“New paradigms continue
to be explored by people who poke at the edges; the public responds by
reframing hopes and expectations; and the character of a new medium begins to
emerge. The process of maturation in new media requires creativity, time,
investment, optimism, and freedom – exactly those things a skeptical society is
in no mood to grant.”
-- Brenda Laurel
|
V |
erbisuality is what I call my
practice, my ways of being an artist. Don’t bother trying to find the word in a
dictionary. I made up the term as I became knowledgeable and skilled in new
media art making. I made it up as I do elements of my books, poems, paintings,
photographs and stories. Yet … like most of my work, the word is based in FACTual terms: verbal, verse and visual, accounting for the
fact that while I am working in new art spaces and places that allow me to link
and to layer, I am grounded in historical art practices: painting, performance,
photography, and writing.
My unpublished
print novel, Reclamation, a multi-vocal literary fiction spanning six
generations of Irish women in coal country, sparked my interest in using the
computer for reading and writing fiction.
As I was performing the second comprehensive edit, I began to think
about how enriching it would be to use hypertext to connect, associatively, stories
of the five women protagonists, to add historical and cultural references to
the work and to show how decisions of our ancestors and community actions have
long-term societal impact. What launched my thinking about that last component
is that the novel is based in geographic location and social strata (my
lifelong preoccupation with the study of place, of course).
Interestingly,
author, educator, software developer Michael Joyce with whom I have
corresponded and whose work I have studied, said he had much the same
experience. While typing successive
drafts of his small-press novel and discovering that a word processor would
allow him to move paragraphs that he felt would work better elsewhere in his
manuscript, he found that he wanted to re-arrange a great deal more.
“I
wanted, quite simply, to write a novel that would change in successive readings
and to make those changing versions according to the connections that I had for
some time naturally discovered in the process of writing and that I wanted my
readers to share … It seemed to me that if I, as author, could use a computer
to move paragraphs about, it wouldn’t take much to let readers do so according
to some scheme I had predetermined …” (Of Two Minds Hypertext Pedagogy and
Poetics 31)
Through links and layers, by using traditional art methods and tools and by making up new rules as I go along, I am working in a new medium generally called hyperfiction, which has its roots in hypertext. Hyperfiction – digital narrative, digital story, electronic fiction, computer-mediated storytelling, whichever terms one uses to define fiction made by and for reading on the computer through hypertext linking – is a medium in early stages of development.
Theorists do not concur in its potential effects on the humanities[1] and world culture. Neither do many of us who write it. Many readers are not certain what to do with hyperfiction. It changes the traditional reading practice.
In my freelance work as a book discussion facilitator for the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, I develop and facilitate reading programs. I am a bibliophile, a collector of books, and a voracious reader of print materials. In researching supplemental materials for the books in my programs, I try to get my readers, in places throughout the state, to access the Internet to read information relating to our discussions, to access digital art that highlights our readings and our talks. Of the hundreds of readers with whom I interact, few occasionally use the Internet to read. Usually, I print the virtual materials and make copies to provide to the readers.
Due to the technical skills one must develop and the time it takes away from traditional writing, most of my writing colleagues are not interested in creating hyperfiction. Among fellow members of Pennwriters, a statewide organization of writers of numerous genres and professions, only one other is writing digital story.
In an Internet article, Trip report –
Computing & The Humanities,[2]
Michael Lesk discussed proceedings of Transforming
Disciplines: Computer Science and the Humanities, a 2003 conference uniting
experts and practitioners. Focusing on Janet Murray’s presentation, wherein she
discussed interactive media with regard to choices and outcomes, Lesk said:
“I
couldn't really see this as an advance over plays like Alan Ayckbourn's
‘Intimate Exchanges’ or the movie “Sliding Doors,” unless there are authorship
tools making this widely accessible. Personally I'm always hesitant about
complex multimedia presentation systems since they tend to require too many
skills and/or too much capital investment for an individual to be able to use
them, and thus hampering the ability of one creative individual to produce
something. There are very few people who can excel at both the narrative and
visual arts (Blake, Rossetti, and William Morris come
to mind, but they are unusual).”
