|
|
Hypertext competition
Art, literature or "multi-sequential writing"? The two winners of the
hypertext competition launched last year by the trAce Online Writing Community
show all the diversity you might expect from such a wide-open form. Rice
(www.idaspoetics.com.au/rice/ riceheading.html) is really more of a hyperpoem,
a series of 16 images of Vietnam that incorporate not only poetry but
also voice-over readings, music and sound-effects. There is some haunting
and effective Shockwave presentation of text, as a poem about a ferry
crossing itself drifts away on screen, with old war broadcasts playing
in the background. By contrast, The Unknown (www. soa.uc.edu/user/unknown/trip.
htm) is exclusively textual. This saga of three writers on a book tour
replaces the traditional linear road trip with something multidirectional,
though full of literary in-jokes. There's a hilarious Henry Miller-style
rampage through Paris, and the London stop includes a game of pool with
Martin Amis. The competition judge, the US writer and academic Robert
Coover, is also featured as a minor character, though he insists that
this did not affect his final decision. Babylondon Others have made hypertext trips through London, notably
in Geoff Ryman's 253, but that seven-and-a-half-minute ride on the Bakerloo
Line was the work of a single mind. Babylondon is the brainchild of four
writers who claim that such multiplicity is the right approach for so
big and diverse a subject. Readers can explore the four different narratives,
either by successive page-turning or hopping between them in search of
"coincidence and cross-currents". Or they can dip into the text at random
by chasing the floating links in a Java-plumbed word pool. The central
conceit is the city as human body - "a monstrous urban foetus thriving
off the variegated placenta of England's womb"; there's also much joyless
and highly detailed sex, references to Artaud, Timothy Leary and Patrick
Keillor, and a surprise skateboarding cat. All Work and No Play As well as a joke and a Kubrick tribute, this is perhaps the ultimate
online anti-novel. Writer's block is the subject, with that terrifyingly
banal sentence at the heart of The Shining - "all work and no play makes
Jack a dull boy" - here presented thousands of times in various inescapable
formations. Readers are challenged to somehow negotiate the linked typographic
maze - something the Jack Nicholson character signally failed do in the
movie. But then, he lacked a "back" button on his browser.
AdaFifi The Web, of course, hosts not just high-profile hypertext experiments
but a huge number of more conventional works, posted in the hope of acquiring
readers outside normal publishing strictures. This "adaptive fiction finder"
offers an alternative to the search engines for finding original novels
available for free on the Web. Calling itself "a little shelf in the corner
of the global library", it uses index cards to describe content and for
further reading suggestions: the links change every so often to send users
browsing in different directions. There are only a hundred or so titles
so far, but submissions are welcome and authors requested to review each
others work.
Send interesting, quirky or even, at a pinch, cool site recommendations
to websites@dircon.co.uk
Bill Pannifer
|