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Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Urs Schreiber’s Java-based German Internet opus Das Epos der Maschine ("Machine Epic") epitomizes the control of the "machine" over its user both practically and (meta-) theoretically. As the title suggests, the text regards itself as a poem of epic dimensions, i.e. poetic narrative that acts as a symbol of an entire national or, as in the case of the Internet, virtual paradigm. In other words, Schreiber positions his work in the tradition of the great ethnic and religious epics (e.g. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Nibelungenlied and Milton’s Paradise Lost). By the same token, it follows in the tradition of concrete poetry, which critically and playfully reflects on language itself as well as its inextricable determination by the medium in which it appears. The Epos is a joint venture. Text and programming were done by Urs Schreiber, the graphics by Kai Jelinek and Cesare Wosko, the photographs by Claudia König, and the sound by Die with Dignity. (...) Read the entire elit work article by Astrid Ensslin at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/314
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Subject: poetry, fiction, cybertext, sound, epic, machine control, multimodal, narrative
Creator: Urs Schreiber
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
Description: Upon launching Erik Loyer's The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (1998), a web-based work of digital fiction powered by Shockwave software animation, readers not only see the opening navigation screen, but must feel their way around it. Nine circles orbit, carrousel-like, around a tower constructed with two triangles, one inverted and resting on top of the other. The sound of an eerie synthesized pulsing accompanies each rotation, which speeds up the farther away the reader moves the mouse. A tiny number appears at the foot of each, counting - up or down depending on which way the shapes orbit - from one to nine. (...) Read the entire elit work article Dave Ciccoricco at http://directory.eliterature.org/node/618
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Subject: poetry, audio, music, narrative , cognition, consciousness, digital fiction, interactive motion graphics, interior monologue, jazz, letters, memory, mind, poem, posthuman, spoken word
Creator: Erik Loyer
Collection: Electronic Literature: Individual Works
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
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