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Description: The Doll Games is a hypertext project that documents a complex narrative game that Shelley and Pamela Jackson used to play when they were prepubescent girls, and frames that documentation in faux-academic discourse. In “sitting uneasily between” different styles of discourse, the work enlists the reader to differentiate between authoritative knowledge and play. Although the dolls in question are “things of childhood,” the project reveals that in the games the authors used to play with these dolls, one can find the roots of both Pamela and Shelley’s “grownup” lives: Shelley’s vocation as a fiction writer, and Pamela’s as a Berkeley-trained Ph.D. in Rhetoric. Throughout, the project plays with constructions of gender and of identity. This is a “true” story that places truth of all kinds in between those ironic question marks. The Doll Games is a network novel in the sense that it uses the network to construct narratives in a particularly novel way. The Doll Games is also consciously structured as a network document, and plays in an ironic fashion with its network context. (...) Read the entire elit work article drafted by Scott Rettberg at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/609
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Subject: hypertext , parody/satire, documentary, gender
Creator: Pamela Jackson, Shelley Jackson
Description: Prose poem published in The Iowa Review Web (TIR-W), Volume 9, Number 2: "Instruments and Playable Texts" (2008). “The Purpling” is comprised of approximately ten basic web pages of eight to ten lines each. By clicking on hyperlinks connected to segments of varying lengths, the reader enters what guest editor Stuart Moulthrop calls a "maze of recirculating expression.” While the words on the screen remain static, the reader's experience of "meaning" varies depending on the order of visited links. These visited links, in most browsers, also appear in purple, which becomes a visual representation of not only the work's title, but also the mingling of the reader with the text. Consequently, in both form and content, the work calls attention to nature of reading and questions the authority of a text. Entry drafted by: Crystal Alberts
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Subject: hypertext , poetry, procedural, constraint-based
Creator: Nick Monfort
Collector: Electronic Literature Organization
Description: Shawn Rider's "So Random" consists of a short hypertext narrative of a bus ride told from several different points of view. Each time a reader accesses the work, an instantiation of it is assembled from chunks of text based on tags assigned to each section. For a piece of electronic literature, the work has a conservative visual presentation. Each version consists of three pages that resemble the appearance of text in a word processing program. The reader has the option of reading the pages consecutively or of clicking on words to generate an entirely new three-page version of the work. With relatively few options, the reader is at the mercy of the algorithm assembling the text, and without access to the logic of the text selection, the work feels "so random." Entry drafted by: Ben Underwood
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Subject: hypertext , fiction, Anthologies, algorithm
Creator: Shawn Rider
Collector: ELO
Description: Judd Morrissey, Goat Island, and 145+ additional contributors are contributing to the work-in-progress The Last Performance (dot org). The project’s developers describe it as “a constraint-based collaborative writing, archiving and text-visualization project responding to the theme of lastness in relation to architectural forms, acts of building, a final performance, and the interruption (that becomes the promise) of community.” The project is a kind of hopeful monster, a mutated form of literature that combines elements of dance and performance, information and physical architecture, and Oulipian constraint-driven approaches to writing. The visual presentation of the project is based on the structure and details of the Dzamija, a mosque built on top of an old church in Zagreb, Croatia. Elements of the structure were derived from a dance performance by Goat Island, a Chicago-based performance collective. The organizational principles of the text are largely algorithmic. The individual texts themselves are written in response to a series of odd, seemingly arbitrary constraints such as “Construct a last performance in the form of a heavy foot that weighs 2 tons and remains in good condition.” The texts that form the material basis of the project are contributed both by the authors who have been working most closely on the project for two years and by readers who stumble across it on the Web and decide to contribute a text by responding to a constraint or to one of the other texts.(...) Read the entire elit work article drafted by Scott Rettberg at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/606
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Subject: hypertext , poetry, collaborative, narrative, database, visualization
Creator: Judd Morrissey
