Cyberspace,
Cybertexts, Cybermaps
There is nothing
inherently spatial about a collection of documents stored on
computers and made accessible to us through fiber optic
cables, except for the physical location of the computers
and of the cables themselves. Nor does cyberspace present
the basic properties of real-world geography. Far from being
physically limited it expands indefinitely, as new pages are
added to it, and you can homestead by building your own Web
site without depriving others of the same opportunity.
Rather than containing places and roads separated by more or
less empty territories, it consists exclusively of places
(the pages) and roads (the links), so that you cannot wander
off-road: in cyberspace, you are either visiting a page, or
on your way to a new page. The IP addresses and domain names
not taken and the Web sites that no longer exitthe
infamous page not found error messages of the
browser--are not places that you traverse on your way to
somewhere; they are non-existing locations; and you simply
cannot go there. In physical space there are long and short
roads, depending on the closeness of the places which they
connect, but in cyberspace all links are the same length.
The speed of travel (read: of downloading) is not determined
by the physical distance between your computer and the
machine that hosts the data, but by the number of links to
be traversed. If it werent for delays and detours
caused by traffic congestion and by the amount of data to be
downloaded, movement between linked places
would not be navigation but teletransportationa mode of
travel that denies the existence of separating distances. We move in physical space through a steady
progression along a line, but we travel cyberspace in jumps,
without experiencing a developing landscape, since there is
nothing between our point of departure and our destination. Despite these obvious
differences between real and virtual geographies, the cyberspace metaphor invites us to think of
the Internet as forming a parallel universe made of
countless galaxies, planetary systems within these galaxies,
worlds within these systems, and nations within these
worlds. [1]
The image of cyberspace produced by Andrew Wood, Nick Drew,
Russell Beale and Bob Hendley [2]
(figure 1) is a good example of this mental
visualization. To the imagination, Internet connections are
the Rabbit Holes that allow us to slip out of physical
reality, and to enter a data Wonderland where everything can
undergo unlimited metamorphoses, because everything is made
of bits whose value can change with every clock cycle of the
machine. The technical jargon of Internet culture, with its
home pages, suggests that Cyberspace
is experienced as much a collection of places to inhabit, as
an open space to be explored though aimless
flânerie. The cybercartographers Dodge and
Kitchin (relying on observations by P. Adam) observe that
cyberspace is replete with the vocabulary of
placenouns such as rooms, lobbies, highway, frontier,
cafés; and verbs such as surf, inhabit, built,
enter (Mapping Cyberspace, 56). This sense of
place is confirmed by what a cybernaut told Mark Dery:
I am staring at the computer screen. But the feeling
is that I am really in something. I am some
where. (Dery, 7). Far from being limited
to the Internet, spatial metaphors have been used by
scholars and developers to describe every imaginable kind of
digital (or new media) object. Eastgate Systems
named its pioneering
hypertext writing software Storyspace, and
hypertext itself has been described as a labyrinth, or as a
Garden of Forking Paths. Randall Walser describes the design
of interactive virtual reality experiences
as spacemaking: A spacemaker sets up a world
for an audience to
act directly within, and not just so the audience can
imagine they are experiencing an interesting reality, but so
they can experience it directly (60). Slightly
downplaying the importance of real-time action, Espen
Aarseth claims that computer games are essentially
allegories of space. Lev Manovich sees
the experience of moving around a simulated landscape as
central to the popular appeal of games; and for Henry
Jenkins, games are spatial stories that emerge
from the encounter between the user and a world designed as
a narrative architecture : a world made of discrete locations
that contain opportunities for different user actions. But if spatial
metaphors have been invoked with respect to
phenomena as different as the Internet as a whole, VR
installations, computer games, and hypertext fiction, the
meaning of space is itself a highly diversified
territory. Whether print or digital, texts involve the
following types of space: In this essay I propose to explore how these
four types of space are put into play by digital
texts. Since the standard interface to physical space is the
map, it is only natural to expect that maps will play an
important role in guiding users through the virtual spaces
of digital texts. In the course of my investigation I will
therefore pay special attention to the use of maps or
map-like devices, though not all four types of space have
inspired cartographic interfaces. Cyberspace
cartography The art of cartography
has received an enormous boost from digital technology, and
cybertexts have been quick to take advantage of the new
possibilities. Dodge and Kitchin distinguish four types of
maps: static, animated, interactive and dynamic (Mapping
Cyberspace 72; reference good for all the quotes in this
section). The last of the four types can only exist in
digital environments. The static type is
self-explanatory: Dodge and Kitchin describe it as the
equivalent of traditional cartographic maps in that they are
snapshots in time. The category is illustrated by any
standard geographic map shown as a document in a cybertext. Animated maps
portray a time series, without user
intervention. A good use for an animated map would be to
show how continents drifted away from each other over the
past billion of years. Interactive maps
move beyond static mappings so that the user can move
through and interrogate the map from different
viewpoints, for instance by zooming in and out,
panning, or recentering the map around new coordinates. I
would like to distinguish another type of interactivity not
mentioned by Dodge and Kitchin: the map that serves as
interface to a database. In this case the users actions
does not alter the display of the map, but clicking on
certain spots will take the user to other Web
addressesthis is to say, to other documents within the
database. Dynamic maps, finally,
are diagrams where the mapping automatically updates
as the information used in its construction is
updated. An example would be a weather map that is
constantly redrawn, as meteorological information streams
into the system. When the input comes from the user, dynamic
maps are also interactive. In fact, a map could combine the
three properties of interactivity, animation and dynamism. When the concept of
map applies to cyberspace, or to the digital objects
contained in cyberspace, it must be taken in a broader sense
than its literal definition of graphic representation of
spatial data. Following once more Dodge and Kitchin
(Mapping Cyberspace, 63),[3]
we can distinguish four types of domains, or objects, and
four types of maps or map-like diagrams: The cross-classification of these categories
with the four spaces mentioned above
yields the following associations: the space of the textual
world belongs to either (1) or (2), depending on whether the
text is a documentary or a fiction; the architecture of the
text illustrates (3); the physical space occupied by the
text is a real space of type (1); and the space that serves
as container for the text can be either (1), if the text is
bound to a physical location (as would be the case for
a sign in an urban landscape), or (3), if this space is the
computer hard drive or cyberspace itself. Alternatively,
texts residing in cyberspace could be conceived as
inhabiting type (4), if we draw an opposition between
cyberspace and real world. This
would mean that real is interpreted as
physical, rather than as the opposite of
imaginary and fictional. We cannot imagine
individual objects without imagining the space, or the world
that contains them. This means that whenever a text refers
to or shows individual
objects, it creates a textual world that extends beyond the
boundaries of these objects in a three-dimensional space.