Welcome
to the “late age of print,” as Jay David Bolter calls the present.
“Digital technology is turning out to be one of the more traumatic remediations in the history of western writing,” he said in Writing Spaces. “One reason is that the
digital
technology changes the ‘look and feel’
of writing and reading …
The World Wide Web absorbs and
refashions almost every previous visual and textual medium.” (24-25)
Remediation is a
technical and a cultural process wherein new media refashion earlier media
forms. The new media and the traditional forms simultaneously exist in the marketplace
with new media using and restructuring elements of traditional mediums, which,
consequently, transforms the “cultural space” of the older medium. Thus
hypertext remediates the printed volume.
Given the criticisms about literature as hypertext and the learning curves associated with software applications, were I easily discouraged, I would have abandoned my study plan. Fortunately, I am of the belief that any skill worth having takes work to acquire. Besides, the controversy about this new form of reading and writing awakened the wanderer/wonderer in me.
Whole-Brain
Art
Hierarchy, linearity, the center and margins are cognitive processes and longstanding, internalized cultural norms that hyperfiction abandons for new language systems and, thereby, new cultural occurrences. Where text and printing brought us the temporal bound book, hypertext creates links, multilinearity, networks and nodes in a spatial environment, in new communities we are only learning to understand and to incorporate into our personal and/or professional lives.
Writing hyperfiction is very much an interdisciplinary creative
act, the work of a verbisualite. I refer to it as
“whole brain art,” meaning that it requires the simultaneous engagement of
verbal and visual consciousness, which I had to train myself to practice for
screen space. Journalism had taught me to separate text from image. In the
print news profession, I was trained to write and design in methods whereby the
image supported the text. Never did the verbal and visual touch in my newspaper
days. A photo caption was the closest thing to interacting with its image.
Stuart Molthrop was not exaggerating when he said of hyperfiction, “It takes months of your life to build these little worlds.” Writing fiction for the computer screen is like putting in double time … and then some.
Reading hyperfiction via computer, I contend, is different from reading a print story. My immersion into this medium did not begin as swimmingly as I had predicted. “What fresh hell is this?” I asked myself, quoting Dorothy Parker, the first time I read a hyperfiction. It was Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story. About five lexias (pages) into the program, I contemplated returning to my beloved books, to print, a medium in which I have made a name for myself and know what I am doing, and to print documentary photography, another realm where I have achieved success, by society’s and newspaper judges’ definitions of the term.
Traditionalists declare
that electronic writers will bring about the demise of literature as current
culture writes and reads it. Cultural critic, essayist and author Sven Birkerts, who wrote The Gutenberg Elegies: The
Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, is one of the most distinguished opponents of
hypertext media. I disagree with many of his views about hyperfiction.
In a debate with 
“What makes books a more
soulful medium than MUDs is that reading always
carries us in the direction of the self; it counters the momentum of daily
living, mends the dissociated self by creating a field, a protected area - by
enforcing duration.
Conversely, many computer scientists and authors of multimedia literary hypertext believe the flexibility, interactivity and speed of distribution liberates creativity, production and delivery of important messages, educational objects and works of fine art. I agree. In my view, the evolution of form is not the demise of art, culture and education. It is change, and change, historically a difficult process, can be productive.
“The computer is not the enemy of the book. It is the child of print culture, a result of the five centuries of organized, collective inquiry and invention that the printing press made possible,” asserted Murray (Hamlet on the Holodeck 8). “Just as the computer promises to reshape knowledge in ways that sometimes complement and sometimes supersede the work of the book and lecture hall, so too does it promise to reshape the spectrum of narrative expression, not by replacing the novel or the movie but by continuing their timeless bardic work within another framework.” (9-10).
Past
and Present Transitions
As do many scholars, I believe “hyperfiction” as an aesthetic concept has been around in print book form for far longer than some will acknowledge. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman published in 1759, works by Kenneth Patchen, including In Quest of Candlelighters, objects by Italo Calvino and other members of Oulipo, and the more recent print phenomenon, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves defy longstanding conventions of print books. Danielewski’s is the most visually startling of these works with its pages of print that sometimes resemble a computer hypertext window. The creator uses the page as a stage for artistic use of text and for collage.
