On Being Literary

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.

Her Boyfriend Came Back From the War and I Don’t Care

I get it. Art is not supposed to come out and to tell you the message or point as that is for the beholder to decide. Olia Lialina’s “My Boyfriend…” certainly adheres to my schema of art. The opening line is the same for all, and we all eventually arrive at the same ending, but there are multiple twists and turns along the way that lead the reader on a journey through art and short lines of dialog. When I arrived at the end, I found myself wondering why I should care about any of what I’d just seen or if it was even possible to feel an attachment at the piece. No offense to the author or anyone who fell in love with the work, but I just didn’t get it.

It wasn’t for lack of trying on my part. I went through her virtual tour on three separate occasions before attempting to piece things together here on the blog. I didn’t want to come across as some stubborn kid who doesn’t “get” art, but I feel that’s still where I ended up. Her artwork didn’t strike me as anything special and the lines of dialog didn’t seem related. With an example like Hegirascope, the disorder made sense to me because everything seemed to have its own path. With Lialina’s work, I felt like there was some main idea I was supposed to come away with, but never did. It’s almost like dying in the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, I felt like a failure when I got to the end.

“MBCBFTW” Blog Post

The structural composition of “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War” reminded me a lot of “Hegirascope”, with the exception of its use of a single screen. As one clicked on the textual link that interested them, a new window frame appeared on the screen, creating a visual mosaic of disjointed phrases. As I read through them, I got the impression of a conversation between a girl and her boyfriend who has just returned from deployment. I read phrases concerning infidelity, marriage, forgiveness, and trauma. The static nature of the large frame with the picture of the girl and her boyfriend to the left helped to secure their presence in the narrative – an aspect of “character preservation” that was never evident in “Hegirascope”. In contrast, the characters of “Hegirascope” changed with each new page on the screen. By keeping the couple in view of the text in “My Boyfriend Came From the War”, Lialina asserted their presence amidst the fleeting idioms that seemed to give an intimate glimpse into the couple’s frustrations.

In reference to its graphic layout, “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War” utilized multiple illustrative effects to create an atmosphere of darkness – perhaps an attempt by Lialina to amplify the viewer’s own obscurity when it came to interpreting the text. The monochromatic nature, miniature square story frames, and intense saturation of the screen all reminded me of a virtual comic book. As I went from square to square, the action of the narrative flowed from box to box (just like the progression of action in a comic book or graphic novel). Like “Hegirascope”, the story seemed disjointed – but at the same time, I could use the abstract fragments to create my own story that read of a lover’s betrayal and struggle to maintain her relationship with her estranged boyfriend. The chaos of the language reminded me of how someone suffering from post-traumatic syndrome might talk: disoriented, agitated, and deceived. It seemed like the text/conversation was being replayed in the mind of someone who felt disappointed and confused – most likely the mind of the jilted boyfriend. His struggle to understand his girlfriend’s infidelity paired with his return to a war-less society was an emotional coupling the young man was not yet prepared to endure. Lialina gives us a peek into this anxiety, replicating the chaos and alienation of her male protagonist. 

Reflection

My Boyfriend Came Back From the War is a hypertext that allows the viewer to experience an unfolding drama. It uses nonsequential writing so that the reader may experience the drama in different structures depending on which link they choose and in what order they decide to choose them. The hypertext ranges from black and white images to white on black text which one can only assume are pieces of conversation and thoughts from the assumed narrator. The black and whiteness of the hypertext helps enhance a sense of duality throughout the piece, with the narrator switching between phrases of justification and phrases begging for forgiveness. Although there are many orders in which one may read the hypertext, all readers will obtain the same phrases and images with the completion of the hypertext. This limits the reader’s experience with the text in ways that other hypertexts ( Firefly, Hegirascope) do not. I believe this tends to give the hypertext more meaning and prompts more thought than the randomness that many of the other hypertexts have brought us. I found it much easier to form a constructive opinion with this hypertext than with previous ones.