(Why three-dimensional ? because we imagine textual
referents as similar to their real-world counterparts; and
we experience real objects as three-dimensional volumes.) By
space of the textual world, then, I mean the imaginative
extension, and geographical or topographic organization of
the world represented or simulated by the text. Since they
are created by the imagination, textual worlds do not
necessarily respect the laws of Euclidean geometry. In real
space, for instance, if A is north of B, and B is north of
C, then A is north of C. But in an imaginary textual space,
for instance in the space of a MOO, user A may build his
house north of Bs house, and B may build his house
north of Cs house, but C may build her house North of
As house, and the relation of the three houses cannot
be represented on a flat map. Some computer games,
similarly, use
mazes that transgress the laws of Euclidean geometry. But in
the vast majority of cases the space of textual worlds is
conceived by the designer and imagined by the user as a
simulacrum of physical space, and it can be projected by the same cartographic techniques on a
two-dimensional plane. [4]
We normally experience textual worlds in the same way we
experience the real world: rather than apprehending them all
at once, we discover them region by region, from the
perspective of a moving body. In a novel, for instance, the
geography of the textual world is revealed to us through a
succession of individual descriptions, or by following the
travels of characters; in many
computer games we explore textual space by moving through a
maze represented from
a horizontal perspective, and at any given time we see only
a particular corner of the gameworld. In both physical and
textual spaces, however, we can use maps to transcend the
limitations of our embodied point of view. As my discussion
will show, these maps can be static, animated, interactive
and dynamic. Static
maps The
use of static maps may seem at first sight incompatible with
the interactive nature of most cybertexts, yet if
interactivity is to consist of deliberate problem-solving
action rather than of random clicking, the information
provided by static maps can play an important role in
motivating the decisions of the user. In the computer game
Myst, for instance, the user discovers in a library
some books that contain a variety of maps and diagrams. At
first these documents provide no help, but if the player
takes them along in his exploration of the island, he will
eventually encounter the objects depicted in the diagrams,
and the diagrams will offer the clues necessary to solve the problem presented by the
object. Maps are consequently an indispensable part of the
toolkit that enables players to advance in their
quest. For instance, by consulting the sketch of a tree
house found in a book in the library, the user is able to
find his way through the tree-house and to locate the
switches that open doors to the other levels, where he will
make further discoveries. Static maps in
cybertexts are not restricted to games, as the hypertext
novel Califia by M.D. Coveley demonstrates. An
exploration of the history, geography, geology, and folklore
of California, Califia uses an interactive
navigational design based on the four directions of the
compass: go North, then East, then South, then West. Each of
these directions corresponds to an episode in the story. The
four episodes, narrated by a character named Augusta, can be followed linearly, but the reader can
always switch along the way to the trails of the
two other characters: Kaye, who gathers star charts, Indian
lore and other spiritual guides; and Calvin, who maintains
an archive of documents about California. This archive
includes, among other items, maps that represent various
aspects of California history and topography: earthquake
lines, bio-regions, Mexican land grants, Spanish
explorers maps of Island California, and
map of Indian tribes. The text chronicles a treasure-hunt,
and though the treasure-seekers are the main characters, the
reader feels that the success of the search depends on her
ability to decipher the documents in the archive. Four of
the maps are labeled treasure maps: a map of
the land of the treasure of Califia (Southern
California), a so-called Baja Mission gold
map, a start chart of the Big Dipper (which,
superposed upon the topographic map, should mark the
location of a treasure); and an Indian blanket with
mysterious signs, some of which represent the Big Dipper
(figure 2). These clues are misleading, and the treasure is
never found, but this does not mean that the quest has been
in vain. At the end of the trip West, as the heroes stand at
the edge of the ocean with nowhere to go, they understand
that they have found something infinitely more valuable than
gold: the rich cultural heritage that lays buried under the
freeways and parking lots of Southern California.
Granted we did not find the riches of which we had
been told, we found a place in which to search for
them. The riches reside in the readers and
the characters spiritual connection with the land, and
by facilitating this connection, the maps provide a reliable
guide to the true treasure of Califia. Interactive
maps For a map to function
as an interface, rather than forming a mere document within
a database, it must possess interactive capabilities. This
means that by clicking on the map, the user will reach
different parts of the text. Cartographic interfaces are
particularly well suited to texts that
concern the exploration of space. A case in point is the huge
Web site devoted to Lewis and Clark, the two explorers who
found a route through the North American continent in 1803.
By clicking on the various spots of the map, the user can
reach truly encyclopedic information about the corresponding
stage of the journey: diary extracts, description of local
Indian tribes, notable incidents, available food, campsite
entertainment, and encounters with wild animals. (See map at
http://www.lewis-clark.org/index.htm) Another
example of an interactive map of a textual world is Deena
Larsens Marble Springs (figure 3).
[5]
This literary hypertext tells the story of a ghost town in
Colorado. Here the reader navigates the text by navigating
the map of the town or the map of the
cemetery. If she clicks on a house on the city map, she gets a
poem that relates to its female inhabitants; if she clicks on a
gravestone on the cemetery map, she gets the inscription. On
the map of Marble Springs, each house, each grave holds a
link, just as highlighted words do on a textual screen.
These links enable the reader to move back and forth between
the geographic map and the texts connected to it.
Thanks to the cartographic interface, the reader is no longer
cast as the external operator of a textual machine, as is
the case in most hypertexts, but as an embodied member of
the textual world who travels around Marble Springs through
the mediation of the cursor. Dynamic,
non-interactive maps Many computer games
use dynamic maps to compensate for the limitations of a
first person point of view. The complementarity of the
limited knowledge inherent to the first person perspective
of the display and of the omniscient perspective of the map
enable the game to offer both adventure in a land full of
surprises, and the possibility of strategic thinking. A
military-strategy game may for instance allow
the player to switch from live battle action to a map-view
of the field that helps him decide how to deploy his troops
in the terrain. Meanwhile, an Internet-based shooter, in which gameplay
consist of moving through a maze and killing enemies, may
allow the dead players to watch the game from a birds
eye point of view, so that the pleasure of acting will be
replaced by the pleasure of spectating. The birds eye
display is a dynamic map, because it shows the current
location of all the live players, but it is not interactive,
because dead
players cannotat least in principlecommunicate
the information to their live teammates. The most common use of
dynamic maps occurs in those games that takes place in a
very large fictional world. To allow the player to orient
himself in the gameworld, or to explore it systematically,
the game may display
a small map in the corner of the screen. As the player moves
in the gameworld, so does the spot that shows his position,
but the player cannot teletransport himself to another part
of the fictional world by clicking on the map. Dynamic
interactive maps
What if we add interactivity to a dynamic map ? In a computer
game, this combination would become a playfield in its own
right. Cartographic views of the playfield are common in the
so-called god-games or simulation
games, games that cast the player as the manager of a
complex system, such as a city, civilization, or a family
(Simcity, Civilization, and The Sims). The vertical
projection of the map offers a panoramic, and consequently near
omniscient view of the gameworld that enables the player to
overview all the resources and processes that need
coordinating. On the other hand, games whose interest lies
in traveling across a world full of hidden dangers will
favor a horizontal projection in which the objects in the
foreground hide those in the background, shielding enemies
from the players field of vision. Some older computer
games, such as Pac-Man, consisted entirely of action on a
playfield that presented the gameworld from a vertical point
of view. The playfield was at the same time a maze, and the
plan of a maze. But the pure vertical projection presents
the disadvantage of allowing travel in only two
directionsthe x and y axesand of rendering most
objects unrecognizable, since the normal way of apprehending
the world is from a horizontal point of view. To increase
the realism of the display, and to restore the z axis, most
recent simulation games rely on a three-dimensional aerial
perspective that represents a compromise between the
vertical projection of a pure map and the horizontal
projection of a landscape picture. In Civilization
(figure 4), the presence of a small vertical-projection map
in the left-hand bottom corner of the screen may mark a
difference between what is perceived as the
world and what passes as its cartographic image; but
