Tierra de Extracción

Author description: The first part of the project, Tierra de Extracción 1.0, was begun in 1996 and completed in 2000 for the Multimedia Writing Seminar promoted by the Center for Communication Research at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Caracas). In a quest for a multimedia rhetoric, we then began to develop Tierra de Extracción 2.0, which was completed and published in 2007. With 63 hypermedia chapters, the action takes place in the region of Zulia, in a town called Menegrande, the location of the first big Venezuelan oil well: Zumaque I, which started the commercial era of oil production in the country in 1914. The narration occurs in three distinct periods: the beginning and ending of the 20th century and a period in between. At a certain moment, which very well can be the beginning or the end according to the path taken by the reader, the stories break their natural timeline and are united in the same space.