The author takes a subject that almost every generation can identify with, a woman’s time away from the man she loves while he has gone to war. This hypertext is not as abstract as much of the other hypertexts we have studied. The subject does not leave the reader depending upon his or her own interpretation to gather meaning because it is one that has been brought up time and time again, especially in the present day. As a woman I feel it is especially easy to relate to the speaker of the hypertext in her conflict.

Coherence / Lialina

Focusing on: Can Coherence Be Saved?

An intriguing read, I tend to agree with the author on most of the points expressed in this article.  One theme that is visited repeatedly throughout the text is the idea of hypertext vs. the standard novel.  Will hypertext replace novels in the future?  Games, hypertext and interactive CD-ROMS are given as examples how they compare to a standard novel but also how they will most likely never replace it.

As stated in the text, most readers “read on” to find out what happens next in a novel, moving linearly, page-by-page, the reader knows what to expect at least in terms of context of a novel.  With hypertext and other forms of electronic literature, you have multiple forms as are outlined in the end of the article.  Some forms of electronic literature as defined by hypertext immersion, go way off, leaving the reader lost, which in turn relegates that piece of literature to academic study and not for the masses.  Spatial immersion would seem a better choice giving the reader some context and control over the text itself.  Followed by emotional immersion, which is described allowing the user to choose different outcomes based upon his or her own personal interests.

I have to concur with the conclusion of this piece.  Currently, people usually books when they want to read a story.  I do not believe interactive textuality is quite there yet in terms of it replacing the book to tell a story.  If history to judge, look at the recent products that are best sellers, such as Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s eBook Reader, these products demonstrate that people still enjoy the concept of a book that can be read linearly.  The next logic step may be to incorporate a type of interactive textuality within the pages of an electronic book; this would help to bridge the gap between a regular novel and selective interactivity.

Focusing on My Boyfriend Came Back from the War:

In Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, the work itself has more context than Hegirascope in that the text and imagery relate to the title of the work.  However, after the first viewing of this site it appears to follow the hypertext immersion model, as one can traverse multiple paths where one can easily get lost.  Like Hegirascope, some paths lead to empty pages such as the following URLs: http://www.teleportacia.org/war/150.htm and http://www.teleportacia.org/war/152.htm.

Unlike Hegirascope, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War seems to differ in a few ways.  First, the work appears to be black and white throughout the entire piece, where Hegirascope was a mixture of colors.  Hegirascope is a simplistic online text in terms of what one can do with HTML.  With My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, it utilizes the characteristics not found in Hegirascope.  First, it used blinking text, where I do not recall seeing in Hegirascope- although I did not traverse every page on Hegirascope.  Second, it uses images where Hegirascope only used text.  Third is the use of frames in addition to allowing the user to traverse further by clicking in the frames themselves.  Hegirascope was a set of standard HTML pages that one could traverse but it did not take advantage of any advanced HTML features.

Hegirascope took a different approach.  There appears to be some sort of randomness accompanied with an automatic meta re-direct to the next page.  Second, in some cases the text is the same color as the background.  Third, the links around the text also seems to change if the same page is re-visited at a later time.  My Boyfriend Came Back from the War is more interactive and coherent than Hegirascope in that the user controls his or her path through the work itself and need not worry about the page changing automatically.

My Boyfriend Came Back from the War – Hypertext as Relevant Art

In My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, Olia Lialina merges visual images and narrative to create a realistic mini drama in hypertext.  The pages/frames are artwork that could stand alone without any text; the text could stand alone as free form poetry.  Lialina’s choice of black and white amplifies the dramatic effect of the work and dually serves to symbolize the tension associated with the words/relationship of the lovers. Although after the third page the reader is offered more choices of links to click, regardless of the order in which they are selected and read, the meaning is the same. Each frame contains a fragment or piece of the narrative.  Linear order is not essential to the meaning.  This hypertext is representative of Marie-Laure Ryan’s jigsaw-puzzle metaphor.  All of the fragments together – visual and text – complete the narrative picture.  Unlike the obscure text of Hegirascope’s, the message of My Boyfriend Came Back from the War is clear.  Anyone who has experienced the changes that result from long term separation from a lover can identify with this interactive narrative.  The fact that the lovers were separated by war adds deeper dimension to the conflict and further magnifies the drama.  The sequence of frames moving from simple to more complex and then to nothingness, visually maps the relationship from the boyfriend’s return until nothing is left.   This is the first hypertext I have experienced that has emotionally moved me.  According to Marie-Laure Ryan, emergent meaning produced through the interaction of the reader with the text that results in an emotional response is called emotional immersion.  I am impressed by Lialina’s hypertext and her ability to emotionally connect with me.  For me, this hypertext is poignant, relevant, and has redeeming value.  My test for good literature: After investing myself and my time, am I a better person?  After reading My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, I can honestly say that my time was well spent.   Olia Lialina passed my good literature test and has dramatically changed my view of hypertext as relevant art.