the difference is mainly one of mapping technique: the
world looks itself like one of those panoramic maps that are
used to represent relief as well as topography. The
cartographic look of the display reminds us that building
civilizations is a deeply map-altering activitya
project with lasting consequences for the appearance of the
world from the air. In The Sims, similarly, the playfield is
a compromise
between a plan view of a house taken from a vertical
perspective and an elevation view taken from a horizontal
perspective. In both Civilization and The Sims, players can
move around the map, add features to it, watch the map
evolve, switch perspective, zoom in and out, and trigger
animations. We could say that these games let the map become
a world, or conversely, that they let the gameworld serve as
its own map, as did the people in this anecdote by Lewis
Carroll: What I call textual
architecture is the internal organization of the text, the
system of relations that connects its elements. These
relations, described by literary critics as spatial
form, have traditionally been semantic, phonetic, or
broadly thematic, but with the introduction of hyperlinks,
the digital medium has added accessibility or
contiguity to this list. In contrast to the
space of the textual world, whose properties are
similar to those of physical space, the
architecture of the text is not a literally spatial
phenomenon, but an arrangement of largely immaterial
semiotic objects. The mapping of this formal architecture
illustrates therefore the case of a spatialization of
non-spatial data. In the digital medium,
the notion of textual architecture is most commonly
associated with the network of links and nodes that
underlies hypertexts, both in their Web page manifestations,
and in their literary applications, such as Eastgate
hyperfiction. The nodes of the network stand for certain
areas of memory starting at specific addresses, and the links for go
to instructions that lead the reader from these areas
to other addresses. But in the memory of the computer, the
text is stored as a one-dimensional string of zeroes and
ones. Since the two-dimensionality of the diagram is nothing
more than an effect of the visual transposition,
the spatiality of hypertext so
dear to theorists such as Bolter and Landow is a purely
virtual space. Another difference
between physical space and
architectural space, more precisely
the architectural space of hypertext, lies in the fact that
the units of hypertext have no coordinates on
Cartesian grid, while the elements of physical space are
situated objects. While physical space is topographical,
textual space is topological. This means that the position
of textual units on a diagram is arbitrary. In physical
space, a certain area can
be represented by different maps, but when
two maps of the same area show common items, these items must
be placed in roughly the same spot on the map. No matter how
schematic, a map of Europe must locate Stockholm north of
Rome (= above it, according to the widespread convention of associating
north with the top of the map). This is not the case with
maps of hypertext: since the graphic representation of the
structure of hypertext is a network of links and nodes, and
since in a network what matters is the system of relations
between nodes, not the exact position of elements, the same
textual organization can be represented by two visually
different diagrams. The poem True North by Stephanie
Strickland illustrates this lack of isomorphism between map
and territory by allowing
the reader to modify the position of the nodes on the text map by clicking and dragging them. This operation
has no consequences for the accuracy of the map as a
representation of the internal organization of the
text. Interactive
maps In their interactive
form, maps of textual architecture provide a convenient way
to navigate hypertexts. Since the primary mode of moving
though hypertext is clicking on the links on the screen, the
display provides a built-in instrument of navigation
which may tempt us to say that the
text serves as its own map, making the use of an external
map superfluous. But the visible links on the screen
function more like signs
at a crossroad pointing in various directions than like a
road map that covers a large area. This is why many
hypertexts supplement their various screens with a global
text map. These maps exist in three forms: External
maps, automatically generated. There exists a number
of mapping utilities that, given the address of the home
page of a web site, will produce a visualization of the
internal organization of this Web site: for instance, the
ASTRA system will take any Web site address and will produce
a diagram of its structure that supposedly facilitates
navigation. (See for instance the map at http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/astra.gif.) These maps are external, since they are not
attached to the web site, and since only a small minority of
people will actually use them. Semi-internal
maps, automatically generated. Authoring programs
such as Storyspace, Director and Flash produce graphs of
textual organization to assist the author with the design of
the text. These maps can remain strictly a design tool, or
they can be made available to the user. In some Storyspace
hypertexts, for instance, the reader can access the
system-generated map by clicking on a certain button of the
interface. I call these maps semi-internal, because it takes
a movement in and out of the text to consult them, or more
precisely, a movement from the inner layer of the
textthe part composed by the authorto the
interface, or paratext, provided by the system. These maps
make it possible for the reader to reach any lexia shown on
the screen by clicking on its image. But literary hypertexts
typically comprise a far more complex system of links and
nodes than what can be displayed on the screen at any given
time. Storyspace maps are therefore most useful when the
text is structured in layers, i.e. as a collection of
semi-autonomous modules which can be reached from a main
menu. In Shelley Jacksons Patchwork Girl, for
instance, the map of the top level shows the main sections
of the text; by clicking on each of its elements, one gets a
comprehensive map of each section; each of these maps in
turn can be clicked to reach individual pages. The map
represents consequently a way to by-pass the system of links
designed by the author. But the usefulness of Storyspace
maps as orienteering tools is limited by the presence of
another system-generated device that performs a similar
function: the button that offers an alphabetical list of all
the lexias, and lets the reader access any of them with a
click of the mouse. To overcome this redundancy, many
hypertext authors have strived to develop other textual
functions for maps. For instance, the map of the section
Crazy Quilt in Patchwork Girl is not only a
navigational device, it is above all an aesthetic device
that mimics the visual appearance of a quilt (figure
5). It offers consequently a double image of the
text: a cartographic representation of textual architecture;
and a pictorial representation of the crazy quilt theme,
which is itself an emblem of the architecture.
[6]
But the aesthetic and mimetic possibilities of
system-generated maps are rather limited, since all that can
be done is arranging the squares on the screen in different
patterns. The expressive potential
of hypertext maps is vastly expanded in my third type,
Internal maps, manually generated. For instance, the
map in Stuart Moulthrops hypertext fiction Victory
Garden reflects the title of the text: as Robert Coover
has observed, the diagram can be seen as a map of a garden
with paths and benches. When the user clicks on its four
subsections she gets a more detailed map, and this map can
be used to access the lexias
represented on the benches, but even these larger scale maps
are far too schematic to give random access to the 993 lexia
of the text. Another example of an emblematic map is this
screen from Shelley Jacksons Patchwork Girl
(figure 6), a text that uses both system-generated and
manually produced maps. Here the text is mapped by the various parts of
the human brain, and the act of reading is framed as the
exploration of a mental geography. The pictorial interfaces
of Victory Garden and Patchwork Girl come
close to the case of Marble Springs, but they represent a symbolic
textual geography, while
the map of Marble Springs is a literal representation
of the topography of the textual world. When I call these maps
text-internal, I mean that they occupy one of the nodes of
the network, rather than being accessible at all times
through a button on the interface. Readers must find their
way to the node that contains the mapand the map,
consequently, is not always available. This is another
reason why internal maps are more useful as decorative and
symbolic items than as genuine orienteering tools. In assessing the
function of maps of textual architecture, we should remember
that even geographic maps are not merely navigational aides;
they also help us visualize what cannot be seen from the
perspective of a normal human being. By giving a visual
identitya recognizable shapeto features such as
continents, countries, provinces, islands, lakes and rivers,
maps create an emotional bond between people and geographic
entities. Most people are indeed able to draw by memory the
outline of their country. Similarly, hypertext maps create visual emblems of the text that compensates for
the inaccessibility of its inscription in computer memory,
an inaccessibility that makes it impossible to tell how much
of the text remains to be seen. Just as a map of France
inscribes the country as an hexagon in the mind of its
citizens, a map of hypertext tells the reader what the text
looks like, and it inscribes the text in the
readers mind as an object with a stable visual
identity. Even though textual architecture is not an
inherently visual nor a spatial phenomenonno more than
other phenomena that are commonly mapped, such as the
fluctuations of the stockmarket or the market share of
various products-- this visualization facilitates
comprehension and motivates the reader to explore the text,
even if the map is not used as a tool in this exploration.
