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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