Quoting Calvino’s The Uses of Literature, Sloane reminded us of his assertions for ars combinatoria
“as a method of releasing the unconscious, of breaking the conscious mind’s ‘ban’ on mentioning something, of crossing ‘the barriers of prohibition’ … [t]he power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what had remained unexpressed in the social and individual unconscious…” (Digital Fictions 49).
Artists’ books also defy the strictures by which standard print books operate. In fact, because many hyperfiction writers are using typography and visual art in their stories, I believe illuminated manuscripts, such as those of William Blake, and artists’ books, are more closely allied to hyperfiction than are print stories. As you will soon read, it took making an artist book for me to break traditional processes of print book design that I had embodied during years of work in literary arts.
To make matters of discourse much more interesting, digital hyperfiction is linked to performance narrative, which, of course, predates writing. Electronic society has its foundation in both writing and in print, Walter J. Ong asserted. (Orality and Literacy 2)
Briefly, journey with me to an age when storytelling was purely a verbal art. Humanity has existed for at least 30,000 years, perhaps as long ago as 50,000 years. Yet writing is only about 6,000 years old. Indeed, oral cultures lived without writing but writing culture has never existed without orality.
Early manuscripts were created to be read aloud to oral society. Writing was not taught to the common folks; it was a specialized craft. Writing was hardly a group activity unless one considers the monks who labored to produce the manuscripts for oral presentation.
The technology was primitive. Writing was an act that demanded serious preparation. The scribes did not run out to Staples to buy parchment and calligraphic stick pens with ink cartridges. They used elements found in nature. “In the physical act of writing, the medieval Englishman Orderic Vitalis said ‘the whole body labors’.” (Clanchy, 1979, 90, Ong 94)
The transition from chirographic manuscript to typographic documentation was just as controversial as was moving from the spoken word to the written word. Change was, as it is now: never an easy thing to get through.
In surveying
transformations that occurred when information technology evolved from
manuscript[4] to print form, George Landow cited the work of Alvin Kernan,
humanities professor and author of Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print
(originally published as Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson),
which uses the work of Johnson to explore how printing technology changed attitudes toward
literature. Kernan, said Landow,
showed how technology:
“actually affects individual and social life. For example, ‘by changing their work and their writing [print] forced the writer, the scholar and the teacher – the standard literary roles – to redefine themselves, and if it did not create, it noticeably increased the importance and number of critics, editors, bibliographers, and literary historians.” (Hypertext 2.0 31)
Print also affected the
psychodynamics of audience, Landow said and further
quoted Kernan:
“a small group of manuscript readers or listeners … to a group of readers … who bought books to read in the privacy[5] of their homes. … Print also rearranged the relationship of letters to other parts of the social world, by, for example, freeing the writer from the need for patronage and the consequent subservience to wealth, by challenging and reducing established authority’s control of writing …” (31)
Lost
in a good book hyperfiction
Readers of print novels and short stories know about immersion, or becoming involved in a world contained within the pages of a book. I would argue that print readers also interact with a book, although in ways different than interacting with a computer-mediated story. For example, what of the reader who forwards pages or chapters to determine what happens with a particular character and then goes back to her place in the text, satisfied with discovering what she wanted to know.
In the digital world, interactivity, due to the hypertext link, has come to stand for elements associated with the postmodern condition, including fluidity, instability, decentralization and multiplicity. Critics of digital narrative say these features make for confusing reading. Some theorists say it reconfigures the role of the author and the reader, making wreaders[6] (reader-authors) of readers. Based on what I know so far, that hypertext systems create wreaders is a sweeping generalization. Obviously, the hypertext author decides, through design, whether she will provide for wreaders. What is more, readers decide whether they want to become co-authors.
Ryan
noted that in the visual arts and literature "the rise and fall of
immersive ideals are tied to the fortunes of an aesthetics of illusion, which
implies transparency of the medium." (Narrative as Virtual Reality:Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and
Electronic Media 4)
For
example, in the 18th century, storytelling style employed an
"ambiguous" approach to immersion.