The idea of a stable visual identity for hypertext may
conflict with the postmodern
aesthetics of fluidity and kaleidoscopic effects, but it
compensates for the dizziness that readers may feel, as they
face too many choices with too few reasons to chose, by
telling them that beneath the apparent chaos of links
is order and design. Dynamic
maps Dynamic maps, maps
that modify themselves in real time, are rare, but not
completely unheard of in the area of textual architecture,
as Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenbergs project
Apartment demonstrates. The map created by this
project, which operates on the word level rather than on the
level of lexia, is not only dynamic, but animated and
interactive as well. Literalizing the idea of textual
architecture, the system asks the user to input words or
sentences, and it creates the floor plan of an apartment to
accommodate this verbal furniture. Words are assigned to
rooms on the basis of semantic content. Twelve types of
rooms are paired with twelve semantic categories: living
room is themed around the idea of group, dining room needs glamour,
kitchen holds food, closet is a place of
secrecy, hall suggests motion, foyer stands for change,
bedroom means intimacy, bathroom caters to the needs of the
body, library is associated with truth, office is where one
works, and windows afford vision. (Dillon, Writing with
Pictures, ch. 6, p. 9). The various rooms are created as
they are needed, and their size and the thickness of their
walls increases with every new piece of furniture that needs
to be brought in. Different inputs will consequently
generate different floor plans. The system ignores the words
that it cannot categorize (mostly articles and
prepositions), and it tries to pair new words with old ones
into meaningful phrases. When the components of the
resulting expression come from different rooms, these rooms
are made adjacent to each other, the wall between them is
taken down, and the group of words floats in the area where
the two rooms meet each other. The same rearrangement and
tearing down of walls occurs when a word hovers between two
categories. Matching the fluidity of the architecture of the
floor plan, an architecture undergoing constant
transformations, the fluttering of the words and phrases
around the rooms suggests the polysemy of language and the
impossibility to immobilize its words into rigid semantic
categories. We can read the result as a kind of aleatory
poetry, or as a story of daily life, with different episodes
taking place in different symbolic locations. Users may try
to build up the apartment systematically by deliberately
selecting words that will trigger the addition of certain
rooms (the bedroom typically coming first), but another
interesting way to use the system is to input a well-known
poem and to watch the system rearrange it as a domestic
drama. Figure 7 shows a snapshots of the apartment created
by the system for Dylan Thomas poem Do Not Go
Gentle into that Good Night. In contrast to the
types of space previously discussed, the material space
occupied by the text does not normally need to be mapped,
because the texts that highlight this kind of space are not
constructed as networks, this is to say, as labyrinths in
which users need to orient themselves. The texts discussed
below either show their whole body on the screen, or they
play themselves like a movie, taking the reader for a ride
through their space. The dimensionality of
the space occupied by the signs of a text varies with the
medium, from the zero-dimensionality of spoken language (a
medium that exists only in time), to the (quasi)
one-dimensionality of a written line, the two-dimensionality
of a page, and the three-dimensionality of an inscription
carved in stone. With digital texts, the dimensionality of
the material realization of the text is a more complex
issue, since the text exists both as data and code
permanently stored in memory as a one-dimensional sequence
of binary digits,[7]
and as a temporary two-dimensional visual display on the
screen when the code is executed. But the image on the
screen may mimics
spaces with different numbers of dimensions, just as a flat
two-dimensional painting may mimic three-dimensional space
through the use of perspective. In addition to the material
space actually taken by the text, there is consequently the
virtual space that the text seems to occupy, the
pseudo-materiality of its appearance. It is with the
pseudo-materiality of this virtual space that I will deal in
this section, since on the level of actual materiality, all
digital texts that run on a PC share the same type of
spatial extension. As we shall see in the examples to be
discussed below, it is though animation effectsthis is
to say, through the exploitation of their temporal
dimensionthat digital texts foreground the spatiality
of their inscription. Foregrounding
one-dimensionality The default status of
the material support of printed texts is the two-dimensional
space of the page. Printing a text on a single
line would be impractical, because it would either limit the
length of the text, or require the scrolling of a very long
tape. But in electronic systemsand here I mean not
only computers, but also television news lines and
electronic billboards lengthy texts are easily
projected on a single line, because their characters are not
permanently inscribed on the viewing surface. By changing
the value of the elements of the display, be they light
bulbs or pixels on a screen, the system gives the impression
that characters are moving from side to side, and there is
practically no limit on the size of the text that can be
made to scroll before the readers eye. A digital text that
takes advantage of this possibility to collapse the
two-dimensionality of normal written text into a
one-dimensional space (or rather into a two-dimensional
space with a vastly dominant dimensions) is the art CD ROM Things Spoken
by Agnes Hegedüs.[8]
Each screen of the work consists of two windows (figure
8). One of them contains a static, two-dimensional
image of an object from the authors personal archives:
kitschy tourist souvenirs, gifts from close friends, family
heirlooms, or treasured childhood relics. The other window
contains two independent line
of texts that scroll from right to left, explaining the
emotional value of the object for the narrator and the
memories evoked by the image. Running parallel to the
written words is an oral performance of the two linear
texts. The reader can alternate between the texts, sometimes
spoken by a male voice and sometimes by a female voice, by
moving the cursor on one or the other of the two lines. The
fact that neither the written words nor the oral version can
be stopped suggests that the one-dimensionality of the
written version
is a visual transposition of the evanescent temporality of
both spoken language and of the mental life that language
tries to capture. The reader moves through the text by
catching highlighted words with a click of the mouse; once a
word has been caught, the text shifts to another screen that
describes a different object by means of the same word. The
capture of the keyword stands symbolically for the firing of
associative chains in the brain that lead to the resurfacing
of buried memories. Through its dynamic unfolding and linear
presentation, Things Spoken thus literalizes the
metaphor of stream of consciousness. Foregrounding
two-dimensionality:
An efficient way
to attract attention to the spatiality of the textual
display is to block its normal functioning. This is what
happens in Cruising, a digital text by Ingrid
Ankerson and Megan Sapnar (figure 9). Here again the text is reduced to a line, and
here again the running of the text on the line is paralleled
by an oral performance, at least the first time around. But
in contrast to Things Spoken, the text is
juxtaposed to a frieze of picture, so that text and image
combine to form a two-dimensional window. The size of the
window, as well as the speed of its scrolling are unstable:
by moving the cursor, the reader can make the text and its
graphic background grow or shrink, move left or move right,
and move at different speeds. The goal is to get a
combination of size, speed and direction that allows the
text to be read; for most of the time, the text is too
small, and moves too fast for the eye to make out the words.
