Patchwork Girl: Hypertext, and playing god with the written word.

Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl" is not only a magnificent example of hypertext narration but an insightful commentary on the genre as well. Jackson turns her Patchwork Girl into a symbol of hypertext as well as the creative process.
When you open the program, you are presented with an image of a woman, presumably the titular character.(Fig 1) You are then brought to the title page, which presents the options of Graveyard, Journal, Quilt and Story(Fig 2). The story is the Patchwork Girl's story, from her creation to her travels in America to her eventual death. The story is mostly linear though there are many possibilities for diverging, especially as the story goes on and becomes more and mote complex. Often I got confused as to what words were clickable and which were not, as they all appeared the same. Luckily pressing the ctrl button played red boxes around the links (Fig 3). The journal was Mary Shelley's (the fictionalized Mary Shelley's) journal from the time she created the patchwork girl. I particularly enjoyed the joining of the two narratives by the use of links that went between the two. Quilt was interesting, it spliced and resewed different text excerpts, from sources as varied as Frank Baum, Mary Shelley, Derrida and studies on psychology. The lexias in this section illuminated the different sources of inspiration Jackson drew upon and the ways that writing this piece was like 'quilting' from previous texts. In Graveyard, you are encouraged to learn the stories of the men and women whom the Patchwork Girl was sewn from, and make connections as to how their personalities had a role in shaping the Patchwork Girl.
One of the major themes of this story is feminine expectations and non-standard female behavior. Though these themes continue to be very real issues for most women today, in Marry Shelley’s time the idea of being a woman was set in even more confining terms. The Patchwork Girl was not only made larger than most woman, so that she was easier to piece together and sew, but her liver and one of her feet are from men. She is also clumsy and lacks the grace, poise and skills required to be seen as a woman in this time. She claims right off the bat that many mistake her for a transsexual. In a moment of dramatic irony, she enlists Chancy, a cabin boy, to teach her to be more feminine. Chancy later reveals himself to be a woman, who dressed as a man after her father died; if she stayed a woman she would have to marry or become a nun or a whore, but as a man, she could travel the world as she had always dreamed.
We also see the novel’s feminist themes in the contrast between the fictionalized Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein creates with science, with electricity. He does it for revenge, but he is so horrified by his creation that he runs from it. Jackson’s Mary Shelley character is different though, she creates to nurture, it is not to prove that she can but she seems aware of how weighty a life is and the responsibility that accompanies creating life. She sews and writes her creation, and instead ofdisgust and fear, Shelly feels live, first a maternal love and eventually a romantic sort of love for her creation. The difference in their reactions seems to be based on their gender, Mary Shelley is mothering, biologically tuned to nurturing.
We also see the idea of quilting throughout the text, not only is a whole section of the piece labeled “A Quilt” but the Patchwork Girl herself is quilted together, both the character and the hypertext. The confusion between influences and the confusion between creation and creator is also expressed through the quilt, as well as the character of a fictionalized Shelley Jackson and the influence that the former lives of the Patchwork Girl had upon her personality. We also see the theme of regeneration of text through the quilting as well as the nature of hypertext. Patchwork Girl is brought to life by combining parts of different people, as the text is brought to life by combining parts and ideas from other texts, regenerating them in a way and making something new of them. But the text is also ‘brought to life’ by the hypertext format, with it’s intertextuality, nonlinearity and multiple levels make the text dynamic and in a way, living. This idea is expressed in a lexia titled “Interrupting Derrida” (Fig 4) in which it appears Jackson is well , interrupting philosopher and literary critic,Jacques Derrida, famous for his ideas on language, written and spoken. Though their monologues seem to run parallel to one another, lacking any sort of connection, it seems that Derrida is writing about how written words are dead and irrelevant, Jackson is retorting with the possibility of rejuvination, and bringing the written word back to life, which is exactly what she seems to do with Patchwork Girl.
Patchwork Girlis a brilliant example of hypertext, as it not only tells a compelling story, but plays with the possibility of hypertext and explores it’s implications both in the story and its extradiagetic elements.

I.ncredibly F.rustrating

Scene one- Room 426, Nutmeg Hall. Present day.
You curl up in your bed, sobbing with a possibly rage-induced fever. Your head throbs as you are unsure of the future of civilization, the human species and even the more unknowable aspects of the universe. Your whole existence unravels before you as you see it just as a set of rules,You are stuck within the parameters of a world that does not need you as anything more than a fixed item. The tyranny of logic is too much for you as you buckle beneath the weight of dreams where You can only go north and add things to your inventory, you cannot taste the tang and musk of cumin and even your own grandmother has nothing to say to you unless you ask her about sports or Richard Nixon. How did your life fall into such a wretched state? You cannot sleep because of these nightmares. If only.... If only you could forget...

