Brian Lennon considers the aesthetic that Retallack has evolved out of a cybernetic sensibility - a formalism that does not impose authoritarian codes or repressive orders, but rather hacks a pattern out of the sheer data of everyday life: directories, menus, phone books, indexes, encyclopedias, and archives.
Fugues, a project of the NT2 Laboratory at the Université du Québec à Montréal, is both an hypermedia adaptation of the poem Piano published 2001 by Quebec author René Lapierre and a literary critical analysis of that same poem. The Fugues Project originally came about when Bertrand Gervais asked NT2 Lab students to think about how to read and to analyze a paper-published poem through hypermedia. Instead of writing a dissertation as one usually does when reading a text in a literature classroom, participants were asked to adapt Piano through hypermedia. The goal was to think about new ways of reading printed text using electronic tools. The participants came up with an associative way of exploring this particular poem. This experimental project was designed not only to build an audience for new media literary works and writing by just presenting existing hypermedia works, but also to ask these literary scholars to think how they would go about writing a paper about a poem in a non-textbook manner. The idea behind this was to put theory into practice. Or rather: to create a hypermedia work allows for a literary audience not only to read new media literary works but it also allows practices in writing new media and thus, familiarizing the literature class to hypermedia and how students can now add associative audio, video and graphics interpretations to their written text-analysis.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)