Critique: Group 5
James Mulholland (jsm5q@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU)
Fri, 26 Apr 1996 03:24:17 -0400
This has wonderful graphic work, and that is the overwhelminh sense I got
from the project (not that it lacks in other areas). The visual displays
were stunning, and worked well, coordinating with the overaching subject
matter. The tilings were especially well chosen, these are images that could
be emblems of gothic fiction. The images contained with every piece of text
is also an interesting technique, though I wished for a greater illusion of
movement. this would have required a larger pool of images that would have
been difficult to find, but a single castles or cathedral, say a tourists
guide, could provide a number of different photos, angles etc that could
give the project the illusion of this movement. At first I had the
impression that this was going to be something of a narrative tale, that I
was "playing" as a charcter but this did not seem to occur. I don't know
whther this seems to reflect choose-your-own adventure too much or not, but
I truly did want some choices within the texts themselves. I suppose these
could be added as simple links, say for example, a question like-- do you
really want to hear the old wman's story-- and then the reader chooses a
response and proceeds from there. I would have enjoyed this a bit more than
merely clicking on the images and being sent to another space. In a sense, I
wanted more of the image map that I had at the beginning. This was
wonderfcul, and lends itself perfectly to your introduction. The image map
could hide any number of clues, and in this way the journey into the
cathedral could become investigative on the readers part as well-- it begins
with this sense, asking me to find salvation, but then as I progressed my
own choices became somewhat limited. I understand this could be just a
practical matter of time, the alternative requiring a great deal of image
mapping, which you may not want to do. The first one was wonderful though,
and (there could be more that I missed) but when I lost this power to
uncover and then choose, I found myself moving much quicker through the texts.
In terms of the cultural fusions of these stories, I couldn't
distinguish between them. The only time I became truly aware of the cultural
implications of this project (and this is just what I remember) was the
reference to kelpie's, just because I've heard of them before. Still, this
is a fascinating idea, and I almost wanted to have the cultural differences
in these stories made clearer to me. tHis might impinge on the narrative/
journey aspect, its a fine line between these two concerns on the readers
part, so I don't know if offsetting cultural information while having these
texts about my trying to find salvation through this journey (as a reader)
would work very well. One runins the ambience of the other. I clearly could
distinguish between the various types of stories.
Okay, one last thing. One of the images, the image mapped one most
likely, took an prhoibitively long time to load up. On my machine it was
something like a minute or two. This actually had an interesting effect, I
found myself waiting to see what would be uncovered, and it seemed to be
reflective of the slowness and suspense that is often associated with gothic
fiction and horror films (some). While not neccessary advocating having
every page take a few minutes to load, giving the reader options, but then
slowing the reader down might be ...
James