Forms of Future

Critical Writing
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1997
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Although my hyperfictions are sincere attempts to negotiate whatever clarity I could find in link and multiplicity of voices, I have as yet found nothing truly self-evident to show you. No new clarity, no new city of text beneath the cranes and scaffolds, no promised land, not even a wire frame Frankenstein awaiting the flesh of textural space.

The web is a pretty difficult space in which to create an expressive surface for text. It seems to me that the web is all edges and without much depth and for a writer that is trouble. You want to induce depth, to have the surface give way to reverie and a sense of a shared shaping of the experience of reading and writing. Instead everything turns to branches.

There is a city of text and it, too, mutates and thrives beneath an umbrella of construction cranes and a crenellated skin of scaffolding, beneath SGML, XTML, VRML, and HTML, inside the plug-in, the data stream, the web crawler, the game engine, the photoshop filter, and so on.

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Eric Dean Rasmussen