hypermedia

Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920 – 1986 is a digital work produced by the Labyrinth Project Research Center of the University of Southern California. Part paper, part DVD-ROM, part real, part fiction, it is based on an unsolved mystery, and unfolds the story of Molly, an Irish immigrant who moved to Los Angeles in 1920. She was at the heart of an investigation in the late 50’s early 60’s as she was the main suspect in the death of her second husband Walt. The project gathers hundreds of different data types like maps, pictures, texts, newspaper articles, books and movies, through which the user navigates in order to ultimately, resolve the crime. But how does the user build an interpretable narrative through this hypermedial database?

Far from pretending to be an analysis based on reception theories, this proposal seeks to understand the mechanisms of language that enable interpretation in a hypermedial digital work by exploring the relational dynamics between the different media representions in Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920 - 1986. Literature, Cinema and Computer language rely on very different semiotic systems that somehow collide in Bleeding Through. Frames are visible; the project shows the different media types, and each one is used for its specificity. What can’t be read is shown; what can’t be seen is written, but at the end, it may just be programmed…

The hypermedial nature of the work calls for an intermedial interpretation. Between literature, cinema, geography, journalism lies an unraveled plot (real or fake), a possible storyline that still needs to be imagined, and which relies on literary imaginary. It’s Molly’s story, and maybe that’s exactly where literature starts and ends. As the user is scrolling through the maps, articles, and photographs the elements are presented and or confronted to one another. Along with the user’s reading, gaps are revealed between the significant units leaving a space where narratives are created, where facts and fiction merge into a unified and coherent virtual assemblage; it’s the figural space.

In Reading the Figural, David Norman Rodowick considers what has become of reading, of interpretation in art through intermedial practices. As he says, “contemporary electronic media [are] giving rise to hybrid and mutant forms that semiology [is] ill equipped to understand. […] New media [are] emerging from a new logic of sense – the figural – and they could not be understood within the reigning norms of a linguistic or aesthetic philosophy.” (Rodowick. 2001. p.ix-x).

By exploring the intermedial relations between the significant elements in Bleeding Through, the boundaries and frontiers of these same units fuse into a blur, and are at the same time reflected on the content of the work itself, until facts and fiction become undistinguishable and the narrative takes over.

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“It is now time to unravel or commit literary murder. I am now convinced that Molly had Walt murdered in 1959. He hasn’t been heard of or seen since. […] Have I hit a motive that is convincing yet? It is daunting prospect to give up all those newspaper clippings in order to make this story legible. […] I promise to murder him off as much as the evidence will allow. I have about a thousand photographs and newspaper articles, over two hundred relevant movies on file, and over twenty interviews, along with hours of interviews with Norman Klein; and hundreds of pages of text. With all of these elegantly assembled in a DVD-ROM, I can […] make an entertainment, a tristful paideia, a mocking of the truth.” (Klein, Norman. 2002. Bleeding Though: Layers of Los Angeles 1920 – 1986. p. 27)

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Listed as one of the main themes of the Bergen 2015 ELO conference is the following question: is “electronic literature” a transitional term that will become obsolete as literary uses of computational media and devices become ubiquitous? If so, what comes after electronic literature?

The notion of obsolescence has been a recurring issue in electronic literature since at least 2002, the date of the ELO Conference at UCLA. At that time, archiving became a general concern in the field. ELO responded with documents such as Born-Again Bits, Acid-Free Bits, and the ELC 1 and 2 Collections. Since that time, with the continual evolution of computational media and devices, the problems of archiving have continued to grow more complicated. The panel proposes to address issues of Archiving based on this re-wording of the conference theme: is electronic literature a transitional practice that will become obsolete as the multiplication of forms of both computational media and devices make literary artifacts more and more difficult to preserve?

The panel will include Leonardo Flores and the ELC 3 Collective, Marjorie C. Luesebrink (M.D. Coverley), Rui Torres, and Stephanie Strickland. Topics to be addressed by the panel will include the following: Stephanie Strickland, “Six Questions for Born-Digital Archivists”; Rui Torres, “Interfacing the Archive: (Ab)Using the PO.EX Digital Archive”; Leonardo Flores/Stephanie Boluk/Jacob Garbe/ Anastasia Salter, “The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3 (ELC3) Editorial Collective presentation”; Marjorie C. Luesebrink, “The creation of Women Innovate: Contributions to Electronic Literature (1990-2010) by Marjorie Luesebrink and Stephanie Strickland”.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

This dissertation is just one portal into the cyberspace-based virtual world called the "Xenaverse," so named because of its association with the world-wide syndicated television program, "Xena: Warrior Princess." The Xenaverse cannot be contained by this dissertation, but this project seeks to link and merge with the webbed Xenaverse culture in cyberspace. To learn about the Xenaverse you must step through a portal, become immersed and explore, both within and beyond the blurred boundaries of this dissertation, and into the Xenaverse itself.

When you are ready to leave, you will have to find your way out, for just as this hypertextual dissertation has an entry portal, it also has an exit portal, a space for you to debrief and share your thoughts on your way out, to contribute to the ongoing dialogue that is this dissertation web on the Internet.

The Xenaverse will stretch your imagination and disbelief in many ways: in constantly shifting voices and perspectives, through bastardized and parallel timelines, with flawed classical Greek deities, by darkly troubled heroines and their numerous bards, and most of all by the Xenites themselves, who have collectively created this virtual landscape in cyberspace. This dissertation aims to be one sort of tour guide, both describing and analyzing in an effort to understand this space. The journey begins with a single link.

Source: from the opening page to the hypertext-only doctoral dissertation

This essay analyses the concepts of poeticity and literarity in digital poetry by meains of a comparative analysis of the works by Philippe Bootz, Belén Gache and Óscar Martín Centeno in order to isolate the features that define digital poetry. On the basis of this analysis, the essay then tries to demonstrate which elements of poeticity remain that allow us to continue to classify as poetry its new digital manifestations, and which elements have changed, so as to make us modify the idea of poeticity and to redefine what we have traditionally understood as literature.

In Hipermedismo, narrativa para la virtualidad (Hypermediadism, a Narrative for Virtuality), the contend is divided into three chapters, that cover from the historical process that permits the existence of new recourses applied to narrative to keys of this literary genre that does not enjoy, not even a universal name. The first part, La gestación de un género narrativo, (the Gestation of a Narrative Genre), summarizes how the use of technology has had an impact on the way of writing and publishing. The second part, Del papel a la pantalla. Hipermedismo literario (From Paper to Screen. Literary Hypermediadism), tries to organize the narrative keys that demands the storage medium: the conciseness that demands the space the screen offers; the communion of arts not only textual, a conviviality in which each one has a different narrative level and explores the possibilities in which literature manages without the text; the use of the hypertext, that allows folds contents; the ludic feature and the interaction of the reader, it challenges the convention of the lineal discourse imposed from the antiquity. In the third chapter, Las condiciones del hipermedio (The Conditions of Hypermedia), that presents a vision of creators and challenges that present the works exposed to readers.