“Everything has a beginning and an end…” OK Liliana, but what happens between them?

In Olia Lialiana’s ”My Boyfriend Came Back from The War” there is only one certainty – besides that the reader will initially be confused by her art – and that is that every reader will read the same lines in the beginning and in the end of the piece. “My boyfriend came back from the war. After dinner they left us alone.” is how the work begins, and with her name and year of publication (1996) is how the work ends. Did I ruin the tale of a returning soldier for you? Don’t worry I didn’t, since you as a reader decide what occurs between the beginning and the end, and how you interpret those occurrences. Thus after reading Liliana’s net art you will conceptualize the work in your own way, and trust me, it’s likely that your interpretation is going to be one of a kind.

“My Boyfriend Came Back from The War” is a net art that uses graphic interchange format in order to deliver a personal tale through said and unsaid expressions. What is being said and what is left unsaid? It’s decided by you. In fact, everything is decided by you! Liliana only places you into the piece. A piece where one region of the page presents the “boyfriend’s” presence through alternating images, and where the remaining frames serve as the venue for the conversation. An internal and external conversation that can be realized in a lot of ways, but which unlike other web literature, has an end – I use the word “lot,” since I have no idea as to all the possible ways the conversation can be realized.

If everything is decided by the reader, what is the purpose of this work? I think the meaning is once again, like in Firefly, is not in the words, but the way they are presented, and if the presentation indicates anything, then it’s that we are free to do what we will. Let’s not think about what the author intended! Once again the focus is not on the writer, but on the reader. If you read some of the remixed piece of “My Boyfriend Came Back from The War” – liked the one that reminds me of Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” by going backwards in time – you will definitely get the idea that this work focuses on the reader’s and not the writer’s imagination.

Hegirascope 2.0

I decided to take the liberty to create a Trailfire trail, for lack of a better term.

This is a link to my main page: http://trailfire.com/vertizontal

This link will take you to the trail page: http://trailfire.com/vertizontal/trailview/65734
Click on the first page listed to get started.

Navigating through Hegirascope was actually a lot easier this way, in retrospect. I actually took the time to think about what I was reading and how it might pertain to an overall message the author could try to convey to the reader. While I am not fully comprehending an overall message or theme, I think the potential is certainly there in some instances. Hegirascope makes many a reference to the Internet, literature, and itself within its vast vault of pages. I find the self references to be the most insightful and funny, too. After reading many passages detailing unnavigable waters and the like, I got the feeling that the author knew what he was getting the reader into and lined Hegirascope with more than a few “I told you so”s. In the end, Hegirascope was a different experience for me and visiting it a couple times was more than enough!

“Hegirascope”: Blog #2

In the early twentieth century, a group of artists in Zurich, Switzerland created an art movement by the name of “Dada” that utilized non-sensical imagery to communicate deeply textural and evocative concepts to a devastated and war-torn society. An admirer of this particular movement, I was initially intrigued by the “Hegirascope”. The mere chaos of it resembled the Dada ideology: because nothing in the world makes sense, neither will the art that attempts to reflect it. However if one pursues a further study of Dadaist pieces, they will find that many of the artistic works have a politically charged undertone to their near unrecognizable form. Therefore, members of the Dada sect did rely on some sort of representational meaning in order to portray an intensely evocative theory on the state of the world after World War I. When I think of “Hegirascope” in these terms, it suddenly doesn’t fit in at all. Although it can be argued that each segment is somewhat representational, the entire piece functions as a disjointed, abstract draft containing a vast variety of miniature plots that dream of assembling into an extended narrative.

