hypertext/new media/electronic lit

Hi, I am Deena. I'm a hypertext / electronic literature / new media / electronic expression addict.

Nonrequired WARNING about this stuff:

Warning: Reading electronic literature can cause sleepless nights, longing for tools that do not exist yet, and dangerous transmissions of ideas.

Official advice: Do not stray any further into the realms of the incredible possibilities offered by combining sound, images, motion, navigation, and structure into a symbiociation of meaning. Do not imagine telling a story from more than one character's viewpoint, showing paths between nodes that continue a theme, and weaving many connections of meaning.

Ok, you have been duly warned. Now for the fun stuff:

  • Peek at my webshelf to find something to read. A webshelf is like a bookshelf--and I organized mine by how long a work takes to interact with.
  • Get the basics of electronic literature rhetoric with my new Fundamentals. This is a coloring book/hornbook for electronic literature--it provides basic explanations of rhetorical devices (e.g., links, paths, navigation, images, sounds, etc.), simpler exercises for you to do and play with, and links to works that use these devices.
  • Check out the wonderful online community
  • See my works and links.

Don't expect fast updates, daily blogs, or great insights here.There are many great places to look, and I am keeping this list more for my own aid to memory than for any one else's aid to instruction. This isn't the best place to get your daily fix of stuff, but there is no shortage of places to explore.

You can email me at deenalarsen at yahoo dot com and get the news much faster than I will update this site. (I have updated the links as of June 2008.)

My electronic literary forays: (listed in chronological order on my cv). The Virginia Tech's Center for Digital Discourse and Culture has graciously offered to host this and other web -art and literature sites to promote new media literature and art. These mirror links are in the (VT) beside the names. I am an independant writer, and sometimes my website goes down because my ISP forgets to pay the light bill.

Intertwined tales:
  • Datafeeds (Visionary Landscapes, 2008) shows the same event in three social worlds
    (the blind, the sighted, and the heartbeat.

Flash collaborations: The page_space collaborations explore relations between content and design.

The Princess Murderer is a game based narrative with sex and violence.

E: Electron is a love story based on the periodic table of elements, with a philosophical treatise woven in and around it.
Matrix poem: Firefly is a poem 6 lines long with 5 stanzas. However, each line is also 6 lines "deep." Click on the line to uncover ulterior meanings.
Flash imagery work: Experiments in backdrops of imagery and motion and sound for language.
Mystery novel/kanji-ku: Anna has disappeared and the only clue she leaves is an open internet connection. This is a complex layered work where 2 levels of kanji-kus serve as structure and framework. Come on in, the water's fine!

Kanji-kus--Kanji-kus are short poems based on the Japanese kanji or ideogram for the word itself. I want to explore the innate meanings inherent in the word.

Note that the javascript in all of these has gone on to bigger and better things. If anyone would like to help me upgrade these, I would be eternally grateful...

 

Further, we mourn the loss of Cauldron and Net.
Structural works: These works explore a structural theme using layout, imagery, words, and navigation.
Disk based work--These are my works from Eastgate Systems. Samplers is a foray into structural storytelling using Storyspace. Marble Springs is a HyperCard based work which explores the lives of women in a Colorado mining town
Government Manuals:

I also wrote and designed a hypertext for Reclamation--now you can explore ways to actually get things done in government.

Articles

Other stuff Syllabi
  • Eng 789: Technopoetry: Electronic Literature and New Media (Johnston, W) at Emory University, Graduate Program, Spring 2003 using Sea Whispers and Language of the Void
  • textual media [nclc375/engl360] syllabus, (Leslie Smith and Dean Taciuch)at New Century College & the Department of English George Mason University, Fall 2002, using Firefly
  • RDG 530 (John E. McEneaney) Fall, 2002 using Stained Word Window
  • EL170C Introduction to Creative Writing Poetry, at Middlebury College, Vermont, Spring 2002
  • English 278 Literature in a Wired World, at University of Maryland (Jason Rhody) using Samplers
  • LC3204 (Stephanie Stickland), at Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002, using What You See is not What I See in Currents.
  • English 698 Hypertext Design Studio at New Jersey Institute of Technology,(Chris Funkhouser)2000 and 2002, and using Ferris Wheels
  • Visualizing Narrative:Writing Spatially in the New Media Writing #6257 Fall 2001, (Carolyn Guertin) at Faculty of Extension, University of Alberta, Canada
  • Tinity College, Dublin 2001 Powerpoint Course Syllabus using Sampers
  • Literature in Transition, NEH, (Kate Hayles) 2001, using Disappearing Rain
  • College Writing 108 Fall 2001, version 3.0, University of California, Berkeley using Father Figures
  • English 165 Hyperliterature, English 236, andHyperliterature 328 at UC Santa Barbara Department of English (Alan Lui) using Bubbles
  • English 115 at Vanderbuilt University using Samplers (2001) using Bubbles
  • English 652: writing hypertext, Virginia Commonwealth University, (Elizabeth Cooper) Fall 2000
  • Hills State University, South Dakota, Fall 2000 using Samplers

 

Please e-mail me (deenalarsen AT yahoo DOT com) to find out the precise URLs for works in progress.

^top^

 

 

 


Marble Springs is now obsolete, as it ran only in HyperCard.

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