Linda Carroli reviews Michael Joyce on networked culture, whose emergence changes our ideas of change.
Yves Abrioux approaches Woman and Men (1987) as an extended novelistic medition on cognition and action.
Diana Lobb tackles the legacy of positivism and the politics of chaotics.
. The first version of the Rhiz-o-Mat was created on the 'm.e.s.s.i.a.h.' site circa May 1995. A Thousand Plateaus recommended a record-album style of reading -- what if it skipped? So young and innocent. Gray backgrounds. A series of meta-tags. A simple quote feeder. "Push Media" was on the cover of Wired. It was all very exciting... . The list of quotes slowly grew and the background became an officious white, but the structure remained doggedly multilinear. Rigidly lockstep. Oh, but such a clever name! Such an empty container! Tried to make digital dirty -- digital not dirty? Ha ha ha! Eventually, finally, 'messiah' was de-rezed. . BlebNet has now reformatted this arcane textual artifact with an all new post-apocalyptic shell with a client-based back-end squiggle. Still a white background, but now the pesky linearity has been Authored into a degree of obscurity. Hopefully your reading will now be an even bigger problem. Hopefully.
F2F might seem retro to you. It struck me as very 1991. The idea of a hypertext that is heavy on the text seemed to lose its charm as soon as images, moving animation, video and sound could also be included. One of the downsides to the speed of the evolution of hypertext, is that whole possible genres and subgenres were not given the chance to grow. What happened to the web-film-essay? Well, it never happened. Sure, there are some text-book-market CD-ROMs and the like that do something similar, but they use video more as mere illustration. What about a film essay that would incorporate the mystery the moving image rather than try to compete with it? What about utilizing images and sounds that potentially resist the text? What about playing with the clips like a video artist would?
F2F gravitates towards Deleuze's theories of framing and the face, and brings into alignment filmmakers who, unwittingly or not, deconstruct the face. But it also spins off into links on Robert Smithson, mirrors, Issey Miyake, creative urbanism, Max Ernst, romance . . . . One of the plusses about doing this essay in hypertext form, is that it allowed me to incorporate or even memorialize various ambivalences I had while writing these ideas down in linear form. There were clearly at least two essays that could come of it all. But, rather than pairing up with one and bumping the other off, we're all still here.
"The city's relation to the face, the major trope of which is 'the faceless crowd,' is productive of one of the great cliches of the movies. . . ."
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Author description: Lexia to Perplexia is a deconstructive/grammatological examination of the "delivery machine." The text of the work falls into the gaps between theory and fiction. The work makes wide use of DHTML and JavaScript. At times its interactive features override the source text, leading to a fragmentary reading experience. In essence, the text does what it says: in that, certain theoretical attributes are not displayed as text but are incorporated into the functionality of the work. Additionally, Lexia to Perplexia explores new terms for the processes and phenomena of attachment. Terms such as "metastrophe" and "intertimacy" work as sparks within the piece and are meant to inspire further thought and exploration. There is also a play between the rigorous and the frivolous in this "exe.termination of terms." The Lexia to Perplexia interface is designed as a diagrammatic metaphor, emphasizing the local (user) and remote (server) poles of network attachment while exploring the "intertimate" hidden spaces of the process.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic LIterature Collection, Volume 1)
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