Upon closer examination, the “Hegirascope” functioned as a sort of stream of consciousness. At each screen we abandon the center text when we wander to a particular link that had succeeded in distracting us from the central text. In an interesting comparison, Ryan says the text gave her the “impression of a loose collection of drafts and writing samples”. Like Ryan, I imagined that if we were able to break open the mind of a creative writer, the many textual fragments of “Hegirascope” would be what we would find. Each screen contained a cohesive idea, however before one could completely articulate that idea-the screen changed and a new thought was presented. To me, the web engine was a writer’s worst nightmare: capturing a moment to later build on only to lose it to another incoming idea. The “Hegirascope” acted as a controller, choosing when its thoughts were finished and moving onto the next (even if its reader was not ready for the shift).

In class we discussed Marie-Laure Ryan’s interpretative strategies for reading new media texts. Within her framework, I would probably describe “Hegirascope” dually as a “kaleidoscopic performance” piece. The “stories” the “Hegirascope” constructs are all made from the same fragments; however, with each new refraction the evocative meaning of the piece changes and a new narrative mosaic is created. 

Hegirascope Comments

I found the constant changing of screens first a bit irritating as I normally like to control the movement of the text as I read, not have it be changed automatically.  Once I got into the gist of it and kept up reading quickly, it became easier to follow.  Sometimes there are one-two shots where questions are posed or the story is split into two different pieces.

Perhaps I am reading too much into this slide but as soon as the background turned pale and I read desert, I thought of the background as a stand-like environment.  This was probably a coincidence since the backgrounds do not change that often.
http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/hgs/HGS033.html

After reading this work for about 20-25 minutes and getting the gist of how it was going I then began to interact with it.  After interacting with the text with the text for awhile, it became apparent, one can create a story based upon the four highlighted text words around the piece of text in the middle.  Somehow, I got to an exit point, which is here:
http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/hgs/HGS144.html

This URL represents an escape from the work itself, and when one goes back to this page a few times, it appears some of the links still exist but they are hidden, so unless you mouse over them you cannot return; however, even when you exit from the work:
http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/hgs/HGSXX1.html

It still continues after about 30 seconds.  Changing the URL a bit at the end, it reveals that HGS248 appears to be the last slide in the work itself:
http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/hgs/HGS248.html

Thoughts on Hegirascope

I have to say that my experience with Hegirascope was confusing.  The only comparison I could come up with was reading anything by Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.  My brain is not wired to process things that don’t seem to connect to one another directly.

The parts of Hegirascope that I explored seemed to all contain snippets of either a scene from a story or a newspaper article.  None of the links that I pressed seemed to correspond with the text it leads to in Hegirascope.  I think that may have something to do with the confusion I felt while experiencing Hegirascope.  Expecting one thing and getting something else.

I did use the back button – a lot!  I am no speed reader, so 30 seconds was just not enough time for me to parse what was written on the page, much less make a choice on where to go next.  I did like the “choose your own adventure” aspect of Hegirascope.  It brought back memories of that kind of book I used to read when I was younger.

While I appreciate the effort it took to create Hegirascope, I’m afraid it is beyond my ability to comprehend its meaning.  Perhaps that will change with discussion in class.

Hegirascope – A Virtual Shopping Experience

Having been previously exposed to Hegirascope (by force) through an ENGL 325 recitation, I really wasn’t looking forward to “going to the dentist” again.  Therefore, I set my kitchen timer for exactly 30 minutes and…reluctantly…re-entered the world of this hypertext abyss.  My aversion to this creation stems from the simple fact that I don’t naturally read, think, and respond as fast as Hegirascope requires.  When words are coming and going on a page before I have the chance to read and process their meaning, I feel agitated.  Further, if I can’t make sense of the words I’m reading, the experience is frustrating and meaningless.  This considered, I took Prof. Sample’s advice and chose to enter Hegirascope through the introduction and index option.   I also chose to exercise further control by backspacing if the pages advanced before I was ready.  This helped me immensely and definitely improved the experience.  Backspacing may not be what Stuart Moulthrop had in mind, but it gave me the opportunity to go back, read/re-read pages, and process them on my timeframe, not the program’s.   I wondered if this might be in a sense cheating, but I don’t think so.  The ability to backspace could have been disabled. 

