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We Descend : Archives Pertaining to Edgerus Scriptor, Volume One
A story of our far future, unearthed by a Scholar to whom it is the distant past. But for that far-off scholar, as for every reader, the paths followed and the connections forged among the diaries, letters, confessions, and artifacts lead only to further questions. Some documents speak to us of Egderus, a young boy at the isolated Mountain House. What -- or who -- lives in the rocky hills around him? What secrets bind his superiors in fear and silence? What is it that creeps out, undetected, to drive a man mad, or to tear him limb from limb? Why must Egderus later leave the Mountain House as amanuensis to the Good Doctor, interrogator and torturer? What intrigue surrounds one prisoner, the Historian, that makes the Good Doctor so relentless in his attack? Why, ultimately, is this Historian the one victim that Egderus attempts to rescue? Years later, as an old man at the Mountain House, Egderus uncovers only more mysteries. What did the Historian learn that drove him to his death? Does something live, still, in the rocks around him? And how shall Egderus pursue this disturbing legacy that could shake the foundations of his darkening world?
Scott Rettberg - 25.03.2011 - 23:43
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Fibonacci's Daughter
With Fibonacci's Daughter the challenge was to capture the Fibonacci precepts--elements of predictability in natural forms--in a narrative. His mathematical sequence of numbers and golden sector were sources for narrative shape, structural organization, and design motif. I wanted the story to have a sense of spiraling both in and out at the same time--disappearing at the center and diffusing at the margins. The structure is based on the Fibonacci golden mean; the spatial access is through a shopping mall that is a golden square. Backgrounds, images, and motifs are drawn from Fibonacci's work. The story has, as well, a shadow of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "Rappacini's Daughter," in a certain altered perception of pattern. Borges lurks.
(Source: Author's note at The New River)
Scott Rettberg - 26.03.2011 - 09:11
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Planting Trees Out of the Grief: In Memoriam Robert Creeley
"Planting Trees out of the Grief" is a lyrical essay, or work of creative non-fiction about mourning. "Planting Trees out of the Grief. In Memoriam Robert Creeley" is a ficticious story that mirrors the psychological processes of coping with mourning described in the essay.
The hypertext will lead you through both texts as same as one goes through the process of mourning. You will go further and sometimes you realize you just stepped backwards finding yourself at the same point you were once before.
Being at the same point (textpassage) you were once before you'll have the choice to follow new paths - or you have to go through the same until a new path (link) reveals. Sometimes people forget they were in grief and then, suddenly, they face their loss again. Therefore, I am dealing with intendend moments of recurrence. By this, you are forced to find new paths and follow other links.
Mark Marino - 27.03.2011 - 17:52
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Labyrinth: the Rulebook without Game
An ergodic Flash text exploring video game culture through the lens of playable manuals.
How does one read this clever piece, which touches on so many genres, such as poetry, fiction, game, theory, game manual, and codework? It claims to be a manual for an absent game, a bottomless pit, and a labyrinth for readers to get lost, wondering if indeed the game has already begun. The reader inhabits a character from the outset, a 35 year old married man, who can take on different roles in games belonging to popular RPG and videogame genres: science fiction, spy thriller, fantasy, and labyrinth exploration. Most of the writing is in the tradition of game manual for these types of games (here’s an old favorite) which at their best help immerse the readers into the world of the game and can be more fun than the game itself. In the case of tabletop RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons, the game is the rulebooks, and all it requires is players and some dice for the necessary randomizations— making them good recipients of the label “cardboard computers,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum has used for tabletop wargames.
Mark Marino - 28.03.2011 - 16:12
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Uncle Roger
In the spring of 1986, Judy Malloy was invited by video and performance art curator Carl Loeffler to go online and write on the seminal Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on The WELL where ACEN Datanet, an early online publication, would soon feature actual works of art, including works by John Cage, Jim Rosenberg, and Malloy's Uncle Roger. In August 1986, Malloy began writing and designing the interface for the hyperfictional narrative database, Uncle Roger. Originally this work was published as a series of three files on the Well. It has been described as a "database narrative", though it could equally be described as a hypertext fiction. Each node consists of a paragraph or two of text. Below the text is a list of links, each leading to a new node. Malloy describes the story thus: "Uncle Roger is a work of narrative poetry written in the tradition of Greek and Shakespearean comedy.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 04.04.2011 - 20:31
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Reconstructing Mayakovsky
Inspired by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, this hybrid media novel imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and discord have been eliminated through technology. The text employs storylines derived from lowbrow genre fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, the detective novel, and film. These kitsch narratives are then destabilized by combining idiosyncratic, lyrical poetic language with machine-driven forms of communication: hyperlinks, "cut-and-paste" appropriations, repetitions, and translations (OnewOrd language is English translated into French and back again using the Babelfish program.) In having to re-synthesize a coherent narrative, the reader is obliged to recognize herself as an accomplice in the creation of stories whether these be novels, histories, news accounts, or ideologies. The text is accessed through various mechanisms: a navigable soundscape of pod casts, an archive with real-time Google image search function, a manifesto, an animation and power point video, proposals for theatrical performances, and mechanism b which presents the novel in ten randomly chosen words with their frequencies.
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 15:38
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Accounts of the Glass Sky
In this Flash hypertext, Coverley weaves a tapestry of text, image, and sound, telling a California story that many readers can relate to. In this piece, the sky itself is the center of a meditation on memory and loss across decades of human experience. The same "blue sky" that often refers to people's wildest dreams now comes to represent boundaries and fears.
(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1.)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 18.04.2011 - 11:07
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All Roads
Venice. The tight winding alleys and long dirty canals. Easy to become lost here, where every street emerges somewhere unexpected. In the central square a scaffold has been erected for your neck, and if only you can escape for long enough you might survive, but in this city all roads lead back to Piazza San Marco and the Hanging Clock.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 18.04.2011 - 12:53
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Bad Machine
Bad Machine is codework that works. It presents a surface of text that blends English with structures and tropes from programming languages, database queries and reports, error messages, and other forms of machine communication. But it is also a functioning interactive fiction, capable of accepting commands and being figured out by the assiduous reader. The machinery of program and language is at work here, as those who are up to the challenge of Bad Machine can discover. (Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1).
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 18.04.2011 - 12:59
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Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales
Chemical Landscapes is a series of photograms by Mary Pinto. The photos suggest landscapes but are created entirely in the dark room, using only chemicals and a flashlight. For this project, I've written a series of "digital tales" suggested by the particular chemical landscape. I hope the relationship of language and narrative to the "tale" parallels the relationship of light and chemicals to the "landscape." The piece begins with a title page that serves as a navigation page. By clicking at various places on the page you're taken to one of the eight chemical landscapes. Once you arrive at a landscape, the digital tale fades in and then out, and you may click on the screen at any point to jump back to the navigation page. I have tried to time the fading in and out of the text so that it is almost impossible to read it all before it fades away. My hope is that the reader will recognize the necessity of jumping around in the text, picking up pieces of the tale to read and ignoring other pieces, thereby creating a different experience with each reading.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 19.04.2011 - 07:24
