Articles by agailes

A mash-up of Afro Samurai and Method Man’s Bring the Pain. Couldn’t figure out how to embed the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWZmthBpLF4

The merging of technology and literature is often described as a progression. We assume that because the scope of literature is expanding, so too must the quality of it expand. That’s simply not true, especially in the short term. As writers broaden their perspective, they lose focus on the forms of literature that have been proven to work for years. By changing the format, hypertext writers have a dual responsibility: to create a quality format and to create a quality text. Novelists, for example need only create a quality text, and simply have more resources to space for this singular task.

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been progress within hypertextual literature, but that it hasn’t had an opportunity to narrow its manifestations down to a few workable formats that can convey the message of the author most effectively. Once that has been done, hypertext can bring real progression to the popular conception of literature. But until then, it will remain a fairly unpopular form of art.

At some point every day, for as long as I can remember, I’ve sat down on the keyboard and my fingers started moving. My father is a piano player, I’ve never been able to play, but I always think of the keyboard as my instrument. What he does through sound, I do through words. I was never talented at music. Or rather, I was never motivated enough to figure out if I had any talent. I hated practicing. I still do. I hate sitting in front of a music page, or a computer screen, and knowing that what I’m about to do isn’t perfect. I’ve never been comfortable with flaws in my own work. They offend me.

The five second drum loop that plays throughout “Bust Down the Doors” suggest chaos. The contrast between the loud beats and the softer, faster drums behind it create a sense of movement before the text can be seen on the screen. Once the text starts moving, the music matches it, and the work together to aid the movement that goes on throughout the story. Each piece of the story that appears on the screen tells a different portion of the story, so that when the text moves, the actual story and the music moves along with it.

By the time the first iterations of “Doors” plays through, the body and machine of the story are set. The story of “Doors” is its body, and that will never change. The machine of it is its delivery and mechanism. In this case, “Doors” uses the computer as a medium that allows us to perceive the story through sight and sound. The drums, the amount of time between each flicker of the screen, and the visual presentation of the words all stay the same in each iteration.

The face of the story, however, is different each time. In the first iteration, the person in the story is “you,” or the reader. This has the effect of making the face our face, the story our story, and it makes the text as a whole more relevant to us by doing so. By using the second person point of view, we become the ones who experience the story. And the characters in it are actually watching us move, cheering when we die. It effectively flips the common perception of a story on its head, making us become its characters and story, while making the story’s characters the ones to whom the story is told.

Each iteration of the story changes this face, or point of view. While the rest of the text stays the same, changing the face of the story completely changes its meaning. In two of its versions, the face of the story changes from “he” to “she,” and the different connotations that these two different points of view say much about our cultural and idiosyncratic perceptions of gender. All of the versions of the story point to the different implications that a point of view can convey. In one version, the point of view changes to the first person, and it’s interesting to see how much the reader relates to both.

By the time “Doors” comes to its end, the face becomes a distorted collage of each face that it had conveyed previously. Line by line, it switches points of view seemingly at random. Although the body of the story stays exactly the same as always, the distortion of its face makes the story unreadable in the short times that we have to read each line. We need to mentally adjust to the changing of the face much more than we would to a change in the actual body or music. In “Doors” we perceive a story through its face. The body and machine are simply mechanisms for a discussion of the transformational properties that point of view has on a story.

Scott McCloud, in “Understanding Comics” defines comics as, “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” This definition has two distinct problems: It is two encompassing, and  it fails to grasp the comic as a medium.

Kanji are Japanese written characters that are pictoral in nature. Unlike English characters, they are not purely symbolic images, but are most often extremely simplified and abstracted versions of the objects. They do not symbolize sounds like our characters, but actual objects and concepts. When written, they are juxtaposed in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information. Calligraphy is an accepted form of art in many countries, including Japan, and so in many cases, the words are intended to produce and aesthetic response in the viewer. By his definition, Kanji and any written language like it are comics.

McCloud himself uses this definition to question the whether forms of art never classified as comics, are. By expanding the territory so far, he loses the medium of the comic - or at least the medium as we’ve seen manifested throughout the past century. McCloud defines comics as art. But perhaps the most important item we need to define comics is what they are exclusively produced on - paper and monitors.

This is key to defining the comic as a medium, and separtating it from, say, hieroglyphs or Kanji. The term “comics” is specifically designed to distinguish works of art like “X-Men” from any other genre of art by their apperance, manifestation, and distribution. To take that element out of its definition is to destroy its meaning and purpose entirely.

