HTML/DHTML

Soliloquy is an unedited document of every word I spoke during the week of April 15-21, 1996, from the moment I woke up Monday morning to the moment I went to sleep on Sunday night. To accomplish this, I wore a hidden voice-activated tape recorder. I transcribed Soliloquy during the summer of 1996 at the Chateau Bionnay in Lacenas, France, during a residency there. It took 8 weeks, working 8 hours a day. Soliloquy was first realized as a gallery exhibition at Bravin Post Lee in Soho during April of 1997. Subsequently, the gallery published the text in a limited edition of 50. In the fall of 2001, Granary Books published a trade edition of the text. The web version of Soliloquy contains the exact text from the 281-page original book version, but due to the architecture of the web, each chapter is sub-divided into 10 parts. And, of course, the textual treatment of the web version is indeed web-specific and perhaps more truly references the ephemerality of language as reflected by the book's epigraph: "If every word spoken in New York City daily / were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, / each day there would be a blizzard." In order to achieve this effect, the web version is available only to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape 6+. Unfortunately, none of the prior versions of Netscape support the CSS tag used here: "a { text-decoration: none }" ; to view the piece in web form without this function enabled would be to ruin the intended experience of this work.

(Source: Author description, ELC vol. 1)

Frequently Asked Questions about "Hypertext" is a short fiction, in the form of a FAQ document, that revolves around various interpretations of a 69-word poem called "Hypertext." The poem "Hypertext," nominally by "Alan Richardson," is composed from all the hidden words/anagrams contained within the nine-letter word "hypertext." The tongue-in-cheek interpretations of the fictional poem include the perspectives of language poetry, cultural studies, feminism, and transgender studies. Emerging through the interpretations and FAQ answers, however, are the interwoven "real-life" stories of the troubled author and his/her troubled critics. The poem's notoriety creates a fan fiction phenomenon centered around an online database, which, along with its creator(s), comes under attack. As in Nabokov's Pale Fire, pseudo-literary criticism gives way to a mystery story about the real author of the text, transformation and transsexuality, love and murder.

(Source: Author description, ELC 1).

White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a JavaScript investigation of literary variants with a new text generated every ten seconds. Its goals are as follows. (1) To present a poetic evocation of the images, vocabulary, and sights of Costa Rica's language and natural ecosystems though poetic text and visuals. (2) To investigate the potential of literary variants. Thinking of poems where authors have vacillated between variant lines, Bromeliads offers two alternatives for each line of text thus, for an 8 line poem, offering 512 possible variants, exploring the multi-textual possibilities of literary variants. (3) It explores the richness of multiple languages. (4) It mines the possibilities of translation, code, and shifting digital textuality. Having variants regenerate every ten seconds provides poems that are not static, but dynamic; indeed one never finishes reading the same poem one began reading. This re-defines the concept of the literary object and offers a more challenging reading, both for the reader and for the writer in performance, than a static poem. The idea is to be able to read as if surfing across multiple textual possibilities. Such regeneration allows traces of different languages to overwrite each other, providing a linguistic and cultural richness. (Source: Author description, ELC, Vol. 1)

From first glance, "White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares" is described as a piece of E-lit that stands to meld the gap between spanish and english as languages into one. That in itself is very true and evident as you first click on the work and see spanish numbers, starting with uno of course, that bring you to a new section each time. From the ELD http://directory.eliterature.org/node/3940

Chemical Landscapes is a series of photograms by Mary Pinto. The photos suggest landscapes but are created entirely in the dark room, using only chemicals and a flashlight. For this project, I've written a series of "digital tales" suggested by the particular chemical landscape. I hope the relationship of language and narrative to the "tale" parallels the relationship of light and chemicals to the "landscape." The piece begins with a title page that serves as a navigation page. By clicking at various places on the page you're taken to one of the eight chemical landscapes. Once you arrive at a landscape, the digital tale fades in and then out, and you may click on the screen at any point to jump back to the navigation page. I have tried to time the fading in and out of the text so that it is almost impossible to read it all before it fades away. My hope is that the reader will recognize the necessity of jumping around in the text, picking up pieces of the tale to read and ignoring other pieces, thereby creating a different experience with each reading. If you think of reading a traditional story as a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an end, then reading a hypertext is like walking through a field: readers begin at any one of several different starting points, wander around as long as they like, and then exit wherever and whenever they choose. (Source: Author's description from ELC 1)

The author and artist Shelley Jackson has produced a corpus of work in print and electronic media that takes as its central focus the relationship between human identity and the body's constituent organs, fluids, connective tissues, and other parts. While her well-known Storyspace hypertext Patchwork Girl revisited the Frankenstein story from the viewpoint of a female monster, my body uses the HTML hypertext form to revitalize the memoir genre. As the reader selects elegantly drawn woodcut images of parts of the author's body, meditations and anecdotes associated with each body part are revealed.