"it cultivated illusionist effects by simulating nonfictional narrative modes (memoirs, letters, autobiographies); on the other hand, it held immersion in check through a playful, intrusive narrative style that directed attention back and forth from the story told to the storytelling act …Nineteenth century novelists [7]favored an aesthetics wherein "high realism effaced the narrator and the narrative act, penetrated the mind of characters, transported the reader into a virtual body located on the scene of the action, and turned her into the direct witness of events, both mental and physical, that seemed to be telling themselves." (4)
Is it possible to get “lost” in a good hyperstory? This question is a double entendre since much of the criticism about digital narrative specifically faults the labyrinthian structure of computer stories. Thus, getting “lost” in a hypertext has literal connotation for many who have explored fiction made by and for the computer. These individuals do not believe it is possible for a reader to become immersed in a computer narrative. I, however, believe it is probable.
As writing evolved, as it became embodied in our psyche, character, plot and genre changed. In primary orality, stories were mostly of heroic battles – epics. When storytellers externalized interior thoughts, stories changed. Explained Ong, “The novel is clearly a print genre, deeply interior, de-heroicized, and tending strongly to irony. Present-day de-plotted narrative forms are part of the electronic age, deviously structured in abstruse codes (like computers.)” (155-56)
My point, beyond that change is controversial, is that when one stops to consider the artistic, personal and social changes that occurred with the introduction of chirography, its successor – print – and, in recent history, digital writing, it appears that hyperfiction may bring us full circle. Yet, while similarities exist, there is a danger to such thinking, I have found. Failure to reason beyond our current print literacy methodology, using comparison and contrast as the sole method to define and practice hyperfiction, could compromise development of the medium.
“ … we must take care not to measure their progress only against the traditional tales they are not trying to be … [digital fictions] direct our attention to how a delivery system can affect plot, setting and character, as well as to the quality of the overall reading and writing experiences.” (Sloane, 42-43)
I
conclude that thought processes for print culture differ from those used in
writing and reading electronic story. In the writing and design of hyperfiction, the artist thinks associatively, allows the
mind to “cross the barriers of prohibition”. Working in new media calls for an assimilation
of cognitive processes used in oral performance, visual art making and writing.
Furthermore, I believe working in the electronic writing and design spaces
calls for as yet discovered ways of thinking about storytelling and story
reading. I also believe emerging noetic processes may
be helpful for empowering individuals seeking personal and professional growth
in their lives. For me, the creation of digital worlds is about using new writing/reading
technology to explore and to unfetter thoughts, words … and people.
HYPERart
Thus far, I have reflected on the remediation of orality, writing and print in hyperfiction. I have not yet shared how contemporary visual artists feel about this new art form.
From my reading
and my new media practice, I deduce that arts critics and artists are
considerably more understanding of the desire to utilize these new creative
spaces than are many writers and literary critics. Nonetheless, as in print,
there is controversy over the social status and “appropriate background” of artists
using digital software and computers to create.
As
do literary artists with print books, visual practitioners cite a lengthy
history of interactive, “hypermediated” art. For
example, the panoramic image, mail art and Fluxus
long
pre-dated Internet art. Each flourished because of artists’ investigations of
and experiments with technology and because multidisciplinary citizen artists
sought to express and communicate in innovative ways that questioned accepted
artistic, cultural, economic, political and societal authorities and ideas.
Artists “were
concerned more with challenging the institutions not (just) of art, but of
communication, from the mail system, to publishing, to radio and television,”
explained Norie Neumark in At
A Distance Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (12).
In the same title,
Johanna Drucker observed:
“Mail art,
artists’ books, performance-based Fluxus[8] art, and site-specific
sculptural work shifted to venues outside the gallery and museum settings,
emphasizing alternative sites and modes of distribution. … And activist art focused on collective
projects, public relations, staged events, and other interventionary
strategies in the period when civil rights, Vietnam War protests, and other
issue-driven agendas claimed aesthetic support.” (39)
As
I see it, new media artists are navigating the pathways Fluxus
artists mapped. Fluxus artists were analog networkers. They sought to circumvent, if not break,
hierarchical strangleholds of art, cultural and social disciplinarity
and they focused on art activities geared toward participation in performative environments they generated, which is what
many new media artists are doing by using the computer to make and share their art.
