Paths of Memory and Painting

Paths of Memory and Painting is a three part work of narrative new media poetry that is composed of composite arrays of hypertext lexias. Parallel trails of lexias lead to different parts of a narrative told by a Bay Area Figurative painter. The main narrative thread takes part in the San Francisco Bay Area in the years beginning with World War II. But the narrator also relates other aspects her life and work, and recollects the lives of California artist adventurers. Composed with multiple paths  through narrative information,  the work creates a reading experience of successive text-paintings that chronicle the changes in a painter's work.  Created with an array of interlocking lexias that the reader shuffles and reshuffles until a narrative emerges, Part I, where every luminous landscape, (2008)  was short listed for the Prix poesie-media, France. It was featured at The Future of Writing, UC Irvine; on Cover to Cover on KPFA radio in Berkeley; and at the 2009 E-Poetry Festival in Barcelona.  Part II, when the foreground and the background merged, (2009) is a filmic, intimate conversation that is represented with parallel lexias.  The interface for part III, (2010) which has the same name as the whole work, paths of memory and painting, is an array of three side by side lexia trails that, like a trio sonata, advance polyphonically. The entire work was introduced at at the UC Berkeley Center for New Media Roundtable in 2010, and exhibited at the 2010 Electronic Literature Organization Conference at Brown University.