In of day, of night Megan Heyward’s voice fuses disparate scenes into a coherent story about a woman's wanderings, a search to regain her sense of self. For what are our dreams if not a series of journey through our past, present, and potential?
of day of night joins other journey stories from the Western literary tradition that explore the struggle of human beings to make sense of life and of their lives.
Down Time consists of twenty-one stories of the computer age, connected by shared characters, events and objects. A police officer, a terminal patient, a computer technician, and a high-school guidance counselor are just a few of the characters we follow as they try (and fail) to understand themselves, their lovers, and the strangers they meet. Interactive elements allow readers to create their own paths through different stories, revealing new correspondences and connections.
(Source: Eastgate catalog description)
Down Time consists of a set of twenty-one short fables named for, and metaphorically based on, computer jargon. In these stories a couple of dozen characters from many walks of life in a mythical Silicon Valley move and interact in complex ways through one another's lives.
The text is accompanied by original music and narration (about 5 1/2 hours worth), and broken into small narrative units (NITS) that can be recombined in many ways, from random to semantic. Although structurally the project may present similarities with some of the films of Robert Altman, notably Nashville, Short Cuts and Pret-a-Porter, in Down Time the effect is a mosaic portrait of a subculture, not a linear narrative, and the readers may generate other stories.
The Down Time stories (the title story based on what it is called when computers fail) are each relatively brief (around 2000 words), and depict a small incident or set of incidents, covering everything from manufacturing accidents to the seductive lure of databases. Because a character may appear at one time as the protagonist in a story, at another only briefly as a supporting figure, it is possible to create other slices through the narrative. For example, the reader/user may follow a character instead of an incident, or an image or motif. Done in Macromedia Director, cross-platform.
(Source: DAC 1999 Author's description)
The Diary of an Absence aims to be an example of intimate personal writing through something which has been put into words but which perhaps should have remained unsaid. Arranged in the form of a diary, this narrative follows the paths of absence by delving into the pain that is caused by desire, a desire that is reflected in this particular box of raptures in the face of a separation from the loved one. To the idea of introspection arising from the exercise of spiritual reflection and the flood of torn feelings that this brings, there appears the idea of the house as a cloister, which is the scenario in which the tale in our hypertext exercise has been set. A closed space, with rooms to walk through, just as we travel different routes when we go deeper into the intimate truth of the suffering narrator. The apparently illogical ups and downs of the narrator’s thoughts are metaphorically translated into the maze where the reader gets lost, this reader who has come in search of words that will lead towards the interior that tells a story of love, of the loss of love, of passion and of impossibility. The Diary is an eminently textual product, situated in a determinate visual and musical dimension, which offers the reader a pilgrimage, a journey to be undertaken.
(Source: Laura Borras: "Growing up digital: the emergence of e-lit communities in Spain. The case of Catalonia 'and the rest is literature'.")
Cristina Llorens and Angustias Bertomeus were the programmer and designer that implemented the project idea and the text by Laura Borrás