Owen
F. Smith [9] recalled the “qualities”
fundamental to Fluxus art,
“(Dick) Higgins proposed that this list would consist of nine points: internationalism, experimentalism, intermedia, minimalism or concentration, an attempted resolution of the art/life dichotomy, implicativeness, play or gags, ephemerality, and specificity. (Ken) Friedman proposed a slightly different list of twelve criteria: globalism, unity of art and life, intermedia, experimentalism, chance, playfulness, simplicity, implicativeness, exemplativism, specificity, presence in time, and musicality … More central to Fluxus is its nature as an attitude toward art, life and culture.” (At a Distance121-122)
One will find many of these qualities in new media art.
Again, as with the term “hyperfiction,” a lack of standard definition for “digital art” seems to create some of the disagreement as does the, continuing although no longer rampant, perception and polarization of art as “high art” and “ low art.” Bolter and Grusin said that in the visual arts community a “rigid cultural hierarchy” no longer exists and digital techniques are literally illustrating a larger cultural development: “that we are coming to regard what was once high art as a series of stylistic choices” (Remediation 140).
This is good news to me because I find the high art/low art duality bothersome. Of course, as disciplines and titles go, I am a photographer, which means I may be sensitive to the polarization because of photography’s long fight for acceptance as an art form.
Possibilities
Multimedia hyperfiction has the potential to reach wider and more diverse readers and to give voice to creators whose work is insightful, skilled and important but not considered profitable by traditional mainstream publishers who control the information to which readers have access. Supply and demand economic principles are involved in this equation insofar as publishers giving readers what they think they want and artists interested in working in the electronic writing space must take the initiative to give readers good stories in the new medium, which will drive demand from our reading culture as more people come online.
So many fine print manuscripts are not published, and thus not even known about, because publishers consider the work too risky to produce for a public that is on a buying binge of genre titles. Hypertext art and publishing can change this. Therein, lies the issue – it is not so much about writers controlling reader experience as it about fear of artists controlling the market and as it is about artists fearful of rejection in another medium of expression.
I do not believe it valid to muddy the waters of discourse with an issue as unproductive as whether one form of story and one art medium is better than another is. Traditional print and literary hypertext, film photography, painting and digital imaging can, and do, co-exist peacefully and pleasurably. Each has the potential to enhance the use of the other. A significant difference is that with use of electronic technology, artists have the potential to affect a much larger audience without having to involve large publishers and distributors.
Art is not threatened.
Print publishing, ensconced in capitalistic ritual, is at risk.
In Gesturing, Carolyn Guertin recalled an observation by Marshall McLuhan:
“the hybrid of meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which a new form is born … the meeting of two media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.”
McLuhan’s remark underscores a statement made by Shelley
Jackson, who is among my favorite hyperfiction
authors.
In Stitch Bitch,
as published in Rethinking Media Change The Aesthetics of Transitions
edited by Davis Thorburn and Henry Jenkins,
“language must be teased into displaying its entire mapcap lavish beauty. If you let it be serviceable then it will only serve you, never master you, and you will only write what you already know, which is not much … the careful guarding of sense in language is not just analogous to but entirely complicit in the careful guarding of sense in life, and that possibly well-intentioned activity systematically squelches curiosity, change, variety and finally, all delight in life. It promotes common sense at the expense of all the others.” (246-247)
For me, the ability to circumvent the politics of the marketplace makes hyperfiction enticing enough to practice. I discovered another potential good use during an electronic discussion I had with a fellow graduate student, one who also practices teaching in inventive ways.
Artist Jodi Patterson told me she had shown my multimedia digital story to her students during discussion about postmodern aesthetics. I invited Patterson to ask her art students whether they would like to become a part of “Covalent Bonds,” a story about physical, social and cultural blindness. In terms of educational value, the story offers lessons in creative writing, digital imaging, intermedia, rural living, and contemporary culture.
