Books

CDs

Events/Exhibits

Film/Video

by J. Yellowlees Douglas.
University of Michigan Press, U.S.A. 2000
212 pages, hardcover.
ISBN: 0-472-11114-0
Reviewed by Mike Mosher, U.S.A. E-mail: mikemosh@well.com


All art and literature is about control, as the chaotic stuff of perceived or lived experience is given form and symmetry through omission and emphasis within a limited arena of canvas or page. Hypertext extends these limits by giving moments of choice that define the reader's path. Poetry may most of all be the work of a tightly controlled and controlling mind, yet successful hypertext poems have been created by Robert Kendall and others. With the multimedia that was defined nearly fifteen years ago as "movies upon the computer", the enemy of reading enters, the moving picture. Cinema will always win the contest, for its higher resolution and movement will engage the eye and back-brain as no words on paper or screen ever can. Furthermore, movies are a time-based medium which demand duration of its audience, not a swift glance. These are some of the forces that impact the development of creative works in hypertext. Author J. Yellowlees Douglas of the University of Florida doesn't recount them in that order, for she writes in the voice of a reader, not a producer of hypertexts. She has, however, produced a worthwhile book which focuses on the reading experience of a limited canon of electronic works.

To illustrate the effects of branching creating new meanings, the author cites 'found' film experiments by filmmaker Lev Kushelov of the U.S.S.R. in the 1920s. Kushelov used the same footage of an actor with a nuetral expression on his face and spliced it between images of steaming food, a corpse and a child playing. To audiences the actor appeared to have portrayed performances of hunger, grief and joy respectively. More recently artists such as Craig Baldwin squeeze political points out of 'found' footage in films like "Tribulation 99" (1991). J. Yellowlees Douglas' chapter "Just Tell Me When to Stop" contains close reading of multiple sessions with Michael Joyce's hypertexts _Afternoon_ and _Woe_, and her journeys are illustrated with flow charts, deconstructing (more properly, reverse engineering?) the works' form as if peeling an onion. Hypertext can create a fiction of annotation and scholasticism like Christian Paul's _Unreal City_, and there is a logic and _raison d'etre_ to critical works like_A Hypertext Guide to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"_. She draws primarily upon Roland Barthes among poststructuralist theoreticians who prefigure hypertext works in their views of the text, interxtuality and the act of reading. The author is at her best when drawing parallels between literary theorists and computer technologists, as when she compares the early 1960s work of Umberto Eco and Doug Engelbart. Much as computer technology flowed from the military to the market (and then to artists), the military imagery that populated the Gulf War of 1991 (a conflict which Manuel DeLanda called the world's first postmodern war) was soon responsible for a postmodern texts such as Stuart Moulthrop's "Victory Garden", written immediately after.

Yet texts sans imagery may be a betrayl of Ted Nelson's original vision of hypertext forty years ago. J. Yellowlees Douglas' book is very much focused on projects composed in Storyspace, a hypertext-builder designed by Michael Joyce and programmer Jay Butler. These works, distributed by Eastgate, remain important but were not the sole center of hypertext activity and exploration. By restricting this book to the issues of hypermedia in isolated works that appeared in the early 1990s, at this point in cyberhistory they can't help but seem somewhat precious in their limited number of corridors and the most recent work discussed is the1996 CD-ROM game "TITANIC: Adventure Out of Time". With the World Wide Web then emerging as the central arena of onscreen interactivity, there subsequently exists the distracting open window to the entire world, the link to information upon another server a block or several time zones away from which your reader may choose not to return. I should hope this author is now examining Web-based fictions and narratives.

Perhaps a truly subtle electronic literature would require artificial life algorithms and other intelligence built in, to warp the text organically as the reader navigates as the breeze might move the trees. In any case, in this book it is good to see hypertext fiction treated not a technological novelty but as a serious creative genre.

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