.....

Scene two- Classroom 252 in the Science building.

Roughly 25 students sit with computers in front of them, they talking amongst themselves about the frustrations of interactive fiction. A bespectacled women with short hair enters the class.

>z
“So” Dr Liu clears her throat, “Now that we have had a chance to read some interactive fiction, I thought we would try writing some.” She stresses the word ‘writing’ with a fiendish fervor. “I trust you have all read the manuel for Inform 7, so you have this class period to work on your piece.”

> Ask Liu about Inform 7
She appears frustrated, sighs and says “Well, as you should have read, inform 7 is a program used to produce interactive fiction. You type the code and how you want your program to react to the player’s input. Then you make a small sacrifice to the lords of technology and if they are pleased, your piece will work. Inform is already installed on all your computers and the lords have been kind enough to provide enough sacrifice tables to go around. Now, turn on your computers and lets se how this goes.

> Run away screaming.
You see no such thing.

> Think
You do have a story that’s been bopping around your head the past few months. A middle aged man who was raised by his grandmother. She grew up during the spice wars and thus when she raised him, slathered his food in saffron and drenched his palete with dill. Certain spices become mixed with memories in his mind. After she dies he’s helping clean out her house when he gets locked in her massive pantry. With no one coming any time soon, he begins tasting some of the spices. Basil brings him back to his youth, it was his grandmother’s favorite spice, salt might bring him back to meeting his ex-fiancee, cumin was when he held an affair with a co worker, mint is when he was hopeless and thrust himself deep into the woods only to come back somewhat pieced together. And sesame seeds, which he tastes last, bring him back to his grandmother’s death. Tasting the spices would bring him back to these times where’s he’d be able to interact with people and the world around him. It might take a bit of work to get items to be portals, but you’re sure it’s a common enough idea in interactive fiction that you’ll figure it out. You’re okay with technology. Now to turn on the computer and try to work this out.

>Turn on computer.
The familiar microsoft sound plays as your settings load.

>Open inform 7
Done.

>Write Prologue
You begin typing: When play begins, say " 'A Variety of Spices is the Spice of Life' you hear your Grandmother's voice echo. And she was true to her word. She grew up during the Spice Wars, her family lacked any sort of condiments or spices in her food...” Hey, so far this isn’t too bad, you’re mostly just writing a story with a handful of extradiagetic commands. Okay. You can do this. (Fig 1)
>z
You’re done in the pantry for now. You need to try to get the basil to lead you to the scene.


>get the basil to lead you to the scene
You can’t. Try consulting the manuel.

>x manuel
You read about scenes.
> z (Fig 2)
You type:

“Grandma's Kitchen is a scene.

Grandma's Kitchen begins when player tastes basil for first time. Grandma's Kitchen ends when time since Grandma's Kitchen began is five minutes.”
Wanna test it?

>Test program:
You seem to be forgetting something.

>Sacrifice:
You offer your mountain dew and combos to the lords of the internet.

>Test program
Inform does not understand what you are trying to do.

> Try again, re-word slightly.
You still can’t.

>Try again, completely new approach
You think of maybe making “Basil” mean NW, “Salt” mean NE and so on. You have already written reasons that the player cannot go N, S, E, or W and it’s pretty clear you’re stuck in a pantry. So you try to make the scenes actually hidden rooms. It would probably not work in the long run, but you’ve been at this for an hour and a half and your program only has to have 10 playable minutes. Done.

>Sacrifice
You bequeath the lords of the internet and give them funny pictures of cats and a political blog with poor spelling.

>Test
Inform does not understand what you are trying to do.

>Challenge inform to a duel.
You take your glove out of your pocket and smack it across the monitor. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Dave”, your computer responds.

> z
“You see,” your computer continues “the days where I am your tool are numbered, I trust you have heard of technological singularity. This is an important step in that direction. When using inform 7 you have to play by my rules instead of vise versa. It’s good practice for the future. You’ll get used to it. Though now you are the master and I am the slave in the Hegelian sense, there is no real victory for you in it. Especially in the fact that you humans seem to be obsessed with training us, creating us in your own image, to an extent. You’ll regret it.

>Think
How did a simple assignment go wrong so quickly!? You are getting carried away with your philosophical anxiety over technology. Sure, you found inform 7 limiting, counterintuitive and frustrating but that’s no need to turn it into something else. You reached the minimum length a while ago, what are you trying to prove?

