Published on the Web (online journal)

Christy Sheffield Sanford's "Light-Water: a Mosaic of Mediations" is a hypermedia work. It is a striking visual-literal meditation on light and water. This combination of the visual and the literal is central to the direction of hypermedia. One reads "Light-Water . . ." as a merged experience of visual art and literature. It both happens to the viewer--the way moving images happen while we observe them--and is made to happen by the reader, in the manner of traditional writing, by interpreting and translating words, turning them into patterns of thought.

(Source: The New River 5 Editor's Note by Ed Falco)

The four words that comprise the title--Nightmare, Wanders, Fathers, Song--are hidden in the black field of the opening screen, to be found by readers as they explore with cursors. The title thus changes from reader to reader. It may include all four words, as in "Song Wanders Fathers Nightmare," if the reader sticks around the opening screen long enough; or the title may simply be "Nightmare," or "Song," if the reader follows the first link found. You see the possibilities. In this new poem . . . Harrell brings a traditional lyric sensibility to the digital fields of hypertext poetry.

A hypertext poem. The reader navigates through different stanzas by selecting icons.

Author's note:

The sheer profusion of a city like Singapore calls reality into question. Exhilarating mix of cultures, plants and animals, surreal insects and multi-colored carp, it plays on the nagging fear that this world is not quite our home. Such anxiety is pitched to the surface by the pressure of the ordinary loneliness of a stranger in a strange land .We can't escape the making of virtuality, any more than we can avoid being connected to the human city (genet) and at the same time individuated from it (ramet). Everything "suffering description," which is the world, the "possible to be believed," is real. And in this fecund city of lives within a strict order, we become acutely aware that the assertion "In the city of Singapore eyes saw" is not so simple.

(Source: The New River 3) 

The particular concern with the "fleshthresholdnarrative" series is with the limit-sites of narrative (where narrative spills over into theory, poetry, data/information, the sciences,history, etc.). Rather than (re)constructing a more familiar form of narrative (those forms of chronological, causal, and organized events inherited from the 18th century), my interest was to explore the non-narrative aspects of narrative, and the narrative aspects in non-narrative within a context akin to J.G. Ballard's "condensed novels" (e.g., "The Atrocity Exhibition"). The highly aphoristic and dense quality of these segments was also well-suited to the medium of hypertext and the net in terms of establishing in the act of reading a range of inter-relationships. 

(Source: Author's note from The New River 1)

David Herrstrom's "To Find the White Cat in the Snow," takes the modernist practice of thematically or associatively linking sections of a poem, and carries it a step further with hypertext. Like Wallace Stevens in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," Herrstrom provides no narrative links between the sections of his poem. Unlike Stevens, Herrstrom is not constrained by the technology of print to present the stanzas of his poem sequentially, in a manner best suited to narrative. His poem is not a narrative and it is not ordered as if it were. It's ordering is hypertextual: the reader controls the sequence in which the stanzas appear and disappear. "To Find the White Cat . . ." is about, among other things, the difficulty of apprehension and the interrelationship of the phenomenal and the conceptual.

(Source: The New River, Editor's note by Ed Falco)

 with Jason Huff's "How Am I Not Myself?" we have a play on biography and the refraction of the self as replicated within a Wikipedia entry by workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. As Huff tells us, this piece "aggregates information about all the Jason Huffs on the Internet [and] acts as an open-source platform for identity remix." That is, as long as Wikipedia doesn't find out about it.

(Source: Alan Bigelow in The New River)

Note: this page was deleted from Wikipedia.

Author's description from The New River: 

This piece tells the story of a character's response to her father's death. In creating this piece, I worked in Flash ActionScript 3.0 to code a random trigger function, so that when you click on the suit icon a random sound file plays and an associated text appears on the screen.

The randomness of the click is not accidental; in generating this piece I worked to explore the nature of narrative and the development of a coherent story. The majority of stories that we hear, read, or tell are linear in pattern or chronologically organized (A leads to B, B leads to C, C leads to D, End of Story). Yet our self-narratives, as we experience them and as we remember them, are rarely so neatly packaged. Frequently, we come to know to the stories of self only through loosely-connected, non-temporally located vignettes. When we think of who we are, we do not first think of the first day that we were born, and work our way up from there. Instead we construct our sense of self, like a patchwork, in bits and pieces that fragment our autobiography. Yet when we present this personal narrative to others, we clean it, presenting an amalgam of what actually happened and what we think we remember happening. As history has shown time and again, frequently these remembrances are, objectively speaking, faulty in some way or another. This piece is a reaction to that “faultiness,” suggesting instead that in terms of the truth of any event and its impact on an individual person, these linked, yet scattered remembrances may be significantly more factual. Frequently this piece pulls up a single scene more than once, occasionally returning to it several times. I made the decision to allow repetition within the piece consciously, again in deference to the rhizomatic, nodal structure of the mind and memory and the process of narrative creation.

This piece works in conversation with other new media art, such as Deena Larsen’s “Carving in Possiblities,” which reveals snippets of text only as the user mouses over parts of an image to reveal the sculpture of David underneath. Another piece that I drew inspiration from while working on this narrative was Thom Swiss, Motomichi Nakamura, and Robot Friend’s 2004 “Fresh Icons,” in which the user interactions causes doors to open and close and reveal figures in silhouette having short bursts of conversation with each other. Both of these works integrate user participation with the process of uncovering, revealing their full text only as the user makes use of the apparatus before him or her. The narrative, then, for these texts and my own, is stunted, fragmented, changing and reliant upon someone else to be made whole, to become understandable in any true sense.

In order to experience this piece, click the suit. Continue clicking the suit to hear short fragments that work to present a fuller picture of the scene being described. If you are keeping track, there are 14 total extracts within the larger piece.

Spamology is a live audiovisual representation of word frequencies in spam e-mail messages.

The visualization is based on analysis of a private archive of spam messages which were collected during 10 years (1998-2007), containing up to 2,000,000 emails originated from various parts of the world. Spam data is visualized in a 3D landscape, where popular words are represented as rectangular structures of various heights, illustrating the occurrence rate of each word in the archive year. Next to the visual representation, each word generates an audio signal with a frequency related to the number of times it occurred during a certain year. Words of various frequencies flow through the 3D landscape simultaneously, forming a constantly-changing sonic texture.

Spamology is a part of ongoing research examining the nature of Spam as a digital-cultural phenomenon. The project aims at visualizing the links and interrelationships between the contents of spam, the user/ individual and the society, by revealing patterns which may reflect cultural and social trends, behaviors and variations. 

"Reboot," in Jhave's own words, is a piece about how "god is an inept programmer who inadvertently created a flawed universe full of unnecessary suffering [...] Personally, I am disillusioned by all political, social, psychological or spiritual efforts to improve reality; I honestly believe the best option is a universal reboot." This piece is one attempt at that.

(Source: Alan Bigelow's introduction to The New River, Spring 2011)

DISCLAIMER: MPAA: MASS PRODUCED ARTISTIC AXIOMS : GENERATIVE WRITING FOR NASCENT CENSORS.

Disclaimer is non-linear and reshuffles every 7 seconds to form a new disclaimer. Every text field is independent. Arrays of words and phrases recombine to keep the eternal threat of censorship ever-fresh.