adolescence

On one level, Cruising is an excited oral recitation of a teenager's favorite pastime in small town Wisconsin, racing up and down the main drag of Main Street looking to make connections, wanting love. But by merging the linear aspect of the sound recording with an interactive component that demands a degree of control, Cruising reinforces the spatial and temporal themes of the poem by requiring the user to learn how to “drive” the text. A new user must first struggle with gaining control of the speed, the direction, and the scale in order to follow the textual path of the narrative. When the text on the screen and the spoken words are made to coincide, the rush of the image sequence is reduced to a slow ongoing loop of still frames. The viewer moves between reading text and experiencing a filmic flow of images — but cannot exactly have both at the same time. In this way, the work seeks to highlight the materiality of text, film, and interface.

(Souce: Authors' description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One)

Flight Paths: a networked novel seeks to explore what happens when lives collide - the airplane stowaway and the suburban Londoner. A supermarket car park lies directly beneath the flight path into Heathrow Airport. On at least five separate occasions the bodies of young men - stowaways - have fallen from the sky and landed on or near this place. This project explores the lives of one stowaway and the woman whose car on which he lands. The authors create multimedia elements that illuminate the story while readers are invited to contribute texts, images, sounds, memories, ideas, and stories. The project grows and changes incrementally. There is a long history of electronic fiction works that include user-generated content. But there are very few fiction projects that from the earliest, research phase attempt to harness participatory media as well as multimedia content in the way that Flight Paths does.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

Publisher's catalog copy:

In A Dream with Demons, Edward Falco invents a world where bruised adults attempt, over and over, to rewrite the violent scripts of their childhood.

Preston Morris is an accomplished lawyer and novelist who writes painful, provocative stories to shore up fragments of his own desperate life. One of Preston's works, which forms the core of A Dream with Demons, tells of a sadly streetwise adolescent named Missy who struggles to come of age during the short space of a weekend when her mother finally leaves her tortured, brilliant lover, the artist Val Rivson.

Preston's genius -- or is it Falco's? -- is the accuracy with which he portrays the sublime compulsions of several tortured yet resilient people. Holding everything together is the unique hypertext structure of A Dream with Demons, which dramatizes a theme evident throughout: how the past can compel the present, through the fragmentary, unreliable, but ultimately persistent medium of memory.

(Source: Eastgate catalog copy)