Experience Counts
[I apologize for this being late. I guess I was busy reading my classmates reactions and forgot to post my own. I realized when looking for feedback that I hadn't posted yet.]
Experience helps when viewing digital literature. After several weeks of looking at and exploring a variety of digital literature, I’m starting to develop an understanding of how to view the sites. Like printed literature, digital literature makes use of earlier works. For example, I realized (probably because I took ENG-253 last semester and we read parts of it) the painting of the bull and women in Miss DMZ was connected to Greek mythology. However, I didn’t pursue it beyond that recognition.
While reading Dakota, the use of Americana in the beginning made an instant connection with me. It seemed to draw on or reminded me of early Springsteen, specifically “Born to Run”. I also connected with the images because my friends and I used to cruise with the top down and a case of beer. Having looked at other pieces by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, the blinking black text on a white background wasn’t as distracting as it was earlier in the semester. This probably allowed me to connect to the imagry more easily.
I thought the frames in These Waves of Girls - while distracting and not something I would use - reflected the segmented aspect of the story. Each section seemed to start with an age statement or a defined block of time which the frames reflected and forces the reader to move though them as though they were going though that block of time. I thought this idea of moving though the story was picked-up in the chapter of First Person that we read. I was intrigued by the idea of Card Shark and look forward to experiencing a piece written using it.
posted by Anonymous @ 3:40 AM
1 Comments:
It's great that you're paying such careful attention to the actual writing in these works--noticing, for example, that some of the key lexia in These Waves of Girls orient the reader to the age of the character, as if to compensate in some way for the disorienting effect of the hypertext structure.
That kind of attention does come with experience, as you note in the first part of your post. At first, we're often so occupied with figuring out how to steer the car that we never look out the window, so to speak. Early on, it's easy to miss the crucial text-image-technology nexus that makes some of these works so compelling from a critical standpoint.
As you begin composing more in these media, you will become even more perceptive about some features. You'll be able to tell how a writer employs a particular technical solution, and you'll be able to judge the aesthetic success of the solution in relation to the work as a whole. You're already there in many ways, but I hope the reading of this stuff will get even more fun (or at least more productively frustrating!) as we move through the semester.
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