(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One)

The Stir Fry Texts are interactive texts that twitch and change as you move the mouse over them. Each stir fry consists of n distinct texts. Each of the n texts is partitioned into t pieces. When you mouseover any of the t parts of a text, that part is replaced with the corresponding part of the next of the n texts. Each stir fry contains a graphic that, when clicked repeatedly, lets you cycle through the n texts. I did the programming of the stir frys and did the texts of the first couple. Later, "Log" was done in collaboration with Brian Lennon and "Blue Hyacinth" with Pauline Masurel. The project also includes two essays. "Stir Frys and Cut Ups" relates these forms, and "Material Combinatorium Supremum" discusses the combinatorial form of the stir frys. The stir fry texts are steeply combinatorial. I did the programming in DHTML. I am indebted to Marko Niemi for his upgrading of the programming in 2004. Now they run OK on both PC and Mac and most contemporary browsers on both platforms. (Source: Author description, ELC v.1)

In the early days of the web, Marsha cheerfully launches a home page devoted to her favorite angels and invites them to come and play. They do, and they are not friendly. The Fall of the Site of Marsha shows three states of her site, captured in Spring, Summer, and Fall, each getting progressively darker as the angels haunt the beleaguered Marsha, reveal her husband's infidelity (from clues found on the site), and drag Marsha and her home page into madness and Gothic ruin.

(Source: Author description, Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1.)

The Fall of the Site of Marsha by Rob Wittig is an interactive electronic literature experience presented in the form of a late-nineties web site. The piece follows Marsha, an eccentric woman who creates a website centered around her obsession with angels. Things begin to get strange, dark, and a little creepy when the Angels Marsha loves so much make an appearance on her web site. Three different versions of Marsha’s site are available for view: Spring ’98, Summer ’98, and Fall ’98. Each version of the site is very different. The sites get progressively darker as the angels take control. At first, the page is just a goofy site about a woman’s angel obsession, but it eventually becomes nearly unrecognizable. As time goes on and the tone gets progressively darker, the site begins to fill with eerie messages from the angels. Each version of the web site is equipped with a variety of links and pages that contribute to the overall story. The user views the story organically through message boards and secret areas of the site. There is much to be discovered, from Marsha’s husband’s infidelity to sinister implications regarding her father’s death. For full effect and the complete story, each version of the site should be fully explored. The site isn't just the way the story is presented; it is the story itself. (Source: Electronic Literature Directory, http://directory.eliterature.org/node/3942)

Inspired by Derrida's Of Grammatology, Mark Amerika experiments in GRAMMATRON with narrative form in a networked environment. Amerika retells the Jewish Golem myth by adapting it into the culture of programmable media and remixing several genres of text into the story's hybridized style, including metafiction, hypertext, cyberpunk, and conceptual works affiliated with the Art+Language group.

Narrated from various authorial perspectives, the story introduces readers to Abe Golam, a pioneering Net artist who creates Grammatron, a writing machine. Endowed not with the Word (as in the original myth) but with forbidden data—a specially coded Nanoscript—the creature becomes a digital being that "contains all of the combinatory potential of all the writings." The Grammatron is the personification of the Golem, which is also a personification of Amerika the artist. While the Golem and its environment have been depicted in any number of literary adaptations and works, in GRAMMATRON, Mark Amerika creates a seemingly infinite, recombinant (text-)space in the electrosphere.

Throughout the story, Abe Golam searches for his "second-half," a programmer named Cynthia Kitchen whose playful codes of interactivity lead both Golam and readers through a multi-linear textscape (the Grammatron writing machine) where they search for "the missing link" that will enable them to port to another dimension of "digital being" the story refers to as Genesis Rising.

The project consists of over 1100 (partly randomized) text elements and thousands of links. It comes with animated and still life images, an eerie background soundtrack, and audio-files that sometimes provide a spoken meta-commentary on the work itself. The work consists of different text-layers the user is free to choose from, including a theoretical hypertextual essay titled "Hypertextual Consciousness," the animated text "Interfacing," and the main hypertext "Abe Golam."

GRAMMATRON (1997) was initially received as one of the first major works of Net art and was selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial of American Art. It was the first work in Amerika's Net art trilogy and was followed by PHON:E:ME (1999) and FILMTEXT 2.0 (2001-2002).

(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Patricia Tomaszek)

Published in 1996, “Twelve Blue” is a work by Michael Joyce that has been considered the first hyperlink story of its kind. The story is devised in 8 different bars, and all relate in some way to the color blue. He sets us with minor and major characters and keeps us going through the bars. You are able to click through different links and some of them leads you to pictures, while the rest lead you through more and more of the story. Each story focuses on an object of some kind or some character. The backdrop and text is a dark and a light blue and there is a side bar with a picture of different color bars that look more like stars.The language in “Twelve Blue” is very concise and to the point. It is simple and is placed with a unique purpose. Even however simple the language may be, it tells a thrilling story of lust, memory, and consequences within its contents. Keeping it laid out like a map, the language and story tells of a drowning, a friendship, a boy and a girl, etc. and keeps resurfacing through a web of memories and pictures through the years or days of our lives. Each character is connected in some way and the story keeps you engaged until the end.