For me, the option of entering Hegirascope through the index had an anxiety reducing effect.  Because the index page is static, it allows the opportunity to peruse the topics and select a link with no time limit.  This entry gives the user some measure of control that the “diving in” option takes away.  After thoughtfully studying the categories, I yielded to temptation and entered Hegirascope through ” ‘ORAL SEX.’ ”  Although I could not find a relationship between the subjects/theme in this link and the topic as I expected it, I’m glad this is where I started.  The first link was Zick.  From “Hey Zick,” again, out of curiosity, I chose the next Zick link.  My course of travel took me to such places as “Shadows,” “Choose Life,” “Spelling of Love,” “LINGERIE,”  and “LOVE IS THE THING WITHOUT STAPLES.”  As I write these names, I realize that I chose titles that intrigued me and placed them in my “grocery cart.”  Marie-Laure Ryan’s metaphor of the “supermarket-shopping experience” was definitely my approach and the one that made me feel the most comfortable with this hypertext.  According to Ryan, “This reader does not feel compelled to read the text in its entirety or to pay attention to every screen, because (s)he sees the text…as a display or resources from which (s)he can freely pick and choose.”  (Marie-Laure Ryan, thank you for validating my approach!)  Ryan further states that for user’s who apply the “super-market shopping” approach, segments are regarded “as a mode of transportation.”  I can definitely identify with Marie-Laure Ryan’s description. 

My slower paced experience with Hegiroscope enabled me to awaken to a possible theme.  Much of Moulthrope’s text seems to relate to the technology of computers, the web, the virtual world, virtual experience, and in general – technology merged or juxtaposed with life experience – all of this in the context of time.  If I didn’t have so much homework, I can honestly say that I would spend more time exploring the hegirasphere and its meaning related to specific aspects of the text that I found intriguing.  In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that there were some pages that made zero sense to me, but for the most part – without too much work/effort – I did see a common thread.

So, my conclusion is that a slower paced hegira-experience was the Novocain I needed.  After my timer beeped and while still numb, I felt brave enough to give “diving in” (minus backspacing) one more try.  In an instant, the familiar agitation returned. I quickly realized that for this procedure, I would probably need laughing gas, too.

 As a footnote, I went back to Hegiroscope this morning to re-create the experience I had last night, but it was impossible.  When I opened “ORAL SEX,” the program did not allow me to take the same path.  When I clicked “Zick,” I got a blank white page.  Refreshing did nothing.  So, it seems that Moulthrop purposely did not want us to have the option of choosing to travel the same path twice.

Reading Hegirascope

Because reading Hegirascope can be a maddening experience, I thought I’d give you some tips.

First, if you’re really confused, take some time to read Stuart Moulthrop’s introduction to the work. But if you’re feeling adventurous, dive right in.

The first couple screens will flash by automatically, but you’ll shortly see a page with several hyperlink choices. Choose whatever you want and keep exploring. Do read carefully what is on the screen and do think about the choices you make. At a minimum, spend at least 30 minutes with Hegirascope.

While you’re reading the work, take note of any individual pages that really interest you. Bookmark them or jot down the URL (just the last part of the URL is all you need, say, HGS084.html).

I’d like each student to come into class on Tuesday with the name and address of three pages from Hegirascope that he or she finds particularly key to the work as a whole. Be prepared to talk about what you think the text on these three pages mean, both literally and evocatively. Also, I want you to think about how the different categories of interactivity that Marie-Laure Ryan writes about in Narrative as Virtual Reality are at play in Hegirascope.