13 | 2000

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The Distributed Author: Creativity in the Age of Computer Networks
Heibach, Christiane (2000-08-23) , S. 1-9
The Death of the Author has first been claimed by poststructuralist philosophy. When language is seen as an open system undergoing constant changes, it loses its power of forming the subject's consciousness. Author and reader become object to the open différance-movement of the signs. Hypertext theorists like George Landow and Michael Joyce transferred this core thesis of poststructuralist thinking to the literary application of hypertext. Hyperfiction, seen as a "garden of forking paths," seems to semantically represent the looseness of the signifier-signified-relation as the multiple narrative lines subvert any control by the reader and undermine the author's power to fix all contexts and therefore all meanings of the text sequences. Although Landow sees this hypertextual dimension as a fulfillment of the poststructuralist claim, that meaning is only constituted by the reader and not determined by the author, in hyperfiction this remains an illusion. As the reader has to move within an unknown narrative universe, her freedom is strongly reduced when she tries to figure out the coherence and connections between the lexias. It is still the author who determines the text by designing the possible ways the reader can take, and by writing and therefore fixing the text sequences. Nevertheless we experience a change of the author concept deriving from new writing practices in computer networks. The internet as the most complex networked platform is the sphere where the single creator is substituted by a collective and communicative creativity. Literary internet-projects meanwhile have developed a wide range of different cooperative forms that can be structured in "weak" and "strong" ways of collaboration. Under "weak" cooperation I subsume collaborations of authors and designers (the technical basis of internet literature and the development towards multimedia effects requires a wide range of qualifications that very rarely can be performed by one person) or multiple authors as e.g. realized in the literary project "Aliento" where three authors work together to create a narrative network of stories related to significant places of a fictional city. "Strong" ways of collaboration are those where any internet user can participate, as in cooperative writing projects like "*snowfields*" by Josephine Berry and Micz Flor , where - based on the concept of soap operas - different stories related to various topographical parts of Eastern Berlin shall be developed. Also "frame"-projects represent this way of cooperation - projects where the initiator sets the frame, and the participators are free to realize their interpretation as for example performed in "noon quilt" where people from all parts of the world are asked to describe what they see when they look out of their window at noon. Thus an intercultural network of different views expressing the different individual and cultural conditions is woven. Apart from these ways of collaboration a second form, basically communicative, appears. It is realized in Virtual Worlds where people meet to interact by text and tell each other their (true or fictional) story. "Conversation with Angels" is such a literary project where avatars talk to visitors, visitors to other real life visitors or avatars and no-one knows who the other is. The avatars have their own biography, and in communication with the visitors they develop narratives that only exist as long as the conversation goes on. These projects are fundamentally ephemeral and only alive as long as there are participants. These forms of cooperation and communication deeply change the notion of the author - they cause a shift from one creator-personality to multiple creators and thus a shift from the completed work to an ever-changing, never finished procedural project, where the act of communicating with others substitutes the desire to create an eternal and fixed work. The action is more important than the result.
Reading Victory Garden
Koskimaa, Raine (2000-09-12) , S. 1-21
Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1991) is one of the "classical hyperfictions" alongside Michael Joyce's Afternoon (1987) and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1993). Of these three, however, Victory Garden has been all but neglected by the critics - in its truly novelistic size (993 lexias), multifarious navigating possibilities, innovative hypertextual devices, as well as intertextually dense frame of references it is well worth closer attention. The essay starts with an overview of the work, describing both the technical aspects (like the reader interface) and the main story lines and characters. Then, the hypertextual structure of Victory Garden is discussed, with particular emphasis on Moulthrop's use of the device we call "singular loop" (as opposed to an indefinite loop). In singular loop the reader is taken back to a previous point in the path she is reading, but the next time around not. There is a loop, a sequence of lexias read twice, but after that the path continues forward. One possible motivation for this kind of structure is to invoke a certain sense of malfunctioning, of an unintentional lapse in the running of the narration. Also, the questions of repetition and repetition with difference are discussed, trying to demonstrate the difference between hypertextual and narrative structures. Next, we try to identify alternative "framestories", which would motivate the hypertextual structures employed in Victory Garden. There are at least four of those: the Borgesian forking paths idea (which is closely linked to possible worlds semantics), the dream-as-hypertext, the virtual reality simulation, and, conspiracy paranoia. Further on, we will next turn to the intertextual references and allusions in Victory Garden, which back up these different interpretational frames. Three essential subtexts are Jorge Luis Borges' stories (especially "Garden of Forking Paths" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"), William Burrough's stories employing the cut up technique, and, Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. In this essay we offer several competing interpretations of Moulthrop's work, but even all of them together cannot explain each and every aspect of the large web of Victory Garden. But, as we argue, trying to interpret Victory Garden means mainly to try and describe how the mechanism works; in other words, trying to explain the poetics of the text.
When Literature goes Multimedia: Three German Examples
Simanowski, Roberto (2000-08-24) , S. 1-10
In February 2000 Robert Coover noticed the "constant threat of hypermedia: to suck the substance out of a work of lettered art, reduce it to surface spectacle". Coover's message seems to be: When literature goes multimedia, when hypertext turns into hypermedia a shift takes place from serious aesthetics to superficial entertainment. What Coover points out is indeed a problem of hypermedia. If the risk of hyperfiction is to link without meaning, the risk of hypermedia is to employ effects that only flex the technical muscles. Can there be substance behind spectacle? In this paper I discuss three examples of German digital literature which combine the attraction of technical aesthetics with the attraction of deeper meaning. The first example, "Das Epos der Maschine" (The Epic of the Machine) by Urs Schreiber, presents a visual image consisting only of words, since the words themselves represent pictures by moving in a predetermined way. For example, words that put technology into question form a question mark with the word 'Truth' as a period. If one clicks on the question mark, the words disappear behind the 'Truth' as if it had swallowed them. However, the question can be 'eaten' in this way, it cannot be erased, because if one moves the mouse the word 'Truth' moves and is followed by those other words as if they stick on the truth until the cursor stops and those words disappear again. "Trost der Bilder" ("Consolation of Images") by Jürgen Daibers and Jochen Metzgers, tells the story of a man who falls in love with a mannequin and locks himself overnight in a store in order to gaze upon it. The manequin's face can half be seen in the background of the text and is shown at the end of the story without the accompanying text, but only for a moment. This combination of image and time setting leads to the deeper meaning, because the readers who hit the return button in order to see the mannequin's face testify to their attraction to the mannequin. To be sure, they do not thereby become like the man in the story; nevertheless, their action re-enacts the reading process in general, which is also a materialization of life in our imagination. The third example, "Digital Troja" (Digital Troy) by Fevci Konuk, uses words, sound and animated images, to discuss war both past and present time. One interesting effect here is the image of Paris, who obviously wants to run away from Troy but is instead caught in an endless loop. There are two breaks within the loop. In the language of animation breaks are supposed to stress something. I see these breaks as allusions to the famous sequence in Hitchcock's movie "North by Northwest" where Roger Thornhill, alias Cary Grant, realizes the danger of an approaching airplane, and to Discobulus, the ancient discus-thrower. While Discobulus is associated with the Olympic ideal, Thornhill evokes the Cold War. Both bring important issues in the story. Thus breaks itselfes serve as text and add meaning to the written text.

Browsing 13 | 2000 by Subject "digital literature"

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