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Return to Riding the Meridian

 

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by  Jay David Bolter

The pieces in this collection are varied in their rhetorical purposes, in their modes of presentation, and in the media forms that they refashion. The jukebox is a good metaphor, because it suggests multiplicity. In a jukebox there is no reason why all the songs must be in the same style or have the same affect or relationship to the listener.

Enthusiasts for new media tend to be unitarians. They ask us to believe that one media form will come to be dominant and to define our digital culture. And each enthusiast has his or her favorite: it might be the World Wide Web, virtual reality, or interactive television. But in fact nothing in our current media culture suggests that a single form will dominate all the others.

What we have instead is a variety of forms satisfying the needs and interests of different cultural groups. The pieces in this web jukebox illustrate the strength that lies in diversity. The artists are not constrained by some predetermined notion of interactive fiction. The variety of their creative efforts becomes clear as we sample the jukebox. Each artist explores different possibilities for digital expression.

Mark Amerika's Grammatron is impressive for its combination of audio and visual hypertext. The audio is a tantalizing thread of sounds that seem almost to be words, and we wonder how these sounds relate to the words that we see on the screen. Grammatron is a piece inspired by the traditions of installation and performance art. It is as if we are watching a performance on the Web, as if the Web site were performing before us.

By contrast Thomas Swiss' City of Bits adopts a discrete mode of interaction. Each page is a collage of text and images that makes a verbal/visual statement and then leads us on. The piece, however, is strongly linear. The hypertext links are pared to the minimalist function of allowing us to stroll through the pages.

Michael Joyce's Reach on the other hand is saturated with choices. Its layout is simpler and more conventionally typographic than City of Bits. But there are many more opportunities for the reader to intervene in the order of reading. A whole list of words on the left-hand side functions like a subversive menu bar to move us in and through the text. Stephanie Strickland captures the spirit of this text when she notes that in Reach "linking ceases to be a navigational option and becomes a principle of word choice."

Water~Water~Water, Reiner Strasser's collaboration with Christy Sheffield Sanford, is visually stunning. It surprises and impresses us, even as it taxes the power of our machines and our network connections. The term "hypertext" does not seem appropriate to describe our interaction with these powerful images and multiple windows. Indeed, the piece seems to me to be a comment on the windowed interface and on the notion of representational transparency: the notion that either digital art or traditional photography could provide us with a window onto the world.

I come to Peter Howard's Rainbow Factory, with its playful use of Flash animation to define a visual and kinetic poetry. Howard shows us how digital artists are exploiting the capabilities of new media forms to reconfigure the relationship between verbal and visual representation. As we watch rainbows roll off an assembly line, we realize that there is no verbal equivalent to this moving image.

Indeed, many of the pieces is this collection can be seen as experiments in a verbal/visual poetry. These experiments do not lead to a single, simple conclusion: it is not simply a matter of the triumph of image over word. Each experiment strikes a particular balance between word and image, and each suggests directions for other electronic artists to follow.

October, 2000

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