Transformations
Tresa Bryan Barksdale (tbb2e@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU)
Wed, 14 Feb 1996 12:07:31 -0500 (EST)
Let's assume readers will appreciate/enjoy creative
writing projects which are made for the web. Eventually, my
mother will not suffer from motion sickness when she reads a
relatively tame and helpful piece of hypertext fiction like
_The Victory Garden_. Sooner or later reading groups either
in person or on some latest version of the moo will be born
-- the Windows '95 buyers are just a shout away.
The above is not too difficult to envision. The
hypertext writers, ever concious of the possibilities and
constraints of their computer program, lead fantasy and
imagination through the visual medium of writing. It could work.
But what about those old creative projects that were
made by an old timer who had a pen or a typewriter? Can the
works which are not meant to be read on a computer work on the
computer? Does the loss of the text, or the primary context,
cause a work to lose more than it gains when it is put on the
net?
Put in a different way, is a book or a text like a piece
of music that can be moved from album to tape to CD without
losing most all (if any) of the intentions of the composer?
OR is a book too much like a work of visual art to be
transformed so freely? It does have a strong visual element
that was planned to a certain extent by the writer.
But a cover to a book changes, page numbers change,
paper vs. hardback, leather vs. vinyl, etc. Furthermore,
stories began as a verbal act much like music. Traditionally
oral stories have worked for the most part when they have been
textualized.
Also, I want to know if tree-fiction will work. I hate
to be given a lot of options. I don't want a project to bother
me at the end of a line with another option for the line.
Charles Deemer's project, _The Cyberspace Sonnets_, impresses me
but is not something I want to read.
I think this idea of continual fiction is problematic.
Will people be able to not have an ending? I think some people
will go with it -- maybe the students of Derrida and the calm
enlightened futurstic minds who do not want just a framed
story/experience/piece of entertainment at the end of their day.
But what about the others?
Does creative hypertext really have a future?
If so, in what form?
Tresa