Finally, the word “comics” also inherently implies a triviality to the work. This doesn’t mean that the art lacks merit, but even McCloud is quick to acknowledge that the comic makes an almost unique usage of simplicity in the search for universiality. This aspect of comics should be included in any definition of comics, as stripping down of reality to build something else is inherit in the art and its imagery.

In his instuctions to “Afternoon,” Michael Joyce describes closure as a “suspect quality,” something that his text supposedly avoids. Not only is that claim false, there is nothing suspect about the concept or quality of closure in text.

All literature is fantasy. The point of literature is to present the reader with a reality that is different from the one he lives in. Even in Non-Fiction represents a different reality than most readers, and in being published after its events, it contains a different perspective than even the people who’s events it covers. At the same time, literature must connect to our lives in some fashion, or we won’t relate to it.

This is why closure is present in literature - because while true closure doesn’t happen in life, even our written works fall victim to an end. When a book ends in, “and then they lived happily ever-after,” that is our way of transforming reality through art. It is false in the sense that it is not an accurate representation of our reality, but that is precisely the point of art in the first place: it is false. But while the art may convey a sense of eternity, it ends. This is how literature connects back into our lives: it ends just as we do, and events that happen after its in must go on without its knowledge.

Furthermore, the idea that afternoon does not contain closure is false. As with any other work of art, it is finite. It dies. While it can be viewed forever, it eventually becomes a corpse - lifeless and without any new creation. That is the closure of “Afternoon”: finishing every single word of the text. Once it is read in this fashion, it becomes like every other piece of literature.

In our first week, we were asked to define “literary.” If I learned anything about literature from that session, it was that terms like that or “literature” are more appropriately described by examples than defined by a few sentences. With that in mind, the best example of this in hypertext is that “My Boyfriend Came Home from the War” is literature, and “Hegirascope” is not.

I don’t believe in the concept of assigning some sort of quality inspection on what is literature. The idea that something is literature because some people with degrees decided that they liked it is silly and elitist. What makes literature, and literary, is a story narrative.

Literary and literature are not synonyms to “art,” so when I say “Hegirascope” is not literature, I’m not saying it’s not a quality piece of art. But in order to be literature, a linear, definable story must be conveyed throughout the text. In “Hegirascope,” there is no linear story being told that connects directly through the various links. Specific pieces of “Hegirascope” would qualify as literature, such as the very short stories present in it. But piece itself doesn’t use it’s parts to create a linear narrative, it uses them to evoke a surreal and emotional connection.

“Boyfriend” is like Hegirascope in that it can be told in different orders based on user interactivity. What separates it into the separate genre of literature is that beyond the different order of choices, the story is the same. It tells a concrete story of a man coming home from war and finding himself distanced from those around him.

On the other hand, “Boyfriend” is not an honestly interactive text. The user cannot change the outcome of the stories as we can in our adventure books - the beginning and end will always be the same. I don’t think that makes it any worse than those books, but in this case, I find the veneer of interactivity to be a cheap trick to keep the user engaged. That doesn’t make it any less literary, but I dislike its hypertextuality being used to shield a lack of overall depth in the story.

“Orson Whales” has very little literal, or representational meaning that is drawn from its actual basis, “Moby Dick.” Its story is told completely through the original drawings which are displayed over the actual book’s text and the commentary by Orson Welles. While I’ve never read the actual book, the animation seems to tell the story itself. Even Welles’ commentary is limited to highlighting certain aspects of the cartoon, rather than delivering a coherent narrative. He plays much the same role as the Led Zepplin song - supporting the story rather than narrating it.

This support role is exactly where Welles, Led Zepplin, and the text itself are most important. They make the background in which the cartoon itself can be expressed. The text acts as a visual background, while the song and commentary act as a sonic boon to punctuate strong moments of the animation. Rather than taking entire sections of the book from Welles’ narration, Alex Itin selects short phrases that coincide with the action, and even foregoes the commentary or the song in large parts. This is all present to establish the various evocative messages of the entire video - greed, lust and ambition all seem to lead to death at some point or another, and they are punctuated by appropriate sound samples of commentary and music.

None of that is any different from what all of us do everytime we write papers. We take from movies, music and books to make a basis for the point we want to make, or even as a justification for that point. What Alex Itin does is take Moby Dick and Orson Welles, and use them as a basis for an entirely different form of expression. He never passes their work off as his; he even cites them as the sources for his new work. We all gain insight from everything around us to help form our opinions and expression, Alex Itin just narrows his scope.