Published on the Web (online journal)

A hypertext fiction about the death of the author, the relationship between the reader, the author, and the text, travel, life, and death. Links in the text launch paratexts, which are juxtaposed with the 70 fragments of the "main" story. Readers can navigate the work by selecting individual fragments or by moving at random through the text, by clicking to animate and irritate the dead author.

Rice is a hypertextual anthology of poems focusing on my experience as a Western tourist in Vietnam. Issues of colonialism, war, poverty, and cultural difference arise. Technically and aesthetically, Rice belongs to an early period of web-based poetry. It uses Shockwave, popup windows, and frames. (Source: Author description from ELC 1)

The author and artist Shelley Jackson has produced a corpus of work in print and electronic media that takes as its central focus the relationship between human identity and the body's constituent organs, fluids, connective tissues, and other parts. While her well-known Storyspace hypertext Patchwork Girl revisited the Frankenstein story from the viewpoint of a female monster, my body uses the HTML hypertext form to revitalize the memoir genre. As the reader selects elegantly drawn woodcut images of parts of the author's body, meditations and anecdotes associated with each body part are revealed.

(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One)

John Cayley’s “windsound” is an algorithmic work presented as a 23-minute recording of a machine-generated reading of scrambled texts. The cinematic work presents a quicktime-video of white letters on a black screen, a text written by Cayley with a translation of the Chinese poem “Cadence: Like a Dream” by Qin Guan (1049-1100). As a sensory letter-by-letter performance, the work sequentially replaces letters on the screen, so that what starts as illegible text becomes readable as a narrative, and then again loses meaning in a jumble of letters. Cayley calls this technique “transliteral morphing: textual morphing based on letter replacements through a sequence of nodal texts.” Sequences of text appear within up to 15 lines on the same screen, thus presenting and automatically replacing a longer text on a digitally simulated single page-a concept Judd Morrissey also applies in "The Jew´s Daughter." Unlike Morrissey’s piece, Cayley’s doesn´t allow the user to interact with the work. Instead the work appears as a self-sufficient text-movie with ambient sound, murmurs of voices, windsound and synthetic female and male voices reading the non-readable to the viewer. As with the shifting letters, narrative perspectives also morph and switch fluidly between the lyrical-I, Christopher, Tanaka or Xiao Zhang. Thus, the sentence: "‘We know,’" Tanaka had said in English/"‘Tomorrow if we meet/I will have to kill you myself/’" is, in the algorithmic process of the work, later spelled out by the I-narrator. At the very end of the work, John Cayley dedicates “windsound” to the memory of Christopher Bledowski. What remains after the black screen and a re-start of morphing letters before they vanish conclusively, is windsound. At a certain point in the movie the text says "you have to be/to stay/silent/to hear it," and it seems like the reader has to be silent, too, listening to what he cannot understand, patiently waiting for the moment of legibility.

(Source: record written by Patricia Tomaszek originates from the Electronic Literature Directory)

A retelling of the classic story one letter at a time.

If fans can't get into the mind of Star Wars creator George Lucas, why not get into his typewriter? Taking us back before the days of the 300 baud modem, Stefans's piece brings each character in the Star Wars cast steadily before the eyes of the viewer and asks that we read — or at least try to read — in a new, unusual way. The sound effect at the end of every line adds a touch of "bell" lettrism.
(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1)

The Stir Fry Texts are interactive texts that twitch and change as you move the mouse over them. Each stir fry consists of n distinct texts. Each of the n texts is partitioned into t pieces. When you mouseover any of the t parts of a text, that part is replaced with the corresponding part of the next of the n texts. Each stir fry contains a graphic that, when clicked repeatedly, lets you cycle through the n texts. I did the programming of the stir frys and did the texts of the first couple. Later, "Log" was done in collaboration with Brian Lennon and "Blue Hyacinth" with Pauline Masurel. The project also includes two essays. "Stir Frys and Cut Ups" relates these forms, and "Material Combinatorium Supremum" discusses the combinatorial form of the stir frys. The stir fry texts are steeply combinatorial. I did the programming in DHTML. I am indebted to Marko Niemi for his upgrading of the programming in 2004. Now they run OK on both PC and Mac and most contemporary browsers on both platforms. (Source: Author description, ELC v.1)

Author description: Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)] is a recombinant portrait and biography generator. The piece recombines the self-portraits of a dozen well-known painters as well as biographical text on each. Accordingly, the generated pictorial and textual portraits are no longer self portraits, but "selves" portraits, with subjects that are more than one. The piece deals with identity in an art-historical context, self-identity for any given artist, and identification as a process. There are over 120,000,000 possible recombinations.

In the early days of the web, Marsha cheerfully launches a home page devoted to her favorite angels and invites them to come and play. They do, and they are not friendly. The Fall of the Site of Marsha shows three states of her site, captured in Spring, Summer, and Fall, each getting progressively darker as the angels haunt the beleaguered Marsha, reveal her husband's infidelity (from clues found on the site), and drag Marsha and her home page into madness and Gothic ruin.

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

The Fall of the Site of Marsha by Rob Wittig is an interactive electronic literature experience presented in the form of a late-nineties web site. The piece follows Marsha, an eccentric woman who creates a website centered around her obsession with angels. Things begin to get strange, dark, and a little creepy when the Angels Marsha loves so much make an appearance on her web site. Three different versions of Marsha’s site are available for view: Spring ’98, Summer ’98, and Fall ’98. Each version of the site is very different. The sites get progressively darker as the angels take control. At first, the page is just a goofy site about a woman’s angel obsession, but it eventually becomes nearly unrecognizable. As time goes on and the tone gets progressively darker, the site begins to fill with eerie messages from the angels. Each version of the web site is equipped with a variety of links and pages that contribute to the overall story. The user views the story organically through message boards and secret areas of the site. There is much to be discovered, from Marsha’s husband’s infidelity to sinister implications regarding her father’s death. For full effect and the complete story, each version of the site should be fully explored. The site isn't just the way the story is presented; it is the story itself. (Source: Electronic Literature Directory, http://directory.eliterature.org/node/3942)

Author description: The Last Performance [dot org] is a constraint-based collaborative writing, archiving and text-visualization project responding to the theme of lastness in relation to architectural forms, acts of building, a final performance, and the interruption (that becomes the promise) of community. The visual architecture of The Last Performance [dot org] is based on research into "double buildings," a phrase used here to describe spaces that have housed multiple historical identities, with a specific concern for the Hagia Sophia and its varied functions of church, mosque, and museum. The project uses architectural forms as a contextual framework for collaborative authorship. Source texts submitted to the project become raw material for a constantly evolving textual landscape.

A hypertextual prose poem, told in the second person, about a dystopic future summer where the skies are filled with ash due to some environmental disaster. Each brief node offers the reader two links, at first giving what appears to be an almost linear narrative, but eventually returning to the beginning to allow the exploration of new paths. The work describes the sensations of living through such a summer without going into the narrative of how we got there, or suggestions to what may happen next.