As it turned out, I am so glad I asked Patterson whether she would be interested in such a project. I was able to test theory, employ arts and teaching skills, practice my field of new media arts, and to make new friends from a place to which I journeyed via the Internet through the virtual voices of students.
Early in my story, a character poses the question: “Learning: have you ever smelled "learning?" In turn, the reader may answer the question by clicking either “Yes?” or “No?” Either of those links asks the reader to share his or her definition of learning via an email to the character.
Patterson’s students sent emails containing their feelings about learning. I responded to the emails as a way to acknowledge receipt of their responses and to create a sense of virtual community.
Each of the students offered a definition that spoke of teenage experience: of pain, of love, of sadness, of goals. I was overwhelmed by what they shared with me and I thought long and hard about how I could honor their stories. I wanted to do more for them than upload their plain text responses. Consequently, I created graphics that employed their words, uploaded the finished projects to the site and added a new link so that readers could access these new pages in the story.
This small project, enabled via the Internet, two artists and a group of students, illustrates the potential that exists for creative arts education in digital environments, wherein we are able to transcend barriers associated with time, place and space. As a result of this successful collaboration, I am designing curriculum that may be used with the hyperfiction as well as with other art objects and projects on which I am working.
Making
Covalent Bonds
My first digital story began as a second generation hyperfiction created by using Macromedia Dreamweaver software application. It reverted to first generation status (these hyperfictions, including Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story, were comprised mainly or exclusively of text, thereby making it more like a print book) with the use of a software program called Storyspace, and is now blossoming into a multimedia artwork based on traditional arts practices (writing, painting, photography, performance) and current technology that I am re-making in Dreamweaver.
Initially titled Sister Stories and recently re-titled to Covalent Bonds, I built the story on the premise that blindness is a disease occurring in many forms that bear various consequences. For example, both utopian and dystopian outlooks toward technology (forms of blindness, if you will) can lead people to harmful beliefs and standards.
Thus, the protagonist, Victoria, is physically blind due an arson fire at the local library, where she was librarian, and metaphorically blind because she refuses to “see” the benefits of technology and of re-discovering a long lost love; her sister, Virginia, cannot see that her marriage is crumbling because she refuses to acknowledge that her husband has an Internet love affair; Mary Meade, the assistant hired to be Tori’s eyes, cannot see that for which she has been searching – her own sisters – because she is functionally illiterate; and the mystery “visitor,” cannot see that his ignorance and his desire to hurt these people, could be his own damnation.
Jake, who has returned from a far to re-settle in his hometown, can see what is happening. Nonetheless, Victoria, whom he still loves, refuses to acknowledge that she loves him as well.
The new title, Covalent
Bonds, has roots in biological science. I employ it metaphorically.
Briefly, covalent bonds form when connected atoms have almost the same attraction
for electrons. Sharing one or several pairs of electrons allows the atoms to
fill their exterior shells, which produces energetic stability. Used as metaphor, the title symbolizes
familial, geographical and cultural allegiances, or those “shells” from which
individuals establish their “energetic stability,” their beliefs, their values.
What’s more, for
my purposes as my hyperfiction’s setting is in the area
of
My quest for a new
title for the story began some time ago when I began to realize that Sister
Stories isolated my reach in terms of audience. I felt that it would
unintentionally eliminate a male readership. My search for a better title
became paramount when I learned through conversation with Joyce that he, Guyer and archaeologist Rosemary Joyce collaborated on the
writing and design of a hyperfiction also called Sister
Stories.
I choose Covalent
Bonds to symbolize the links within the hyperfiction,
the links among orality, print, performance and
digital fiction, the convergence between the sciences and the arts, and,
finally, as aforementioned, to metaphorically define the sustaining life forces
and connections among the characters and their social and physical places in
the microcosm where the story unfolds.
