STORYSPACE BROWN UNIVERSITY SERIES
I generally understand Web 2.0 as the replacement of static HTML pages with a series of mathematical procedures, or algorithms, that construct brand-new pages on the fly after you click a link. Here is an original copy of the first web page ever.
This all seemed like magic after centuries of book culture, and seemed even more magical prior to the web, when the only place you could go to witness this procedure was the aforementioned reserved computer in the CS department. In the days before “Web 2.0,” this was a simple practice - pages coded in HTML sat on some server, each page had a set of links embedded within it, you clicked on one of those links, and a new page of HTML would come up to replace the old one. (In case I’ve lost you: “hypertext” is basically the practice of linking two bits of text - they used to be called “lexia,” though that term seems largely academic now - with a “hyperlink,” whether it be a clickable word or an image. Ironically, more theory about hypertext was produced in the days before the web, when one had to work one’s way back to the one computer in the computer science department reserved for creative efforts, as Shelley Jackson did at Brown University when she was writing her now canonical Patchwork Girl (which is now, unfortunately, largely illegible due to the inability of Eastgate Systems, her publisher, to keep up with OS upgrades), than now, when hypertext is a way of life. Other artists have come at it from the more familiar (at least in the community) angle emerging out of the flurry of interest in hypertext as a next step in the evolution of written language - the book is dead, long live the link. “Cunnilingus in North Korea,” Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries YHCHI first started posting their works to the web in the early ’00s, when the 56k modem was the norm, and the speediness with which their lightly animated texts zinged over the web - in contrast to the often image-heavy work of other net artists - along with the humor of their work (“ Cunnilingus in North Korea” is the title of one of their more notorious pieces), the caffeinated jazz soundtracks they used, and the general good writing of their work soon brought them gallery and museum commissions. Some have emerged from what is often called the “art world,” even though the most salient example of this, the artist group Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, turned to Flash (their preferred programming environment) and the internet merely as a way to get their writing out. The problem is that the artist/writers who can be said to be “electronic writers” are coming at it from different angles.
I’ve been working for the past several years to find a way to discuss what has come to be known as “electronic literature” - it’s a creaky phrase that doesn’t survive parsing, hence the wavering between this term, “new media writing,” “digital literature,” etc. - in a way that is neither naively celebratory, presuming that computers will change writing the way DNA testing has changed crime television, nor overly technical, branching off into deep theoretical territory that seems, long before hindsight, to have nothing to do with literature or digital technology, not to mention graphic design, information architecture, film/photography, and video games, all of which at times seem to be relevant discourses.
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