tragedy

Inspired from “La Tragedia de Caldesa” by Joan Roís de Corella, Valencian writer of the 15th century. This contemporary tragedy is about the sad love story of four lives in the same night: Joan, Caldesa, Roís and Aurora suffer from love. In this work , the reader is not free to choose what he/she wants to read the moment he/she wants to read it. On the contrary, his/her position is that of a spectator flying over the characters lives and is able to know what happens but he/she cannot stop their lives or delay the events that are told. The digital format takes control (Source: Biblumliteraria).

"Wax..." was my first feature, executed from 1985-1991 with a variety of arts funding, and a co-production commissioning from ZDF in Germany. The narrative is grotesque, an unresolved and unresolvable tragedy revolving around the perceptual and ethical misperceptions of one Jacob Maker, flight simulation systems programmer, and amateur beekeeper. Half-way between suspense and suspension, the movie moves through space, as the protagonist is translated from his home in Alamogordo out to the Army's Deseret Test facility, and beyond, to caves or the world of the dead, and perhaps even further, if his endless talking voice is to be believed (it should be). Dislocated, disoriented, fragmented, and finally flying, the hero and all those bees and other pictures accompanying him fly backwards and forwards through time. And in a sense the viewer does too.

"Waxweb" (1993-1999) is the hypermedia version of the project, available online and on CD-ROM. It is a hypervideo, clickable on a shot by shot basis; and it is literally spatial, recomposing the time of the movie in varieties of space (2d, 3d, wor-d space). The movie expanded into apparently infinite time (made of minor, interrupted epiphanies); a grotesque, miniature, and artificial world.

(Source: Abstract, 1999 DAC conference)

Translation of Michael Joyce´s afternoon, a story. The publisher´s catalog-entry comes along with a video-presentation of the work (embedded in this database-entry) as well as a number of notable references.

This CD-based hypertext fiction is described as a tragedy, using words, music and images to "evoke three virtual spaces: the psychic space of memory, the public space of an internet mailing list (called Undertow) and the private space of a mail exchange between two people that are spearated by an ocean, a gender and a language." (from the blurb on the back of the CD).

It is only available on CD-ROM and unfortunately the CD-ROM this ELMCIP contributor can access is faulty and most files will not show.

Afternoon, a story is a work of electronic literature written in 1987 by American author Michael Joyce. It was published by Eastgate Systems in 1990 and is known as the first hypertext fiction. Afternoon was first shown to the public as a demonstration of the hypertext authoring system Storyspace, announced in 1987 at the first Association for Computing Machinery Hypertext conference in a paper by Michael Joyce and Jay David Bolter.[1] In 1990, it was published on diskette and distributed in the same form by Eastgate Systems. The hypertext fiction tells the story of Peter, a recently divorced man who witnessed a car crash that may or may not have involved his ex-wife and their son.