Where traditional
elements of fiction writing are concerned, Covalent Bonds uses Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Aristotle’s three types of
drama and Lajos Egri’s
three dimensions of character and employs the five main elements of fiction:
characterization, conflict, plot, setting and theme, and traditional literary
devices, including, but not limited to: metaphor (igniting imagination to show
the relationship between individuals, terms and ideas that, at first glance,
are foreign to each other), dialogue, foreshadowing, flashback, personification
and symbolism.
Noting that I
shall be among the first to break rules, to experiment, to be “bold,” as my
Nana calls me, I also believe that a fiction writer must have a command of the
traditional elements and devices used in fiction writing. If the writer wants
to be read, the writer has to be able to “tell a story” no matter the medium in
which he or she works. The need to be
grounded in what audiences want in a story is crucial. Besides, one must know
the rules before breaking them.
Beyond using the fundamentals of fiction, I break, or, at least,
stretch
certain writing rules. I use theory
of orality, print fiction, hypertext linking, hyperfiction, photography, painting, digital art,
typography and new media culture to create stories with and for the computer.
The new media
elements of my story are based in the work of Katherine Phelps, MFA, PhD.,who developed Storytronics[11], a body of original
theory on the pathing structures of computer-mediated
story, which she published at her indisciplinary
virtual art site, Glass Wings. Based on her findings and my e-mail
discussions with her, I plotted a braided multi-pathing
digital story, which is to say that my focus is on the interconnectedness of
human lives and events.
“… an initial situation is given which then branches out in a number of thematically related plot directions which subsequently converge upon another situation that then again offers a number of directions to choose from. In this manner it is still possible to build dramatic tension, give the reader a feeling of free movement, and yet even with that free movement provide a seamless story experience,” Phelps explained.
This structure is ideal for me, a new media artist seeking to be bold and brave while remaining true to traditional story constructions so that folks new to hyperfiction do not feel overwhelmed by what they see and read. If a reader so chooses, Covalent Bonds can be read from beginning to end, in a linear fashion as one typically reads a book. They will miss certain lexias, sub-plots, but they will have a full story if they choose to read the pages without clicking on the hypertextual images and text.
On the other hand, I included gaming elements so that the adventurous may explore. Hyperfiction theorists and numerous practitioners agree that electronic literature has its roots in electronic games.
My early designs
of Covalent Bonds were not wildly experimental. Indeed, the lexias, or pages, looked very much like pages in a print
book. Hypertext links, leading the reader to various connective spaces within
the story, were the sole differentiation of the hyperfiction
from its print counterpart. Covalent Bonds does exist in a print format.
I thought it vital to determine, and to record, how I thought and worked in
both storytelling mediums.
Visually, my first attempts at designing Covalent Bonds looked much like 24 hours with someone you know, a 1996 hyperfiction by Philippa J. Burne. From here, my design involved elements as used by Christy Sheffield Sanford. In those works, images are included, but for the most part, separated from the story. I designed just as I did during my newspaper production days. That’s fine. As Sheffield Sanford remarked, there is nothing wrong with having text and an image occupy different positions on a page; however, with regard to my hypertext documentaries and my hyperfiction, I seek the amalgamation – the multimedia interdisciplinarity – that current technology allows.
Therefore, I spent considerable time studying Internet hyperfictions. About Time[12] by Rob Swigart, Jennifer Ley’s The Body Politic[13] and Progressive Dinner Party[14], a digital tour de force of contemporary women hyperfiction authors, are among my favorite examples of the many multimedia hyperfictions that I enjoyed for display of interdisciplinary art skill. At these sites, the artists combine elements of traditional and new media to entertain through story.
Although I am certain that the time I spent at interdisciplinary hyperfiction sites was helpful to my work, as I mentioned earlier, it was studying about and making an artists’ book that caused me to realize that the art I made for inclusion in the hyperfiction was very much in my traditional style of using image to explain text.
N. Katherine Hayles and Drucker convinced me that an understanding of the materiality of the traditional print book, not just how it LOOKS but how it WORKS, was vital to my ability to use and to find new ways to assemble an art object and to promote the Human-Computer Interaction, or HCI, via the World Wide Web.