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: Shelley Jackson’s 1997 web-based hypertext, “my body—a Wunderkammer” employs many of the same strategies that make her celebrated Patchwork Girl (1995) so conceptually interesting, albeit on a smaller scale. With its asynchronous mode of storytelling, its vivid images, and its layering of different texts, all of which need to be explored, re-mixed, and assembled by the reader for any coherence to emerge, “Wunderkammer” has much in common with the way a reader must stitch together the disparate pieces of “the monster’s” story to make sense of Patchwork Girl. (...) Read the entire elit work article drafted by Lisa Swanstrom at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/566
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Subject: hypertext , autobiography
Creator: Shelley Jackson
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: Inspired by Derrida's "Of Grammatology", Mark Amerika experiments in GRAMMATRON with narrative form in a networked environment. Amerika retells the Jewish Golem myth by adapting it into the culture of programmable media and remixes several genres of text into the story's hybridized style including metafiction, hypertext, cyberpunk, and conceptual works affiliated with the Art+Language group. Narrated from various authorial perspectives, the story introduces readers to Abe Golam, a pioneering Net artist who created Grammatron, a writing machine. Endowed not with the Word (like in the original myth) but with forbidden data -- a specially coded Nanoscript -- the creature becomes a digital being that "contains all of the combinatory potential of all the writings." The Grammatron is the personification of the Golem which is also a personification of Amerika the artist. In a number of literary adaptations and works, various characterizations of the Golem and its environment are depicted. With GRAMMATRON, however, Mark Amerika creates a seemingly infinite, recombinant (text-)space in the electrosphere. Throughout the story, Abe Golam searches for his "second-half," a programmer named Cynthia Kitchen whose playful codes of interactivity lead both Golam and the reader through a multi-linear textscape (the Grammatron writing machine) where they search for "the missing link" that will enable them to port to another dimension of "digital being" the story refers to as Genesis Rising. The project consists of over 1100 (partly randomized) text elements and thousands of links. It comes with animated and still life images, an eerie background soundtrack, and audio-files that sometimes provide a spoken meta-commentary on the work itself. The work consists of different text-layers the user is free to choose from including a theoretical hypertextual essay titled "Hypertextual Consciousness," the animated text "Interfacing," and the main hypertext "Abe Golam." GRAMMATRON (1997) was initially received as one of the first major works of Net art and was selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial of American Art. It was the first work in Amerika's Net art trilogy and was followed by PHON:E:ME (1999) and FILMTEXT 2.0 (2001-2002). Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext , animated text
Creator: Mark Amerika
Description: A visual index, with a paragraph of description, of each of Jason Nelson's work. Scrolling from the bottom of the page to the top lets one view the artist's work chronologically from 2001 to the present, offering one potential trajectory for the field development as a whole, spanning hypertexts, short fictions, poems, haikus, games, all of which are computer generated and include image in combination with multimedia elements, code, text, and sound. Browsing the collection means witnessing the ways electronic literature involves readers and shows the potential for involving programming and multimedial devices and embedded text as in, for example the flash-based work titled, "this will be the end of you: play4: within within." Here, holding the mouse allows the user to move "into words" and to play with text as it emerges. Readers control the movement on the interface by holding or releasing the mouse and can thereby determine the mouse driven fly through of texts and images that float towards or away from the user. Or the work, "game, game, game and again game" which uses the a side scrolling gaming interface to navigate through a mix of poetics content and corresponding hand-drawn elements. This play, either literal or through interface serves as a metaphor of what Nelson wishes to transfer with the artwork: some scattered [imaginations, some] oddly organized fire of thoughts and incomplete ideas" or simply a comment on the internet and its nonlinearity and the new possibilities of digital poetics. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext , flash, generative, audio, animation, textual instrument, net art, digital poetics, poetry, network forms, combinatorial, interactive, visual poetry, fiction, appropriated texts
Creator: Jason Nelson
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: In the Web's first hypertext novel Bobby Rabyd [Robert Arellano] explores the pop-cultural shadow-side of 1969 -- from the moon landing to the Manson murders, from a Vietnam veteran's PTSD to a rock star's idolatry, from the love-in at Woodstock to the murder at Altamont -- by relating intermixed stories and emphazising graphics and music. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext , graphic, audio, fiction, html, historical, novel
Publisher: Robert Arellano
Collector: ELO
