Eroica: A Hypermedia Fiction

Eroica is a hypermedia fiction for web (http://hypereroica.com/). It moves on three dimensions: narrative/temporal, mosaic/spatial, interior /vertical. It tells three similar stories, one in fin de siècle Vienna, one in a mid-century mid-Hudson River mansion, another in the upper Amazon in the present day. Every narrative presents an innovative composer, his/her artist lover, and a conservative arch-antagonist. On the spatial level the work presents 88 kinetic images that the traveler is invited to assemble into a three-dimensional mosaic depicting artistic struggle. In the vertical dimension the work submerges the traveler in three descending layers: dramatic, psychological, and archetypal. The work is composed of image, music, text, and voice. Without pause or recursion it lasts two hours. The work’s system of navigation gives the traveler options of temporal vs. spatial exploration, narrative constraint vs. total freedom, and choices of endings – order and randomness, logic and serendipity. Thematically, the work portrays the artistic struggle against the counter forces of aesthetically ingrained conservatism, anti-Semitism, religious intolerance, colonialism and racism across historical epochs and geographical locale. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)