loss

In this Flash hypertext, Coverley weaves a tapestry of text, image, and sound, telling a California story that many readers can relate to. In this piece, the sky itself is the center of a meditation on memory and loss across decades of human experience. The same "blue sky" that often refers to people's wildest dreams now comes to represent boundaries and fears.

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

“Loss of Grasp” recreates the loss of self-control. What happens when one has the impression of losing control in life, of losing control of his/her own life? Six scenes tell the story of a man that is losing himself. “Loss of Grasp” plays with the self-control and the loss of self-control and invites the reader to experiment with these feelings in an interactive work.

English title "Light-Darkness." Description by Hans Kristian Rustad: a remediation of a play with the same title. Moving the work into a digital environment Næss makes use of written and verbal text, pictures, graphics, and animations to create a quite different work than the original. She also explained in an interview that the play not really was meant for the stage, but that she was waiting for its right medium. So she utilises facilities of the medium to make the text appear as she first intended. 

The work is interactive in the sense that the reader need to move the mouse courser over the screen to make something happen. The narrative is divided into three different and independent stories, and which of the three stories that appear, depends on where on the screen the reader holds his mouse cursor.

One of the narratives is about a fire in a train coupe. Two persons die in the fire, probably kids, and the narrator is probable the father telling us how he remembers the fire. Another of the narratives is about a group of people going in the mountains, than suddenly one of the group members disappears. And the dead body of the person is not found until the snow starts to melt. And the third narrative is about a father taking his two sons on a fishing trip. And one of his sons discovers what might be a dead body. It is hard to tell actually. In the play which is published in a book, the text tells explicit about a dead body that one of the sons finds in the water. While in the digital version, we can hear the son telling his father: “There is something in the water”. This part of the narrative actually ends with laughter, so it is hard to tell what actually happened. 

The work is about losing someone and/or finding someone, and it demonstrates the big semiotic leap that the work takes from the theatre stage to the digital screen, from a play to a kind of digital narrative. It shows how other semiotic systems can be used to tell the same story, and how the technology can be used to make different scenes, different incidents, collide, because they can be combined and read in different sequences and contexts.

“Loss of Grasp” is an interactive narrative about the notions of grasp and control. What happens when one has the impression of losing control in life, of losing control of his/her own life? Six scenes tell the story of a man that is losing himself. “Loss of Grasp” plays with the grasp and the loss of grasp and invites the reader to experiment with these feelings in an interactive work.