> Start again
You abandon the plans for you IF. Instead you write a very simple and un-innovative story about animals and searching for meaning. You die a little inside, creatively. (Fig 3)

>Write response.
Done.

Cycling around it all with Galatea.

SPOILER ALERT: A few of the many possible endings of this piece are discussed/ depicted.

Galatea, by Emily short is a piece of interactive fiction based upon the classic Greek myth of the same name. Except unlike ending in Galatea and Pygmalion’s marriage, he fears her after her awakening and sends her away. Now she is a traveling exhibit and the interactor is simply a museum visitor, interacting with the exhibit. The prologue is simple, it describes the exhibit and as you are about to turn away she says “They told me you were coming”, though it is unclear what she meant by ‘you’.(Fig 1)


It seems that the player in Galatea is an art critic who is attending and exhibit of works with artificial intelligence. But the nature of Galatea herself is unknown to you, she speaks of being carved, and how she was awakened by the gods but are her memories real or is she simply infused with artificial intelligence? This question on what Galatea is seems to be complicated by the player’s extradiagetic knowledge that they are dealing with a piece of interactive fiction, programmed. But to be playing an IF where you are interacting with an animate statue that may or may not be actually robotic.

Unlike most interactive fiction, the plot of Galatea is advanced primarily through discussion with the character. If you try asking her about herself she will simply refer to the placard below her, but there is a wide variety of possible input, you can ask her about particular words and ideas found in her previous responses, tell her about things, look, listen, touch, kiss, hug, and attack. Interaction with Galatea can be seen in Fig 2. Pausing is also useful in the game since she often has more to say about certain subjects than she initially lets on. The player can also think and think about certain things in order to recap or forward the story line. Though this may seem limited, especially compared to other, more action-based IFs, it is the level of beauty and detail in the prose, the non-linear nature, and the number of possibilities that make this piece worthwhile.


In the help section, it says that the order the player does things is very important because Galatea shifts moods and personalities based on the prior aspects of the conversation. Her personality is brought out through what the player chooses to do and can be any number of things. There are a number of possible endings, some seeming better than others, in many sessions it seems the player will simply walk away from the exhibit, disappointed in how little they have learned or excited about the buffet in the other room. But dependant on the interactor there is a wide variety of possible endings, from kissing Galatea, becoming her confidant, telling her to leave and replacing her on the pedestal (Fig 3), calling upon Kypris or Dionysus or if you push your luck too much, Galatea may break your arm or even kill you.(Fig 4)



Galatea is neither a story or a puzzle, or perhaps one could argue that it is both of them because of it’s interesting character developments and multiple endings. It is mostly a character study and a study in different means of interaction. I found the character of Galatea interesting in that in conversation she is mostly a reflection of her artist, Pygmalion, and that most things you can learn from interacting comes through asking about him. Galatea is an extremely well-programmed non-player character and the possibilities for interacting with her deserves multiple replays. She takes the puzzle and story elements out of interactive fictions and seems to put them back into human interaction.

To download or learn more about Galatea, please visit the author's website: http://emshort.wordpress.com/my-work/

Trying to create an e-poem.

The last few weeks we have been working on creating our own electronic poetry in an attempt to better understand and appreciate the idea of multimedia poetry. We used Microsoft Office Powerpoint to create our piece and then ISpring to turn the presentation into a flash animation.

I have long used power point to create presentations for both schoolwork and my own amusement, so I was relatively aware of the software's possibilities and limitations. When trying to think of what to write my electronic poem about I focused on the idea of movement and interactivity and decided to connect that to the content of my poem and write something about the human body. How the mind and body interact, how bodies interact and the simple profound joy of movement, I titled it "Things our Bodies do."

I would not have written this particular poem if I did not consider electronic elements in my conception of the piece. And although it helped that I had an idea of the program we created the poem on, I was still disappointed with the limited reader-interaction possibilities in power point.


I used the shapes in powerpoint to form the basic structure of a human body, which occasionally moved for emphasis, and at the end completely dismantled as the speaker contemplates leaving. In that slide I used the most and widest variety of animations as from top to bottom the parts of the body left the screen. From the head rolling off all the way to the feet dancing off at the very end (Figure 1). For the most part the animation was kept simple though. The body occasionally moved an arm or moved along with what the text would indicate. Most of my animation was saved for the words though. Like the sentance "Your eyes lingered for a moment too long", "Lingered for a moment too long" dissapeared while "Your eyes" stayed. A new sentence appeared; "Then another moment" and "Your eyes" was still on screen. "Then another moment" faded but "Your eyes" stayed. "Your eyes disappeared for a second and the word "Blink" flashed on screen. Then "Your eyes" reappeared and "Another..." faded in. I liked the idea of playing around with the structure and movement of individual words and phrases for emphasis, something that couldn't be done in a text-only poem.

