Full contents of this issue are available for download as PDF files at the Cybertext Yearbook Database.
Author description: La casa sota el temps ('the house under time') is designed and programmed to immerse the reader in a virtual space, that plays off of the structure of conventional narrative in order to create a reading experience that includes a multitude of interactive possibilities. The reader is the main protagonist of a multimedia journey that gives her the freedom to explore and also to build the fictional universe that she desires.
Flash required.
Author description: This text was written during a stay in the hospital in 2001. Computer workers often neglect their bodies and by doing so they risk the development of a Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). The visitors of Separation / Séparation are compelled to click slowly (as someone recovering from RSI) in order to see how words appear, one by one. Every now and then an exercise for an RSI patient is proposed and all interaction with the computer is postponed. The text seems to be about a separation between human beings, but the last two phrases reveal that it is about a separation between a human being and a computer. The exercises in this piece are based on the exercises in WorkPace, a software tool that assists in the recovery and prevention of RSI. (Author's abstract.)
lonely soul,/ not knowing how to differentiate between you and me,/ you don't feel my pain/ Your body became mine/ you are interesting/ involving/ absorbing/ demanding
Cybertext explores the aesthetics and the textual dynamics of digital literature and its many diverse genres such as hypertext fiction, computer games, computer generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts such as MUDs. However, instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of "electronic writing" or "interactive fiction" (phrases which mean very little) the author situates these new literary forms within the larger and much older field of "ergodic" literature, from the ancient Chinese I Ching to the literary experiments of the OuLiPo. These are open, dynamic texts where the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence, which may vary for every reading. Aarseth constructs a theoretical model that describes how these literary forms are different from each other, and demonstrates how the widely assumed divide between paper texts and electronic texts breaks down under careful analysis. He then confronts literary theories of narrative, semiotics and rhetoric with the new empirical field of ergodic literature, and examines the problems and potential usefulness of applying these theories on material for which they were not intended.
(Source: Author's abstract)
It may seem paradoxical to create an online work on touching. One cannot touch directly: in this case touching requires a mediating tool such as a mouse, a microphone or a webcam. This touching experience reveals a lot about the way we touch multimedia content on screen, and maybe also about the way we touch people and objects in everyday life. The internet user has access to five scenes (move, caress, hit, spread, blow), plus a sixth one (brush) dissimulated in the interface. She can thus experience various forms and modalities of touching: the erotic gesture of the caress with the mouse; the brutality of the click, like an aggressive stroke; touching as unveiling, staging the ambiguous relation between touching and being touched; touching as a trace that one can leave, as with a finger dipped in paint; and, touching from a distance with the voice, the eyes, or another part of the body. This supposedly immaterial work thus stages an aesthetics of materiality.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)
Il peut sembler paradoxal de proposer une création en ligne sur le toucher : le toucher ne peut alors se faire immédiatement, c’est-à-dire sans médiation technique. Pourtant, ce toucher prothétisé a beaucoup à nous dire sur notre relation au toucher. « Toucher » met ainsi en scènecette relation en proposant à l’internaute d’accéder à cinq tableaux (mouvoir, caresser, taper, étaler, souffler), plus un sixième (frôler) dissimulé dans l’interface du menu.
Adobe Flash player or plug-in required. This work requires headphones, a microphone (for "blow") and a webcam (for "brush").
Kevin Carpentier; Stéphanie Spenlé