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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
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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: Shadows Never Sleep is the final story in a series of narratives written by Aya Karpinska, each exploring different aspects of reading using digital media. As with the prior works in the series, Shadows Never Sleep is evocative of children's stories and folk tales. The work is designed to make use of the iPhone as a storytelling platform. Rather than turning pages or selecting paths through the narrative, readers "zoom" into the story revealing new images and text. Shadows Never Sleep is divided into three "pages," each containing more panels than the prior, 1, 8, and 64 respectively. The simple black and white images are interposed with minimal text, evoking the play of light and dark, and the anthropomorphization of shadows that constitute the subject of this work. Entry drafted by: Dave Parry
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Subject: interactive, children`s stories, zoom-narrative, iphone, picture-story, classic folk tale
Creator: Aya Karpińska
Collector: ELO
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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: 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
Description: Canadian poet bpNichol used an Apple IIe computer and the Apple BASIC programming language to create First Screening, one of the earliest collections of kinetic computer poems, in 1983-1984. The twelve poems in First Screening soundlessly move across a black computer screen and so the work both positions itself halfway between film and sound/concrete poetry and also as a self-conscious (mis-)use of the filmic medium for poetry. In First Screening it also appears as though Nichol - writing at the very beginning of the era of the PC - understands the ease with which the digital computer can efface the body. For example, midway through the screening, the reader/viewer is introduced to “ANY OF YOUR LIP: a silent sound poem for Sean O’Huigin” - the title alone gestures to the absent presence of the body. Once the poem begins, we see/read the simple alternation between “MOUTH” and “mouth,” “myth” and “MOUTH,” “math” and “MOUTH,” “mate” and “MOUTH,” “maze” and “MOUTH,” “amaze” and “MOUTH”, and then the alternation between “ing”, “amaze,” and “MOUTH” which closes with the repeated flashing of “ing” and, finally, “MOUTH.” While the poem is perhaps silent because of the technological limitations of Nichol’s time, looking back on “ANY OF YOUR LIP” it is noticeable how this paradoxical silent sound poem draws attention to its silence at the same time as it enacts and perhaps even encourages readerly interactivity. Especially with the repeated flashing of “ing” at the end of the poem, a verb-ending that signals generalized or uncompleted action, “ANY OF YOUR LIP” invites readers to sound out or to “mouth” the words at the same time as they also try to make sense of the connections between the words as they flash across the screen. While poems in First Screening are not interactive in the sense that we’ve been accustomed to finding on the Internet, they show us another iteration of an expanded sense of interactivity that does not depend on the hypertext link. Entry drafted by: Lori Emerson
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Subject: Animation/Kinetic, kinetic text
Creator: bp Nichol (Barrie Nichol)
Collector: Electronic Literature Organization
Description: Jhave Johnston’s “human-mind-machine” is comprised of three chief components. The most obvious of these are the animated, three-dimensional images of the words in the poems’ title: “human,” “mind,” and “machine” (rendered using Autodesk’s Mudbox software). These three terms, which serve as the piece’s thematic backdrop, hover in the center of the screen, moving, morphing, and mutating to the palpitating, ambient loops that serve as the second, but perhaps most innovative, component of Johnston’s piece. Below the three-dimensional images, lines of text appear, in a variety of fonts, and change in synchronization with the cardial thrumming of Johnston’s soundtrack. In terms of its content, “human-mind-machine” explores consciousness and its competing characterizations as organic and mechanical, patterned and random, individual and collective. Especially powerful is its depiction of life in an apartment building, where the smell of cooking onions by an unseen neighbor imposes upon the speaker’s senses, pointing to a visceral intimacy outside of language. The speaker explains, “We know each other well. breathing and farting in the same tight pool. Sharing the vectors of savage necessity.” The poet captures the subjective character of daily life while rendering this primal experience with a twinge of determinism. The irony, of course, rests in the underlying programming feat of Johnston’s Sound Seeker application, which he describes as an “online real-time beat-synchronized poem animator.” The result is a delightfully chaotic instance of individual expression grafted to a patterned, structured format. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman
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Subject: Flash, animation, visual poetry, 3D, sound seeker
Creator: William David (Jhave) Johnston
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
