I felt that “agailes” brought up a point that was at the forefront of my mind while navigating through MBCBFTW, in terms of whether or not Lialina’s piece could be considered “literary.” While I agree that MBCBFTW is certainly more literary than Hegirascope (though I realize that the nature of subjectivity as it relates to discerning what is literary from what is not is certainly up for debate), I saw MBCBFTW mostly as a piece of “cyber art,” so to speak. I did feel that there was some sense of a story being told, even if it was often disjointed and fragmented. To Lialina’s credit, if one is to assume that Lialina presents a literary piece, one might take into account that our sequences of thoughts function, in general, in a nonlinear fashion. The speaker may be intending to show the way our trains of thoughts are typically disjointed, fragmented, and may not appear to have any real pattern, which could potentially be considered as some sort of literary device.
I cannot truthfully say that the piece evoked any emotional response from me. In fact, I found it to be somewhat irritating and boring. Flat, even. Despite the variety of multimedia-related aspects present in the piece (animation, drawings, hyperlinks, and so on), I felt that, because the text itself was pretty one-dimensional, that there was very little to stimulate me in an intellectual sense. It seemed to me that what Lialina was attempting to create art for art’s sake and, while it might be moving and seem innovative to some, it won’t necessarily be received the same way by others, such as myself.
In terms of trying to relate MBCBFTW to the text written by Marie-Laure Ryan, it did occur to me while coursing through Lialina’s piece that there was a particular quality to it that reminded me of walking through a museum. Perhaps this was because of the various forms of multimedia presented. However, it was clear that the person interacting with the piece had to eventually go through each “exhibit” to come to the end. In comparison to Hegirascope, there was clearly less opportunity for the person interacting with the text to make choices about producing different outcomes. However, MBCBFTW had the benefit (as I see it) of ostensibly containing some sort of plot or story. While there appeared to be certain threads which were related to one another in Hegirascope, it was clearly much more randomized than MBCBFTW. I think story and plot were key components to Lialina’s, whereas this was not a concern for the maker of Hegirascope.
While I have lingering questions about Hegirascope, I also have to wonder why Lialina made some of the decisions she did in MBCBFTW. For example, I wonder about Lialina’s intentions in presenting various sequences of “plot” elements, as well as some of the aesthetic choices she presented: the clocks, the Fox television network logo, etc. Why use only black and white? The sparse nature of the story continues to leave something to be desired, at least for me. Perhaps its simplicity allows the story to have more flexibility in terms of the various pieces of the story fitting together in some understandable way. Either way, both texts leave me feeling somewhat lost and curious as to how to interpret the significance of each one.