“To look at a thing,” Oscar Wilde said,
“is very different from seeing it.”
With the creation
of my artists’ book, Nether Province, a component in the Voice of
Home project, I worked toward the goal of Stéphané
Mallarmé who believed, as Drucker
recounted:
“that spaces of
the book could be invested with a far more complex structure and thus become
‘the divine and intricate organism required by literature.’ ... Mallarmé was attempting a synthesis between a philosophical
vision of the book as a expansive instrument of the spirit and the capacity of
its physical form to reflect and embody thought in new visual arrangements.”
(36)
When designing my artists’ book, I developed layout designs for each page, planning exactly the elements that would go on each, and, initially, I followed the map like a dog on a leash. This rigidity stymied my creativity, in part because this was my first artists’ book and because the planning had hindered proper delivery of the messages.
Several weeks in the project, I wondered whether I should reconsider my decision to make the book. Creative juices were not flowing. I decided I would leave the pieces of the book on my work area to stare at while I continued with other projects.
“I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light,” said Isaac Newton.
Call it divine
intervention, call it coincidence, call it what you will, but what happened
next was nothing short of magical for me. Based on an earlier recommendation
from an artist friend, I watched Andy Goldsworthy Rivers and Tides Working
with Time. In the
I realized what had happened to me with the artist’s book. I was not allowing myself to listen to the creator within, to do this artist’s book intuitively. Instead, I was working from an unyielding map drawn by my own hands.
As Goldsworthy stated,
“Total control can be the death of
a work.”
It had been intuition that had caused me to spend a morning gathering sticks, pinecones, coal, white birch, ferns and other elements at an abandoned strip mine site and to feel so excited about undertaking the art project with these elements. Making that design map was not wrong, but following it when it was leading me down the wrong path, was incorrect.
I was thinking entirely like a print author and designer of print texts. The map is evidence of this. When I started to use the gutters and fore-edges of the rectos and versos, once I stopped thinking about the book as space for a printed story, once I allowed myself to play with the materiality of a book, creativity flowed.
In a 2003 Journal of Artists’ Books article, In the Context of Reading, Susan Viguers said, “Artists’ books have an uneasy relationship with writing.” This statement has deeper and somewhat different meaning for me as an artist with a strong print writing/editing/design background serving a community with an embodied print background.
Emerging
Art in Converging Spaces
Having been through and planning to re-enter the process of re-creating my hyperfiction to reflect a convergence of text and image, I agree with what Glassner said about the progress of hyperfiction artists being contingent upon three steps: studying the basics of writing fiction, learning from the present and building with balance. “Since the medium that combines stories, games, and people is still being born, everyone involved is simultaneously both inventing new technology and finding ways to use it … The failures are as important as the successes” (28).
We are taught not to fail; however, in my belief, errors do not signify failures. Any experience from which we learn cannot be deemed a “failure.”
As Phelps predicted: “The current generation of creators are now in a position whereby taking in the full scope of computer mediated storytelling, they can make conscious use of these methods, synthesizing technique with artistry.”
Covalent Bonds
is a finished story in the traditional print sense. In screen space, it is far
from being a closed book. It is a world wherein changes are occurring, a place
inhabited by people whose interactions with others bring about change in
individual and collective thought and action. Thus, I include on the “cover” a
date noting when the story was last updated.
“Oh foolish
writer. Now moves. Even in story time, dream time, once-upon-a-time, now isn’t then …a mere glimpse at this place told me that things had been
happening there while I wasn’t looking. It was high time to go back and find
out what was going on now.” (Tales
from Earthsea, foreword)
In my view, Ursula
K. LeGuin, the creator of the fictional world of Earthsea, referred to the artist’s mind at work while going
about day-to-day living. Earthsea is bound in printed
volumes. Yet, the people and the place had evolved since the last page was
written and placed in book form.
By employing
screen space, Covalent Bonds is unbound. If, upon return to this world,
I find that things have been happening, I can add new “pages” to the story.
Verbisuality. It is the process of combining old and new art disciplines and tools to explain, to explore, to intervene and to share one’s creative output in multiple forms and many places and spaces.