The users control of the speed and direction simulates
the driving of a car; and indeed, driving a car is what the
text is all about: I remember cruising Main Street
with Mary Jo and Joanie, the heat pumping full blast,
windows down, night rolling through Mary Jos
fathers station wagon like movie credits. The
text runs in a closed loop that underscores the repetitive
aspect of the favorite activity of small-town teenagers: up
and down, up and down the same street, the only difference
between two runs residing in the speed of the car and the
resulting legibility of the landscape framed by the car
window. At low speed we see distinct images, and we can read
their details, while at high speed the images look like the
frames on a strip of film. The interface thus underscores
the hybrid status of digital poems between text that we can
read at our own pace, and film that rolls before our eyes,
blurring the distinctions between its images. The interface
is much more than a way to manipulate the textit is a
simulative mechanism that enables the reader to participate
symbolically in the experience of the speaker. What literary
critics once hailed as the unity of form and
content has now become the triple unity of interface,
theme, and image. [9] Foregrounding
three-dimensionality:
Three-dimensionality is a rare feature in textual displays,
and it usually contributes to visual effects rather than to
the creation of truly verbal meaning. This is why we mainly
see it at work in advertisements or in the titles of films.
In Star Wars, for instance, the words Star Wars tip
over, flatten out and vanish in hyperspace with a
perspective effect that makes them look like objects cut out
from solid material. But to the digital poet Aya Karpinska, three-dimensionality
should be able to produce meetings of words in textual space
that leads to sparks of poetic meaning. As the author
writes, extending poetry beyond the printed page into
three dimensions will lead to novel ways of representing
relationships between words, as well as the evolution of new
patterns and rhythms. The title of her experiment in
three-dimensional textuality, The Arrival of the
Beebox (figure 10) is borrowed from an eponymous poem
by Sylvia Plath. In Plaths Beebox, the bees
held prisoner in the box represent the thoughts and images
that haunt the poet, clamoring to be set free. Yet the
speaker fears that if she opens the box, the bees will fly
away, never coming back to her, never using her as a source
of honey, an image that I interpret as meaning that the
liberated thoughts will be lost, rather than swarming around the speaker as a poem. In
contrast to Plaths poem, which represents a temporal
unfolding of thoughts,
so that the sequence of lines cannot be modified without
loss of meaning, Karpinskas Beebox is written as a
collection of relatively independent verses loosely held
together by common themes and oppositions: an intense,
sudden experience; loneliness versus meeting with an other;
containment versus explosion. The
three-dimensional mechanism functions as a shuffling system
that recombines these elements into different mini-poems,
creating temporary configurations similar to the figures
created by the bees as they swarm in the box. The poem
presents itself visually as three squares, or planes (the
box), with eight verses (the bees) arranged along their
outline: one at each corner, and one in the middle of each
side. At first the text is one-dimensional: the characters
of the verses are superposed upon each other in a single
line, forming an illegible graffiti. By
clicking on each segment, the reader expands the
various inscriptions into verses of two or three lines
reminiscent of haikus. Now the text has two dimensions. The
third dimension unfolds when the user sets the text in
motion by mousing over
four arrows at the bottom of the screen.[10]
These arrows trigger four different types of rotation: along
a vertical axis, along
a horizontal axis, and each of these in two directions. While
the rotation along the horizontal axis preserves the
relative location of the squares with respect of the viewer,
the rotation along the vertical axis brings different
squares in the foreground. Half of the time during the
rotation the words are seen backwards, and they can only be
read with the help of a mirrorbut the reader may just
as well wait until they are in the right position. The
rotation allows the edges of the different squares to
overlap, bringing together fragments of text that belong to
different squares, or it inverts the vertical order of the
verses on the same square. The result is a digital version
of what the Oulipo poet Raymond Queneau achieved in
Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a
poetic contraption that recombines the 14 verses of ten
sonnets into 14**10 poems by letting the reader flip a book
whose pages have been cut into strips. Faithful to the
surrealist concept of beauty as the energy released by the
random meeting of found objects, both Queneaus and
Karpinskas design are aleatory mechanisms, in which
the system brings the words together, and the reader brings
the meaning. Texts exist in a real
or virtual space that serves as a container for a large
number of other texts: a shelf in a library, where books are
arranged alphabetically or by call number; the hard drive of
a computer, where individual files are stored at specific
memory addresses, or the entire World Wide Web, where
documents are identified by numeric URLs. The alphabet, call
numbers, memory addresses and URLs represent one-dimensional
organization and allocation systems, but these systems are visually represented by
two- or three dimensional diagrams: for instance, the map
that tells us where a certain book is to be found in a
library; the tree diagram that shows the organization of files into folders; and the
visualizations that represents Web sites as planetary
systems, or the entire Web as an outer space filled with
galaxies of documents. Postmodern texts
acknowledge their situatedness within a larger textual
space through intertextual allusions, and hypertexts do so
through links, but because they are produced by executable
code, digital texts have developed much more dynamic ways to
relate to their environment: they can explore it actively,
bring back materials from their exploration, build
themselves up in real time from these materials, or produce
microcosmic image of the macro-space of which they are a part.
In this section, I propose to explore some of the
modes in which digital texts situate themselves within these
larger fields of data. Static
relation to surrounding space A digital text can
relate to the surrounding space in either a static or a
dynamic way. In a static relation, the text points to other
locations in its environments, it may even offer a mode of
transportation to these locations in the form of hyperlinks,
but it does not visit these locations by its own initiative,
and it cannot expand by itself its network of connections to
other sites. As an example of a static relation to
cyberspace, consider for instance a artwork titled A
Net Art Idea Line by
Martin Wattenberg, also the co-author of
Apartment (figure 11). Conceived as a portal to
sites of digital art, the text is both an animated and an
interactive map. As the author describes it : When the user mouses over the threads, they open
up gently, creating a wave that gracefully spreads through
the entire fan. Titles of works appear in the space between
the threads; if the user mouses over the titles, she gets a
description of the work; if she clicks on this
description, she is sent to the corresponding Web site. This
cleverly expanding design enables the map to give access to
far more titles, and to contain far more information than
the screen could hold at any one time; and yet, the user
never loses sight of the whole bundle of threads, and never
leaves the map for a more detailed image. With this
beautiful, vibrant creation, which reminds the spectator of
a delicately breathing jellyfish, aesthetic appeal
overshadows utilitarian function, as it did in the great
decorative Dutch maps of the seventeenth century: most
people will appreciate it as an artwork in its own right,
rather than use it as a portal. But in its the relation to
cyberspace, A Net Art Idea Line is no different
than an ordinary Web pages with hyperlinks pointing to other
Web sites. It does not find the URLs, as would a search
engine like Google; the URLs are given to it (authors of
artistic texts are invited to submit their work), and the
code must be rewritten for every new addition. Dynamic
relation to surrounding space: exploring the hard
drive
Digital texts that entertains a dynamic relation with their
surrounding space may do so in two (and a half) ways,
depending on how they delimit their environment. In the
micro-spatial version, the text visits the other files on
the hard disk of the computer on which it
operates. In the macro-spatial version, the text performs a
walkalso known as a crawl, or stalkthrough
cyberspace itself by following the links of a given Web site
toward other Web sites, and then the links of this new Web
site toward still other sites , in a potentially infinite
recursion. In the half way, it visits the Web
sites whose references are found on the users
computer. As an example of text
that operates in a micro-spatial environment, consider
[Phage], a Director program created
by the digital artist Mary Flanagan. [Phage] browses
the hard drive of the computer, collecting bits and pieces
of data, and throwing them back
at the user (or should one say throwing them up ?) as a
collection of decontextualized fragments that blow, rotate,
and swirl on the screen like pieces of trash on a windy day
at the dump (figure 12). The users who miss the theoretical significance
of this deconstructive activity can turn to an essay on the
projects web site in which the author explains her
work in terms of several interconnected
metaphors: The
benevolent virus. Taking her clues from
bacteriophages, viruses used for healing,
Flanagan envisions [Phage] as a virus that invades
the hard drive, but instead of pursuing a malicious intent,
this virus destroys harmful bacteria that threatens your
prosthetic mind. (This is all metaphorical, of course: in
reality, [Phage] does nothing to your hard drive.) Feminism
and space. Woman have been traditionally excluded from
spatial practices, such as architecture or computer design.
