In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.
Hypertext has been promoted as a vehicle that will change literary reading, especially through its recovery of images, supposed to be suppressed by print, and through the choice offered to the reader by links. Evidence from empirical studies of reading, however, suggests that these aspects of hypertext may disrupt reading. In a study of readers who read either a simulated literary hypertext or the same text in linear form, we found a range of significant differences: these suggest that hypertext discourages the absorbed and reflective mode that characterizes literary reading.
(Source: abstract.)
The key issue here will not be how far literature can be made to dance to the multimedia tune in order to seize the attention of the Internet-surfing audience for electronic entertainment, but how far we can establish the distinctive qualities of the literary experience that makes it a clear and significant alternative to what commercial interests are willing to provide.
The essay addresses the theoretical background and artistic inspiration for the author's engagement with locative narrative.
Locative Narrative is a literature of action, of movement, of moment and of place, not (so far) about “style” or other semantic/aesthetic/point of entry roadblocks. This perhaps is already part of its role within larger literature thus far.
Locative Narrative made integrating the physical and narrative spaces not only possible, but essential. The tools of the writer now were to be no longer limited to letter forms and tools as before; the world itself and its details were intertwined with text and writing intrinsically. This was an amazing realization.
Deploying the metaphor of "narrative motors," Tisselli analyzes several of his own "degenerative works" in which the program (the engine) burns fuel (information) until it is depleted and generates noise.