Description: "Voyage into the Unknown" by Roderick Coover is an historical non-fiction hypertext about the first geographic expedition down the Colorado River in 1869. The three-month journey was led by John Wesley Powell who, with his eight fellow boatmen, departed from Green River City in northern Utah towards the Gulf of California. Coover investigates in the question of how we come to know and imagine an "unknown territory" and provides the answer with the navigational technique he applies in his work: an interactive panoramic environment with a digitally re-worked map of the journey, in which the user navigates though the desert landscape using a seamless, horizontally scrolling interface. The reader, who takes the perspective of crew member George Bradley, faces an unknown literary space he can choose to explore in several different ways. He can either use red arrows to move back and forth within the landscape or use the "key" numbered from one to twenty that recalls a chapter-like navigation. In order to "read the unknown territory", the user is forced to explore the map that is marked with points of interest. These markers (abbreviations that are explained in an introductory agenda at the beginning of the piece) work like hyperlinks that, once activated, name places passed, people the group met or events they experienced. A diary-like narrative unfolds in short excerpts of texts that reveal what happend when the crew was declared dead and how they managed to survive in "the darkest hour" when subsistences decreased each day. The narrative is contested with researched facts that interwine with actual diary accounts and works by John Wesley Powell, along with additional publications by other crew members (George Bradley, John Sumner, and Frederick Dellenbaugh). Coover also integrates primary visual works by E.O. Beaman, John Hillers, and Thomas Moran with new and original writing, artwork, and interactive devices. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext , Flash, nonfiction, historical
Creator: Roderick Coover
Collector: ELO
Description: Revelations of Secret Surveillance weaves family history, fictional narrative and documentary material together in the story of German video artist Gunter and American writer Gwen. Spurred on by the discovery of a poem Gunter’s grandmother wrote in Nürnberg in 1933, they begin to explore past and present covert systems of surveillance and social control. Most of the characters in the narrative are recognizable from Malloy’s other work as is the minimalist visual layout of the epic composition, which is divided into preludes, interludes and cantos. The piece is composed as a hypertext in which the individual lexias work as independent entities. They can either be read sequentially by following the progression of the narrative (pressing the blue bar below the text), or the reading can branch out through the links (placed to the left of the interface). In this way an opaque, poetic universe is created, which questions causal relations as well as the probability of chance occurrences. The composition of the piece thus forms its own layer of reflection on the theme of covert surveillance and control. Entry drafted by: Kristin Veel
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Subject: hypertext , control, epic, surveillance
Creator: Judy Malloy
Collector: ELO
Description: The “Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot” is a poem written by Stephanie Strickland as a score for a hypertext implementation, coded by Janet Holmes. Its images are suggestive of digital or mathematical culture, including Webcam photos, a core dump, an animated fractal, and algorithmic patterns inscribed in sand by a computer-driven steel ball. The latter images are from Jean-Pierre Hébert’s and Bruce Shapiro’s work, "Sisyphus" (1999). These images accompany the text of a love poem, a ballad of love gone wrong, or at least not entirely right, between Sand and Soot. At one level, the disjunction of image and text mirrors the difficulties of this pair. However, this discordance will spring into resonant oscillation for readers who either see or read an avatar of carbon-based chemistry in Harry Soot and silicon life in Sand. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext , visual poetry, interactive, html, women authors, poetry
Creator: Stephanie Strickland, Janet Holmes
Publisher: Stephanie Strickland, Janet Holmes
Collector: ELO
Description: These Waves of Girls is a hypermedia novella exploring memory, girlhoods, cruelty, childhood play, and lesbian sexuality. The piece is composed as a series of small stories, artifacts, interconnections, and meditations from the point of view of a girl (or girls) at various ages from four to twenty. Fisher's work is distinct for its hypermedia features: each text passage is illustrated by new images and therefore presents a new interface for each chunk of text, some passages are read by the author. On the level of content, the story's characters try to find and come to terms with their sexuality. Figuratively, this construction of self is mirrored in the hypertextual structure Fisher makes use of: The reader witnesses the characters' identity construction by following one link after the other, coming closer to what identity means to the stories' characters': "We've all been fifteen. I look very much the same, only at fifteen I'm a little larger, a little stronger. I'll believe anything. I tell people I believe nothing." Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: hypertext , flash, women authors, audio, fiction, dhtml, html, sexuality, memoir
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