They have consequently developed their own idea of space and
their own relation to it. Flanagan describes [Phage]
as a feminist map of the machine, in which space
will no longer be organized according to the
masculine principles of order, control and
hierarchical directories. This feminist logic reconfigures
the computer from a rationally organized tool
for daily use into a poetic engine that exploits the
creative energy of chaos and randomness.
What then does [Phage] claim to do ? It
eats your hard drive and its hierarchical
organization, curing your
computers architecture from
the masculine diseases of logic, order, and
control, and it restores it to you as a
reconfigured space that changes your relation to your data
and to your machine: as long as [Phage] is running,
the computer is no longer an instrument of work, but a map
of your personal experiences,
and a site of poetic activity. What does
[Phage] actually do ? The project offers a discovery
trip into the depth of the mind, and many users will take
pleasure in the temporary resurfacing of long forgotten text
or images. Unfortunately, these fragments swirl too fast,
are too small, or are shown from the wrong angle (i.e.,
backwards) for the user to read them: it was only when I
captured a screen as a still picture and saw some French
words that I recognized the fragments as being actually
taken from my hard drive, rather than created by the program
(as are the sounds that accompanies the show). But the claim
of the author that by throwing objects in the users
face [Phage] offers a feminist map of
the machine must be taken with a grain of salt, because the
art of cartography relies on order and rationality, and
represents consequently the modes of thinking that Flanagan
dismisses as masculine. The program implements an
original, not-to-be-reused
idea, as should any genuine work of conceptual art, but I
share the opinion of George Dillon, who writes:
[Phage] is the anti-mapper to all mappers,
since it presents the hard drives contents as
disconnected, unrelated fragments (Writing with
Pictures, ch. 6, 15). And this, of course, is the exact
opposite of what a map should do. Dynamic
relation to surrounding space: exploring the Web through the
users scrapbook While Phage limits its
snooping to the micro-environment of the users hard
drive, another space invader, The Impermanence
Agent by Noah Waldrip-Fruin and Brion Moss, opts for a
compromise between the macro-space of the web and the
micro-space of the users computer: the text explores
the Web by looking at the content of the users
browser window, or
scrapbookthe area of memory where text and
images from recently visited Web sites are temporarily
stored, so that the user may revisit the site without having
to download images and text all over again. The text
consists of a window with two columns. One of them contains
a chronologically scrambled, but very readable, in fact
moving story inspired by the death of the authors
grandmother, Elinore, illustrated with family photos. The
other window contains theoretical texts from various authors
and memorial imagery from multiple cultures. The content of
the windows scrolls down slowly by itself, then returns to
the top in an infinite loop, so that the reader can take an
occasional glance as the text and catch bits and pieces of
either the story or the theoretical texts during breaks from
other computer activities. A parody of the so-called
Artificial Intelligence agents that search the
Web for materials suited to the users interest,
The Impermanence Agent modifies the content of
the window by gradually integrating materials culled from
the users scrapbook. A lightweight artificial
intelligence model selects interesting or
frequent words from the users scrapbook, and makes
sure that they fit syntactically into the text, but the
model does not check the output for semantic coherence. The
visual material undergoes similar blending with pictures
from the scrapbook. Below is a passage from the original
text, followed by three successive stages of
transformations. (For an example of the transformation of
the visual material, see the illustration in the
authors essay at http://www.impermanenceagent.com/agent/essay2/.) It
is 1933. The webcam picture of a restaurant in the
railway auction. The cool green felt of the blotter. A
crap green banner is going for left hand
writing. It
is 1933. The shock of it, the hair, counselld with
the railway auction. The cloudswashed over as with
a blotter. A woods flit and left handIt is 1933. The
shock of it, the hair, counselld with the railway
auction. The main from a blotter. A climax of Act 1
emerged, in one form or left hand writing.
[12] The authors claim that
this algorithm customizes narrative discourse
to the readers interests, but their definition of
narrative is so loose that it accepts any grammatical
sequence of words. After a whole week of running the program, the text is completely
invaded by fragments of other texts that may point towards,
but never fully tell their own stories, and the original
narrative is replaced by a random collage. Though the user
may take pleasure in the serendipitous resurfacing of
souvenirs from her cyberspace travel, the result is not a
customization of narrative meaning, but a disintegration of
the mapping of human experience that takes place in its
narrative organization. The Impermanence Agent
enacts the loss of memory, and consequently the loss of
storytelling ability, that affects Elinore, the heroine of
the original narrative: the mind that was once occupied by
meaningful representations of the past is now the theater of
a chaotic swarming of disconnected elements. On a more
allegorical level, I read The Impermanence Agent
as a demonstration of the falling apart of story that takes
place when personal preoccupations interfere with the
readers ability to immerse herself in a fictional
world and to share in imagination the concerns of others:
Elinores moving story crumbles under the onslaught of
the trivial phrases and visual fragments culled from the
users favorite Web sites. If The Impermanence
Agent ends up telling a story capable of
catching the users interest, this story resides on the
level of process rather than on the level of product: in the
gradual destruction of the input text, rather than in the
resulting inscription. It is above all an example of
virtuoso programming, where the code and the design idea
command greater aesthetic attention than the output
itself. Linking
texts to the world The notion of spatial
environment for texts need not be restricted to digital
storage. Texts inhabit the world as much as they inhabit
paper, audiotapes, film strips or silicon chips. By inhabiting the world, I mean
not only that their material support is an object within the
worldusually a movable objectbut more
importantly, that they may anchor themselves in the world as
semiotic objects by referring to specific locations. Our
sense of place is strongly indebted to the stories that
circulate about a certain area. For instance, by telling us
how striking landscape features came into being, or what
happened in a certain site, the narratives of myth, legend
and oral history build the spirit of a
placewhat the Romans called the genius
lociand contribute to our emotional attachment to
a geographic area. Will digital
technology facilitate the connection between texts and the
world, the filling of space with stories ? To answer this question we
must venture into the slightly futurological domains of
ubiquitous computing and Augmented Reality. Instead of
taking the user to an alternate world entirely constructed
out of bits of information, as does VR, Augmented Reality
will project digitally generated
images, text and sound upon the real world, thereby turning
human-computer interface into a three-way relation involving
human, computer and the
physical environment. The proponents of the technology
foresee applications in the military sector, in
construction, in the tourist industry, and in video games.
