drafted by: Rob Schoenbeck
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Subject: poetry, animation, html/dhtml
Creator: Jim Andrews
Collector: ELO
Description: Beginning with the provocative epigram by Phyllis Web, “The world is round. It moves in circles,” which gives way to a minimal interface with the word “meaning” placed in the center of a black screen, Jim Andrews’ “Enigma n” is a densely packaged experiment in the potency of language. With a click of the mouse, the reader can “Prod,” “Stir,” and “Tame” the word, causing the letters to swirl chaotically around no particular center. After all the options have been selected, the reader is permitted to restore order to the word by clicking “Spell.” Conceptually, the temporal sequence (epigram, the assertion of “meaning,” the reader’s acts of disruption, culminating in a restoration of order) might be interpreted as a parable of communication, from sender to receiver. As an experience of reading, the attentive mind will seize upon the various anagrams that arrange themselves chaotically, making sense wherever it is suggested by juxtaposition. However, Andrews’ piece does not simply end with the anti-climactic, almost jarring, return to order. The intrepid reader will quickly move to prod, stir, and tame the text again, and will be rewarded with a fifth option, “0/1,” which freezes the swirling letters in space. Another click on “0/1” opens up another option “Colour,” which invites further exploration leading to a reward at the end. In its entirety, “Enigma n” is an extraordinary and deceptively simple work that offers rich rewards for those who take the time to play with it. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman
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Subject: poetry, animation, html/dhtml , visual poetry
Creator: Jim Andrews
Collector: ELO
Page 1 of 1 (7 Total Results)
