Sorry for the super extra late blog post on hypertext’s, I’ve been wanting to write on this topic ever since we finished the reading on Strickland’s Ballad. Deconstructing this text and looking at its ambiguous nature as a form of interaction with the reader was very interesting. However, whilst writing my essay on this topic, I felt that justifying the effect the poem created by the absence or ambiguity of another element made me sometimes skeptical of what I was writing. In the end I think that I managed to pull it off alright (lol); however, I still wanted to investigate what other hypertexts had explored in terms of reader involvement and navigation that differentiates them from other pieces of literature in other media.

Furthermore, I went ahead and investigated hypertexts that actually use the technology at their disposal to enhance the interactive aspect of the text, and how sometimes this technology intensifies the theme communicated, just as Strickland’s ambiguity does with its text. This was to see if hypertexts can actually be interactive, interactive as we conventially think of the word in this day and age, where the boundaries between reality and digital are being blurred to the absolute minimal. In terms of experimentation with technology regarding reader involvement, Strickland’s text doesn’t do much, I believe that a hypertext could do way more than having words highlighted that allow you to move from page to page. So I went ahead, and investigated other hypertexts.

I found out that the main source of the interactivity in most of the hypertexts were very similar to the one presented in The Ballad. Most of them truly relied on the reader clicking the highlighted words to construct the text. The very first hypertext, Sunshine ’69 is a hypertext novel with intertwining character stories. In the main page they give you the option of different forms of  navigation, you can choose to navigate chronologically or non-chronologically by choosing the dates of the events in the novel. There’s another option, where you can navigate by choosing the character you want to follow, or geographic naviagtion through a map where the events of the story take place. It is fair to mention that it does not elaborate interactivity further than Strickland’s work, where we navigate by clicking on the highlighted words, but it is interesting to see how the author’s decomposed the different categories and elements the reader can use to navigate the story. However, this form of navigation does enhance the reading of the story, as it is a mystery-thriller, you have to build the events from how you choose to navigate the story. Reading each of the character’s perspective in a particular order will give you a certain bias of one character over the other, this bias will develop, but it will do so differently if you had read the story geographically or “birds-eye view” which is the all-seeing perspective of the text.

Another colossal hypertext released around the same time, named the Grammatron, explores different narratives as well. This text is massive, it contains around “2000 hyperlinks” and “40+minutes of original soundtrack”. According to its “about” page it is a story about cyberspace, the evolution of virtual sex and it also explores digital narratives. Although most of it narrative exploration is the same as Sunshine ’69 and The Ballad –  if you choose the “High Bandwidth Version” named “Interfacing” it opens up an interesting introduction to the regular version. The about page does not explain the reasoning behind having the two versions, and the hypertext is massive for me to read all of it to understand such reasoning, but this introduction opens up other possibilities for the interactivity in texts. When you begin with this option a new window pops open and automatically starts playing a sinister recording of a voice slowed down, alongside is a synth playing minor chords. This song is accompanied by a text that plays automatically, accompanied by abstract animated gifs, every 4 seconds or more the text displayed changes. The very fact that the reading ambients itself and obligates the reader to go at a certain speed accentuates the theme of digital evolution and consciousness. It seems the text is playing itself or rather thinking for itself, and this message is presented from the very home page, where one of the hyperlinks displayed says the following:  “you are about to enter The Grammatron, please wait while the machine reads you”. Also, the use of glitchy animated gifs add life to the text and a certain sinister aura to it, almost taking over your computer through automatic, and to a certain extent, unstoppable storytelling. This is a clear example where the coders of this text explored forms of interactive storytelling to emphasize on a certain theme and create a bigger impact on the reader through it.

Other hypertexts, like the work that is presented in Bram.org, collects dynamic and interactive digital poetry that speak about the human condition of loneliness. Although most of the the texts are fairly simple they present a new way in which we view poetry as they use the automatic digital display significantly to alter the way we read the poetry. The text “All Alone” is a clear example of this: when the text opens a barrage of pop-up windows displaying the words “All. Alone. All One.”  – in that order. Alternating between colours, these windows close as soon as they have displayed these words. Finally leaving the reader with a single word displayed: “you”. The loss of control through the barrage of pop-ups and the intense display of colours, impacts you and gives you a certain impression which finally adds power to the word “you”. An extremely simple form of poetry it is complemented through its use of coding to get emphasize on the word “you” which further adds to the theme of loneliness point that is to supposed to be communicated in this collection.

Websites:

http://www.sunshine69.com/noflash.html

grammatron.com

http://www.bram.org/beinghuman/alone/allfr.htm