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Migration as Translation: Moving Figurski to the Web
"Traduttore e traditore." [The translator betrays.]
Migrating an early hypertext novel originally created with proprietary software programmed in C and published on a removeable disk, to HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for the World Wide Web, as we have done for Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, is an act of translation—one involving not only the translation of its code, but also of its interface design and its functionality. As such, translation impacts our experience with the work, ultimately betraying it as some aspects of it becomes lost in the effort to make it found by a new audience. In a digital translation aimed at restoring access to a work that has become technologically obsolete, the gain is so much greater than the loss. In the case of Figurski, especially, it means that we can now again read one of the most unique and quirky interactive novels of the early 21st Century.
Dene Grigar - 07.09.2021 - 18:39
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The Distinctive Quality of Holeton's Hypertext Novel
This essay by Michael Tratner provides both a historical account of the public reception to Figurski at Findhorn on Acid and critical commentary about it.
Dene Grigar - 07.09.2021 - 18:45
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Hypertext Lake: Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling or Lessons in Hypertext Reading
If Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story is the Yin of hypertext literature, then Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling is the Yang: perhaps the ultimate hypertext of female sensitivity, poetics, and politics. Published in the autumn of 1992, Quibbling seems to be everything that afternoon, a story wasn’t. Instead of a single protagonist on a paranoid knowledge quest about those close to him and himself through a labyrinth of his fear and desire, the “digital rhapsody” [1] by this woman American author gives voice to a group of characters, four couples, without a distinct narrative centre towards which other voices would gravitate. As readers we are invited into their stories, their intellectual horizons, and into uncovering relations between these characters in the past and in the present. The whole work is broadly feminist, and as such it represents an innovative form of l'ecriture feminine [2] from the early 1990s with a fascinating, added value of experimentation with form in the electronic realm of hypertext.
Dene Grigar - 07.09.2021 - 23:38
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Reformers vs Capitalists: Hypertext and Simulation in The Election of 1912
Immerse yourself in the era of railroads and reformers. Take the role of Theodore Roosevelt in the run for the presidential seat in a remarkable simulation The Election of 1912: A Hypertext Study of the Progressive Era by Mark Bernstein and Erin Sweeney.
Dene Grigar - 07.09.2021 - 23:46
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A Sucker in Spades & Transitional Media
The question I get asked a lot is: Why do I care so much about early interactive media, particularly since they are generally relegated to the black and white (or green on green) environment of a computer monitor (and a small one, at that), are text-heavy, and whose images–-if they exist at all––are comprised of ASCII art, and mood, augmented by 8-bit sound (if there is any sound at all)? This is a valid question in light of contemporary interactive storytelling techniques that involve robustly immersive environments created with Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and 3D technologies.
It boils down to this: I am fascinated with the way ideas develop over time and contribute to approaches, techniques, and technologies used today. A case in point is Robert DiChiara’s detective-adventure game, A Sucker in Spades, which serves as an example of transitional media during the formation of electronic literature.
Dene Grigar - 08.09.2021 - 00:05
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A Sucker in Spades––Hardboiled Text Game of Robert DiChiara
One dead body, two femme fatales, local mafia, and a lone private eye roaming the labyrinth of L.A. from one click of the mouse to another. A Sucker in Spades by Robert DiChiara, is the second eliterature works published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1988 on a the Hypergate platform. It offers a solid dose of digital, postmodern adventure within the recognisable convention of hard-boiled fiction and film-noir genres. At the same time it prefigures future forms of interactive entertainment.
Dene Grigar - 08.09.2021 - 00:14
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Under the Parable. Hypertext and Trauma in Genetis: A Rhizography
On the surface, Genetis: A Rhizography by Richard Smyth, a hypertext story published in The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (Fall 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4), could be labeled a typical work from the late period of Storyspace hypertext publishing. The growing popularity of the Web put the development of Storyspace in a position of catching up with multimedia capabilities of the Web. Thanks to this, apart from the allure of the visualised “hyperspace,” of multi-linear storytelling, and associative argumentation, Storyspace of 1996 offered authors a set of functionalities to include sounds, images and even videos in their hypertexts. Multimedia could be displayed and played back on the reader’s machine in a stand-alone mode: a much more reliable way than over the dial up, PPP connection protocols of the early Web.
Dene Grigar - 08.09.2021 - 00:40
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Like a Dog Chasing its Tail
Richard Smyth’s Genetis: A Rhizography participates in several kinds of discourse. Sometimes, the Storyspace work is a serious scholarly essay on hypertext and madness and follows the rules of that form of discourse (citations and all). At other times it is an obscene fable, an autofiction, or a joke. However, regardless of what it looks like—poem, essay, screed, or allegory—Genetis is always trying to get at the same question: How can you make a self (or in more Lacanian terms, a “subject”) capable of telling about itself and being understood by others? Since we know our selves by how and what they say, that question is synonymous with another: What kind of text, what kind of discourse, can serve as evidence of such a self and prove it legible, whole, and (perhaps) healed?
Dene Grigar - 08.09.2021 - 00:47
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'Into an alien ocean:' The Lore of Kathy Mac’s Unnatural Habitats
In her poetic hypertext pastiche, Unnatural Habitats, Canadian writer and scholar Kathleen McConnell, alias Kathy Mac, explores the spatial affordances of Storyspace hypertext both formally and thematically. It engages with the ways in which modernity’s phallogocentric strife for teleological technological progress and masculine dominance has created numerous subjugating, alienating, and potentially fatal spaces for humans and other animals. In my ethnographic research into the lore of early, pre-web hypertext (Ensslin 2020; 2021), I had the opportunity to interview Kathy about some of the processes and ideas underlying her work, as well as to access some of the written correspondence she had at the time with Eastgate’s Chief Scientist, Mark Bernstein, who published her work in The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (issue 1:3) in 1994.
Dene Grigar - 08.09.2021 - 00:56
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Storyspace Estranged: Kathy Mac’s Unnatural Habitats
There is a third group of Storyspace hypertexts, and it includes works that aim to utilise poetic potential of both hypertext links and hypertext maps. Among these, Unnatural Habitats by Kathy Mac is the most representative, consistent, and beautiful example. Perhaps not surprisingly, because as a collection of interlinked poems, it represents hypertext poetry in most literal, not only metaphorical, manner. Advertised as “poetry of primitive submarines, crippled spaceships, and basement apartments,” the hypertext of this Canadian poet explores many different ways in which people make their own habitats unnatural, inhabitable, and hostile.
Dene Grigar - 08.09.2021 - 01:04
