Article in a print journal

Each reading of a hypertext is a single performance of the text, not an act of simply filling in the emotions or shading in a little angst here and there, but of creating meaningful sequences and coherent narratives.

"I wanted to write a book that would change every time you read it." (Michael Joyce, personal conversation)

The early hypertextualists—Joyce, Moulthrop, Judy Malloy, Shelley Jackson, Rob Swigart, J. Yellowlees Douglas—wrote about interconnectedness, flux, immateriality, and sprawl, themes that reflected the structure of StorySpace, the program most of them used to craft and publish their work. Yet the hyperfictionists also managed to bend the technology to their own political and artistic whims, using its disruptive nature to splinter notions of linearity and authorship

This cadre of author-programmers, clustered around a handful of progressive universities and museums, continue to engineer word toys, interactive fiction, and various forms of digital poetry—poems that shiver and collapse; poems that read themselves; poems that crawl across gallery walls; poems encoded within poems; poems randomly generated by algorithms; poems fully abstracted into constellations of floating individual letters. The end result has been a corpus of texts so hard and shiny they could chip a tooth.

Words have shape and musicality. They almost have a flavor. But they are too easily drowned out by stronger stimuli.

In giving text a body, then, the relationship of the author shifts to one closer to that of a theater director who stages the play, with the staging being the outcome of a lot of conversations with multiple contributors: sound engineers; lighting people….