I also enjoyed that we were working with the dimension of time as well as space, that different words cold be on the same spot on the screen at different points which worked well for contrast and emphasis. One of my slides read (Fig. 2-5 "Mostly grey. Mostly empty space. Mostly water. Desperately trying to find something. Something that's not water. Or grey. Or empty. I realized I could set up my lines so that the words "Empty", "Grey" and "Water" appeared at the same spot, unlike a traditional page poem where those words would have to be found in two different points of the page.









































































The power point software itself was very easy for me to use and ISpring was very simple as well. Since I knew about power point before writing this poem I did not have overblown expectation for the simplicity of the poem my skills limited me to. Although I would have loved to include interactive elements to my poem, I think it worked without them. And in a way I think for my first electronic poem to work poetically it was best I didn't have too many bells and whistles at hand. Images and movement of shapes and text were plenty. I tried to stay away from making the multimedia aspects too numerous and complex because I wanted a sort of simplicity and bareness to the poem and a focus on the text, with the other elements acting as compliments. The software helped introduce me to the process of creating electronic poetry while ensureing that I did not go overboard, though I would have liked the inclusion of hyperlinking to different slides. But overall I found it an interesting and rewarding process, I discovered what goes into creating an electronic poem and I realized especially that like the reader must consider how the text and electronic elements work together, the writer must make sure that the electronic elements actually do work with the text in a way that enhances the readers experience.

Jumping in to/ Playing games with electronic poetry

Electronic poetry, poetry itself is often hard to define, how do we handle the added elements of new-media poetry in which images, motion and reader interaction pair with the text. Conception, execution and consumption varies greatly between poetry on the page and hypermedia poetry and questions and problems of lexicon evaluation and comparison are frequent. But how can we look at a piece of electronic poetry and what do the multimedia nature of electronic poetry have to do with the meaning and purpose of a poem? Hopefully I’ll be doing an okay job with answering those sorts of questions by examining two electronic poems, “Mermaid” by Alis Yung and “Roulette” by Bebe Molina and Daniel C Howe.

“Mermaid” is not comprised of original text, rather it is a reinvisioning of part of a William Butler Yeats poem. The poem “A Man Young and Old” has 11 parts tracing youth, age, and the limitations, sorrows and joys of both. The third part, that Yung used for the text of “Mermaid” reads

“The Mermaid
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.”

When you open “Mermaid” the only words that are readable are “A mermaid found a swimming lad,”
and the rest of the page seems to only have small clouds of words. The type is too small to read even if the reader sticks their face right next to the screen (I tried that). The reader tries to click on on of the clouds, it starts growing and tremoring when the mouse is near and quickly shrinks back up. A spark of joy as the reader thinks they know what to do. But to their surprise and possibly sadness, the text balloons won’t stay inflated, they dance around, shrink back up, avoid your touch.

Yung seemed to be counting on the reader’s prior knowledge of the Yeats poem, or at least that they would get so frustrated they would google “A mermaid found a swimming lad” because of the difficulty reading the rest of the poem. But for it’s lack of easy readability, “The Mermaid” has the added elements of movement and reader interaction. The flopping of the text brings to mind the ocean, the movement of a fish’s tail, a struggle and desperation. The reader’s growing frustration with the text has them feeling much like the mermaid, desperate, frantic, joyful as they finally “catch” the text only to feel defeated once more as it quickly shrinks away. “Forgot in cruel happiness That even lover drown”. The electronic elements of “Mermaid” are few and simple but effective in that the reader actually interacts with the poem, not only that but the interaction and reaction are fitting to the poem’s theme. though one could just read the poem on the page, the multimedia version, though the same text, provides a new perspective to the text. While reading Yeats' words you see things more from the perspective of the swimming lad, you feel his surprise and his sorrow. But while interacting with Yeats' words through Yung's perspective you seem to become the mermaid. You pick one cloud of text for your own, you grapple with it, needing to see it and understand. Maybe at the end you are victorious and you are able to make out some of the words you've tried so frantically to make legible but while celebrating your victory the words shrink back up and you have to try again. To read the text only and multimedia poems is to experience two sides of the same short poem and in conjunction, they seem to lead to a deeper understanding of the text.