Soldiers will see strategic information superposed upon the
terrain; technicians will find identifiers or how-to-use
directions on the parts to be assembled; tourists will find
bits of history
floating in front of buildings; and instead
of fighting enemies on a screen, game-players will face
three-dimensional computer-generated creatures profiled
against the realistic background of a real-world setting. While this brand of
Augmented Reality will require the cumbersome head-mounted
displays of VR, a purely textual version
can be implemented by means of mobile phones equipped with
GPSglobal positioning systems. By locating the exact
spatial coordinates of the user, the GPS system makes it
possible to compose messages on the mobile phones, to attach
them to particular geographic locations and to upload them
on the Internet. These geographically coded messages, known as
user-generated location-specific content (or
more colloquially, as wireless digital
graffiti), will only be retrievable from the server by
people who happen to be in the proper location.
Ultimately, the logical conclusion of wireless
graffiti systems would be an ability to attach information
to any object or place on earth with an accuracy of a meter
or less (The Revenge of Geography, 22).
The idea came to one of its developers, Jim Spohrer, during
a hike: He saw an unusual sort of plant, and wished he
could look it up on the Internet; he then realized that
other passers-by might also want to know the same thing, and
wished he could somehow stick this information on to the
plant, like a virtual Post-it note (ibid).
Digital graffiti answers a need for the transparency of a
fully legible world, a need to know everything that is to be
known and everything that has been said about our
surroundings. The idea can have both practical and artistic
applications: when leaving a restaurant, you could attach to
the location a review of your dining experience for the
benefit of prospective
customers; or when visiting a sublime landscape, you could
record the deeply philosophical meditations that the
environment inspires to you. Wouldnt it be marvelous,
if the passing thoughts of D.H. Lawrence were incrusted for
later generations in the landscape of New Mexico, or the
musings of
Baudelaire in the cityscape of Paris ? Yet there are reasons
to be skeptical about the technology. Will the landscape
turned into its own map, with explanations, stories, and
other peoples personal experience superposed upon its
features enhance our appreciation of the external world ?
Will the Shamanistic vision
of a world echoing with the murmurs of the spirits of things
be realized through GPS and cell-phone technology, or will
the true voice of nature be silenced by the human chatter
that will attach itself to everything? Do we really want to
walk, armed with a palm-pilot, in a reality augmented by the
passing thoughts of every would-be poet, amateur
philosopher, or traveling salesman, and will we be able to
filter out the unwanted messages ? The alternative to an
uncontrolled proliferation of graffiti freely created by
every cell-phone owner is to coordinate the texts for a
global narrative experience. For instance, bits and pieces
of story could be attached to the objects of a building, and
by touring the site, in whatever order they choose, visitors
would walk into the life stories of the people who lived
there and eventually gain a comprehensive view of the family
saga. Or a fictional murder could have been committed in the
building, and the visitor would solve the mystery by
retrieving the clues attached to certain objects. One GPS-supported
project that implement this idea of a designed experience is
34 North 118 West by
Jeff Knowlton, Naomi Spellman and Jeremy Hight. Whereas
natural landscapes generally borrow
their creation stories from myth and from
legends, urban landscape, as man-made environments, speak the
language of culture and history. Conceived as an exploration
of the narrative archeology that underlies a
decrepit district of downtown Los Angeles, 34 North 118
West bears testimony to the forgotten lives that
clustered around the landmarks of the area, such as the
railroad tracks or the La Grande station. These lives are
commemorated not through actual historical documents, but
through prose poems that articulate the unspoken experience
of the anonymous people who worked in the area. For
instance: The texts are stored as audio files on a laptop
computer attached to a GPS system, which users carry along
in their walk through the district. On the screen of the
laptop is a
dynamic map that shows the walkers current location,
as well as the locations of some hot spots. Whenever the GPS
detects a hot spot (for a surprise effect, not all of them
are shown on the map), the text that relates to these
coordinates is
played through earphones to the user. Walking around the
area thus becomes a treasure hunt for hidden stories. (See
http://www.xcp.bfn.org/hight.html
for pictures of the project.) Different itineraries will dig
out different artifacts from the narrative underground of
the city, creating, in the authors words, a
sense that every space is agitated (alive with unseen
history, stories, layers.)
Movement and reading now
bring a narrative of what is unseen and what has been lost
in time, only for it to quiet again once passed (Hight, Narrative
Archeology). With this
revenge of geography, as an anonymous technology
writer calls the use of GPS and WiFi
technology,[13]
the space odyssey of the text reconnects the micro-space of
computer memory and the mega-space of the Internet with the
measurable, human-scale space of the world. At the
start of this odyssey, in oral cultures, the text did not
occupy any space of its own, but as a unique performance, it
was bound to a specific site, the location of the
participants in the act of communication. With the
development of writing, texts acquired a permanent physical
support with a spatial extension that turned them into
potentally movable objects. Inscriptions on stones or on the
walls of caves were still tied to specific coordinates, and
the manuscripts of the Middle Ages were too precious to
leave the libraries of monasteries, but when the invention
of print allowed the mechanical production of multiple
copies, and when the invention of the codex book made the
material support of the text easily transportable, texts
were freed from their spatial mooring, and they began to
travel around the world. With the invention of digital
writing, the space physically occupied by the text became
the electronic chips of computer memory. This space was so
tiny, so inaccessible, that it disappeared from sight. All
that was left for the senses to contemplate was the graphic
display of fictional space created by the text, as well as
the virtual body of the text projected by the code on the
computer screen. This virtual body soon began to explore its
own pseudo-spatialityone, two or three dimensional--,
its architecturenow conceived as relations between
non-spatially-situated, floating elements--, and its
connections to other documents in the same environment. The
move of texts
to the Internet resulted in a total mobility that
obliterated the separating effects of physical distance. But
this seemingly straight trajectory leading out of the
constraints of real space into the freedom of virtual space
is now beginning to curve back upon itself, as the text
rediscovers its roots in real world geography. The GPS
applications described
above may be a passing fashion, and they will probably never
become a dominant mode of textuality, but they signal the
possibility of a reconciliation of real space, in which GPS
texts are anchored, and cyberspace, from where they come to
us. In order to reestablish
a connection to place, location-specific texts
sacrifices mobility, since they can
only be downloaded from a certain area. But if they renounce
the postmodern nomadism of their Internet companions, they
make us rediscover the world, by insisting on being read in
the presence of their referent. Aarseth,
Espen. Allegories of Space: Spatiality in Computer
Games. German version (Allegorien des Raums:
Raümlichkeit in Computerspielen) in
Zeitschrift für Semiotik, 23, 3-4, 2001, 301-18. Ankerson,
Ingrid, and Megan Sapnar. Cruising.
http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/spring2001/crusing-launch.html Bonsor,
Kevin. How Augmented Reality Will Work.
http://www.howstuffwors.com/augmented-reality.htm/printable Bolter,
Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and
the History of Writing. Hillsdal, N.J.: Lawrence
Erlbaum, 1991. Carroll,
Lewis. Sylvie and Bruno. The Complete Illustrated
Works of Lewis Carroll. Ed. Edward Guillaro. New York:
Avenel Books, 1982. Coverley,
M. D. Califia. Califia. [Hypertext Software.]
Cambridge, Mass.: Eastgate Systems, 2000. Dery,
Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the
Century. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Dillon,
George L. The Semiotic Art of Web Maps.
Discourse Studies in Composition, eds. Ellen Baton
and Gail Stygall. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2002.