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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: Uncle Roger by Judy Malloy first appeared from 1986-1987, placing it among the first generation of hypertexts produced on disks - contemporaneous with the earliest versions of Michael Joyce’s "afternoon: a story." The current (2003) revised web-version attempts to keep the original hypertext layout, design, and interaction. The work consists of a series of text nodes, connected via hyperlinks on words and icons. The node texts form a longer narrative in three parts: “A Party in Woodside,” “The Blue Notebook,” “Terminals.” The three sections, or "files" as the author calls them, intertwine personal recollections with descriptions of a pre-Internet, pre-PC age in California. The narrator, Jenny, serves as a focal point. The title figure “Uncle Roger” is Jenny’s uncle, an eccentric semiconductor market analyst, and the Silicon Valley culture and chip industry form the narrative backdrop. The stories bring together pieces of conversation at a California party with Jenny’s memories. In classic hyperfiction fashion, the reader chooses a path through the nodes by clicking on linked words or images. For instance, the section called “Terminals” features a keyboard-like set of icons that function as a navigational tool for accessing the separate story sections. Entry drafted by: Maria Engberg
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Creator: Judy Malloy
Description: In this work of kinetic concrete poetry the interface serves as a stage for words directed by poet Robert Kendall. Each of the expressions used perform Kendall's interpretation of the words meaning "Faith" and resemble a specific character that differs in color, typescript, movement, and sound. The "expanding multi-verse" is a poem in five 'movements' that consists of four differently colored layers of text that are revealed one after the other by mouse clicks. Each of the sucessive layers of text is overlaid on the previous one(s), incorporating the 'old' text into the new. The new words glide into the text from various directions replacing the 'old'. Semantically, each new state engages in an argument with the previous one(s). On the level of content, the poem thematizes the relationship of "logic", "theory", and "doubt". To each of these expressions, a certain color (red, orange, brown, black) and behavior is assigned. Additionally, the five 'movements' are accompanied by music: xylophone-like sounds, melodies of a harp, spheric synthesizer vibrations which merge with the harp in the fourth movement, and in the final instance, the xylophone tones prevail. The orchestrated words performed on the screen reinforce the poem's meaning visually, auditorily, and semantically. Special to this work of concrete poetry is the dynamic use of space that make the words move: some of the words glide out of the text space, other words bend down to the right or, like the word "leap", jump into the foreground. In the end, all words fall to the ground except one: "faith". Parts of this description are cited from "The Virtual Muse. Forms and Theory of Digital Poetry" by Norbert Bachleitner published in: Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric by Eva Mueller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: Flash, Animation/Kinetic, poetry, audio, music, concrete poetry
Creator: Robert Kendall
Description: Rob Swigart's "About Time" is a web-based digital fiction that juxtaposes two temporally remote narrative strands. One involves an aboriginal named Mouth with a penchant for exploration and discovery; the other tells of Crockford ("Cro") de Granville, a voracious business mogul who heads the Institute for Cognitive Emergence. Mouth's present is 40,000 years before de Granville's, which is described as the "present day" but appears much more like a mildly dystopic near-future, where a pretentious and egotistical de Granville "skinny-casts" his clients to secure their popular and financial support. Mouth likewise spends his time trying to convince his dull cousin, Tuber, of a world much larger and more complex than their current way of life would allow them to grasp. Thus both Mouth and de Granville conspicuously crave knowledge, but for vastly different ends. Using Flash animation software, "About Time" incorporates both sound and images, but relies on the primacy of the text for its dramatic and aesthetic effect. Composer and performer Allen Strange is credited with the "sound design," which includes introductory music for the text as a whole, musical effects for many of the episodes, and voice-over audio for some of the interactive media elements. The subtitle of the work, "A Digital Interactive Hypertext Fiction, Two Braided Parallel Paths, A Double Helix," is a fairly accurate comment on the structural composition of the text. The navigation is organized in two ways. Each page contains a sidebar menu of links to individual narrative scenes or episodes. In addition, the body text of each episode is populated with a number of links. These links will either open other textual episodes (color-coded by blue text) or, in the de Granville strand, open small windows containing media elements that are typically images with voice-over audio (color-coded red). The result is a reading environment that accommodates a linear, hierarchical reading - from the top of each menu to the bottom - as well as the ability to traverse the lateral linkages. A further navigational element joins the two "parallel" narrative paths, effectively braiding the text into its "double helix" composition: a dynamic image sits at the foot of each sidebar menu. For "Mouth's Journey" it is a futuristic-looking glass sphere in rotation; for "The de Granville Files," it is a rather austere skin of water that ripples in perfect red spheres with the perpetual disturbance of a single droplet, against what could also be a background of screen static. This is the portal between the Mouth's world and that of Cro de Granville, and for the reader a way to not simply imagine two disparate realms but, in effect, experience them in striking and eerie proximity. This is a work about two "times" that are, on the surface, far removed, but nevertheless continually bumping up against one another. The result is a telling commentary on human nature and its "progress" through the ages refracted through the juxtaposition of the two anchoring characters, along with a commentary on a topic toward which all narratives tend - the nature of time itself. Entry drafted by: David Ciccoricco