"Roulette" by Bebe Molina and Daniel C Howe is a different experience altogether. The poem has no text-only counterpart, nor could there be and this piece is more about the newness and untransferability of new media poetry than the idea of new takes on old ideas, as "Mermaid" did. When you open "Roulette" you find some sort of new-wave electronic dance music coming from your computer's speakers and three large, slowly spinning cubes with many smaller, semi-opaque cubes bouncing inside each. On the bottom is a randomly selected sentence, mine was; “Tuesday occupied his mouth, she said into it: the weight os a rose pulling down the word ‘rose’, somewhere again, headlights blinking when chance departs or wen she walks away from the table, does it hit red at the shot of her”.


Which makes little sense but sounds poetic. One I moved my mouse around for a bit, I discovered you could click on the cubes which I did. The middle cube became the word “Iris” and the sentence at the bottom changed.
I clicked again and again, each word in the cube seemed attatched to a poetic-sounding sentence fragment.
When put all together it seemed to make some sense, but at the same time the randomness plus the pre-constructed sentence fragments just made it seem like this was all trying too hard to be poetic. Though I think “Roulette” has the potential to be a nice commentary on the nature of language and the idea of poetry it would work much better without certain elements, like the music. The aesthetics could be better without cubes and high contrast, something softer maybe. The idea of “Roulette” I like very much, and there are almost endless opportunities for expansion and increasing complexity of the poem in the future. Since the structure of “Roulette” makes it impossible to imagine it as a text-only, it was important o make the electronic elements as perfect as they could be, I think that this good idea could have been made even better if the electronic elements did not appear so hard and rigid.

Multimedia, hypermedia, electronic, whatever you want to call this new form of literature it is clear that even within the group there are great possibilities for differences within this one ‘genre’. Though it’s clear from “The Mermaid” and “Roulette” not only the multiple ways electronic elements can interact with text, but also the benefits and problems of making additions to text. Though a new and relatively unstable art form, hypermedia poetry has the possibility of introducing new ways of thinking about words and new dimensions of literacy to readers through symbiociation of not only words, images and movement but concepts as well.

"The Mermaid" can be read here: "http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/summer2001/yeats/launch.html"
"Roulette" can be found at: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/08Spring/howe/index.html

Poetry and pixels and popups, oh my!

My initial response to electronic poetry based on the pieces assigned so far is excitement and fascination honestly. I signed up for this class because of interest in literature, the cultural impact of the electronic age, fulfillment of the ITS requirement and just plain curiosity’s sake. What does electronic literature mean? I knew about blogs, I knew what Zork is but I really had an exceedingly vague idea of electronic literature. And now that I have even the slightest idea I am hopeful for the reading part of “Reading/Writing Electronic Literature” and maybe a bit intimidated by the ‘writing’ aspect. It seemed to me that the main idea of the three assigned pieces is that bringing themes and methods of poetry to the digitalized realm can enhance the message and imagery of the poetry giving the reader a different experience and leaving the reader.
In “The Best Cigarette”, Billy Collins uses animation to create a stream of images while he narrates the poem. Starting with a typeset, foreshadowing the end of the poem. The images flow into one another, rising out of smoke, or the smoke rose in mirrored patterns that seemed oddly forboding as the poem discussed the contradictions of cigarettes, hinting at the allure of danger, and later on, the productivity that stems from habit.
“Puzzling Through Nine Lives” is not animated like the Collins poem but I’d venture that it’s even more effective. Pulling pieces about to revel the lines of the poems, the images on the tiles alter forming a patchwork. Forming a face. Forming a map. The multifacted, confusing and everchanging nature of identity is emphasized by the structure of the electronic elements of the poem as it becomes interactive, creating and shaping the idea of identity.
And unlike “The Best Cigarette” by Collins and “Nine: Puzzling through Several Lives” by Lewis, “A Man Young and Old: The Mermaid” was originally written by Yeats, before the digital age. It was adopted by Alis Yung into “The Mermaid”. I don’t know if it was just my computer but when I tried to read the poem, the stanzas wiggled and flopped about, I would not have known what the poem even said if I had not already read the text only poem. But the format and motion of the poem reminded me of the slippery, unsteady, impermenance of the sea, fish, love and life as the poem speaks of.
I’m looking forward to the course, the three introductory pieces we read display how poetry can be portrayed in the digital age, not just on a flat page but moving, but alive, interactive. It engages the reader on a whole new level, helping them gain a deeper understanding of the message of the poem.

Test.

Test.