331-352. Dillon,
George. Writing with Pictures. Chapter 6: Maps of
Abstractions. http://courses.washington.edu/hypertxt/cgi-bin/12.228.185.206/html/maps/maps.html Dodge,
Martin, and Rob Kitchin. Mapping Cyberspace. London:
Routledge, 2001. Dodge,
Martin, and Rob Kitchin. Atlas of Cyberspace. London:
Addison-Wesley, 2001. Flanagan,
Mary. [Phage]: A Feminist Poetics of the
Machine. http://www.maryflanagan.com/virus.htm Guyer,
Carolyn, and Martha Petry. Izme Pass. Writing on the Edge.
Hypertext software, [MacIntosh]. Cambridge, Mass:
Eastgate Systems, 1991. Herman,
David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of
Narrative. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. Hight,
Jeremy. Narrative Archeology. http://www.xcp.bfn.org/hight.html Jackson,
Shelley. Patchwork Girl. [Hypertext
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Henry. Game Design as Narrative Architecture.
First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and
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Mass: MIT Press, 2004. Karpinska,
Aya. The Arrival of the Bee Box.
http://www.technekai.com/aya/box/
Knowlton,
Jeff, Naomi Spellman and Jeremy Hight. 34 North 118
West. http://34n118w.net/ Koskimaa,
Raine. Visual Structuring of Hypertext
Narrative. Electronic Book Review 6.
http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr6/6koskimaa/koshead.htm Landow,
George. Hypertext 2.0: The convergence of Contemporary
Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1997. Larsen,
Deena. Marble Springs. Hypertext sotfware
[Macintosh]. Cambridge, Mass.: Eastgate Systems,
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Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
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Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell. London: Routledge, 2003.
75-92. Moulthrop,
Stuart. Victory Garden. [Hypertext software]
Cambridge, Mass: Eastgate Systems, 1991. Punday,
Dan.Toying with the Parser: Aesthetic Materiality in
Electronic Writing. The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 61:2 (2003): 105-111. Simanowski,
Roberto. Interfictions. Von Schreiben im Netz.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Strickland,
Stephanie.True North. [Hypertext software]
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Marek, and Martin
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60-61. Wattenberg,
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Mark J. P. (ed.) The Medium of Video Games. Austin: U
of Texas Press, 2001. The Revenge of
Geography. The Economist Technology Quarterly,
March 15, 2003. 19-22. Endnotes [1]
See for instance the numerous virtual nations that have been
created on the Internet: Bergonia (www.bergonia.org),
Talossa (www.talossa.com)
, the principality of Fredonia (www.freedonia.org),
and the founder of the breed, the no longer existing
Lisbekistan. [2]
To be found http://www.igd.fhg.de/archive/1995_www95/proceedings/posters/35/2.gif [3]
I borrow the categories from Dodge and Kitchin, but I use my
own examples. [4]
For an example of a textual world with an impossible spatial
lay-out, see David Hermans discussion of Flann
OBriens The Third Policeman, in Story
Logic, 285-96. For an example of a non-Euclidean map in
a computer game, see Marc J.P. Wolf, 62. [5]
In the demonstration version of this text on the Internet,
the map is not literally interactive. Rather, the locations
on the map are listed below the image, and it is by clicking
on these verbal links that the reader accesses the
correponding texts. [6]
Other mimetic uses of Storyspace maps are found in Carolyn
Guyer and Marthas Petry Izme Pass, as well as
in Stephanie Stricklands True North. [7]
As Alan Turing has demonstrated, all computers can be
simulated by an automaton that operates on n infinitely long
tape, consequently, on a one-dimensional object. [8]
See Roberto Simanowskis discussion of this project in
Interfictions, pp. 97-99. (review in dichtung-digital) [9]
My presentation of
Cruising is indebted to an insightful reading by
Daniel Punday. [10]
From a strict geometric point of view, the
three-dimensionality of Karpinskas poem is nothing
more than an optical illusion. The program with which the
poem was written, Director, is not a genuine
three-dimensional design system, such as 3D Studio, but a
two-and-a-half dimensional system that creates
an impression of depth by superposing layers of
two-dimensional objects. A genuine 3D program would allow
the construction of cubes, and it would be possible to
rotate these cubes along three different axes with
geometrically correct changes of perspectives. But the
objects of Karpinskas poem are planes, not cubes, and
the impression of three-dimensionality arises from the
distortion of their shapes, not from a genuine real-time
calculation of perspective. [11]
In her discussion of the
computer as palimpsest, Flanagan
alludes to hose files that have been deleted, but not
overwritten, and thus remain technically recoverable, but I
have no evidence that her program can actually access this
type of data. [12]
From a transcription of a sample run. I am thankful to Noah
Waldrip-Fruin for making the file available to
me. [13]
See the article by that title in the references.
presented
by Brown University
1.
Space
of the Textual
World
2. Textual
architecture
3. Material
space of the text
4. Spatial
environments
5. References
Figure 1:A visualization
of cyberspace
1. The physical space of the fictional world represented or
simulated by the text.
2. The architecture, or design, of the text itself.
3. The physical space occupied by the symbols that make up
the text.
4. The space that serves as context and container for the
text.
Figure 2:The treasure
maps in M.D. Coverleys Califia
Figure 3:Map of
Deena Larsens Marble
Springs
Figure 4:
Playfield of the computer game
CivilizationWe actually
made a map of the country on the scale of a mile to a
mile ! [said Mein Herr]
Have you used it much? I enquired ?
It has never been spread out, yet, said Mein
Herr: the farmers objected: they said it would
cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight! So we
now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure
you it does nearly as well. (Sylvie and
Bruno, 726.)
Figure 5:Storyspace map:
Crazy Quilt, in Shelley Jacksons Patchwork
Girl
Figure 6:Picture as text
map: Phrenology,
from Shelley Jacksons Patchwork Girl
Figure
7:Screenshot from Marek Walczak and Martin
Wattenbergs Apartment
Figure 8:
Screenshot from Agnes Hegedüs Things
Spoken
Figure 9:Two screenshots
from Cruising by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan
Sapnar
Figure 10: Screenshot
from Aya Karpinskas Arrival of the
Beebox
Figure 11:
Screenshot from A Net Art Idea Line by
Martin WattenbergThe Idea line
displays a timeline of net artworks, arranged in a fan of
luminous threads. Each thread corresponds to a particular
kind of artwork or type of technology. The brightness of
each thread varies with the number of artworks that it
contains in each year, so you can watch the ebb and flow
of different lines of thought over time.
Figure 12:
Screenshot from [Phage] by Mary
FlanaganIt is 1933. The
small writing table from the railway auction. The cool
green felt of the blotter. A five cent pad of cotton
paper turned for left hand writing.
35 years I cleared
the tracks. Those men, along the rails, tired. Death by
train we called it. They waited and wandered.
Hoped....for the sound that comes too late. To take them
from this life. It was my job to assist........to
help......kind words.....or help clear the tracks after
the impact... Such failures. My failures. Such
small horrors. And it is not the most dramatic: an eye
open tomato red with blood, a nose with ice covered
nostril hairs that looked like a crab emerging from a
shell, an ear lying by a man's feet like some dead
wingless bird, a cheek punctured with teeth exposed, a
wound open steaming in the snow. (Hight, Narrative
Archeology.)
dichtung-digital