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Subject: Flash, Animation/Kinetic, fiction, hypermedia, animation, network forms, narrative
Creator: Rob Swigart
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
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: NIPP0N portrays a situation in a night-club and narrates the thoughts, actions, and interactions of a group of businessmen and "working women". In this work, the narrative alternates between first and third-person points-of-view, shifting between the perspectives of the women, the men, and an omniscient narrator. A horizontal screen-division displays the text bilingually: Japanese ideograms in red against a white backdrop on the top and English presented with white letters against red beneath. The unnamed characters are depicted as archetypes: the domineering madam, the leggy, lust-inspiring singer, the man who flirts with the prostitute while praising his loyal wife and making excuses for being out rather than at home. These stories are so common that the female listeners have "HEARD THIS— KIND — ØF — STØRY— MANY — TIMES". Marc Voge and Young-hae Chang, two Seoul-based artists known as Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) usually present their works as flash-narratives that come along with a synergistic interplay of text, music, color, and animation. Music is an integral component of YHCHI's pieces as the Flash animation tends to be synced to the melodies and rhythms of the music they choose. For the work at hand, the duo used a Thelonius Monk recording titled "Japanese Folk Song" from the "Straight, No Chaser" (1967) album. Generally, NIPP0N's narrative identifies the work as revolving around the presentation and deconstruction of binaries: Displayed onscreen are the dichotomies of English/Japanese, red/white, East/West, work/leisure, male/female, or commerce/sex. Its effect is an audio-visual encounter between the languages and cultures. While the work's title is the only indication of a geographical location given, the narrative could happen in any urban setting. It is, in a sense, universal. And so might the cultural critique entailed in this work be applied universally: At the end of the night and of NIPP0N's animation, the parasitic sickness is shown to be a symptom of a larger cultural, and decidedly corporate, epidemic: "THIS— IS — AN — INDUSTRY— LØVING/ YØUR MØM". The work ends by showing that the effects of global corporate capitalism are not limited to the confines of the after-hours bar but are evident in the daytime when the streets are filled with "TØØ MANY MEN IN DARK-GREY SUITS/ HURRY TØ TAXIS,/ AND LØØK HØW MANY— HAVE —CHAUFFERS". NIPP0N exposes a situation in which "TØØ MANY MEN", too uniformly dressed, and possessing too much money spill out of bars and brothels and into a morning light. The presented narrative written by the artists is a single Flash file. It runs for 16 minutes and contains no options for reader-controlled navigation, no buttons to pause, slow, or stop the animation of text that flashes in high-speed in front of the readers eyes. Parts of this description are cited from "Reading the Code between the Words: The Role of Translation in Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Nippon" by Jessica Pressman http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2007/Pressman/Pressman.htm Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: Flash, music, sound, animated text, scalable dimensions
Creator: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
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
Description: Zoe Beloff’s "Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A." is flash adaptation of a multimedia installation of the same name created by Beloff in 2001. This web-enabled version combines video, text, audio, and animation to tell the story of Natalija A., a psychiatric patient who was unable to communicate except through writing. Natalija believed that she was being controlled remotely by an “influencing machine,” a mechanical model of her body created by a doctor in Berlin which could be manipulated to control her telepathically. Based on an actual 1919 account of Viennese psychoanalyst Victor Trausk, Beloff’s work contains passages from Trausk’s notebooks, simulated effects of the “diabolical machine,” surrealist footage of medical procedures, and video clips of the actual broadcast technologies that emerged during the early twentieth century to influence populations worldwide. Beloff’s piece is notable for its interface, which presents itself as a “book,” with weathered, yellow pages complete with faint traces of text bleeding through from their opposite sides. Embedded black and white videos enhance the uncanny feel of the piece, giving the “book’s” diagrams a haunting, hallucinatory mood. The audio of the piece combines soundtracks with the video clips with white noise and whispered recitations, suggesting that the mute Natalija is speaking through the book through supernatural means. The result is an atmosphere that seems faded and esoteric, preserving the enigmatic character of Natalija’s unresolved affliction, her allegation that Trausk himself was under the machine’s evil influence, and his suicide the following year. Taken as a whole, the piece might best be understood as a contemporary manifestation of the literary gothic, where facts and speculations anxiously intersect, and conspiratorial notions flourish. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman
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Subject: video, creative non-fiction, gothic, installation
Creator: Zoe Beloff
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