Writing the wave:
nodes, hypertext, trajectories
Written for Artlink, June 2001

Earlier this year, when the Chicago-based Electronic Literature Organisation announced the shortlist for its 2001 Electronic Literature Awards, three Australians were honoured. While none made it into the winners' circle, Komninos Zervos received an Honorable Mention for his cd-rom work cyberpoetry underground in the Poetry Section. The shortlist also included geniwate's (Jenny Waite) Nepabunna and Mez's (Maryanne Breeze) _the data][h!][bleeding texts_.

This competition, like those instigated by the trAce Online Writing Centre and AltX in 1998 and 2000, has drawn attention to the diverse practices which operate as 'hypertext' as well as lifted those works into prominence. RMIT lecturer Adrian Miles, who has been working with hypertext since 1992 and teaching it since 1995, contends that Australian work is receiving attention because of its "intelligence and willingness to experiment".1 According to Miles, many Australian practitioners are not "too fussed whether what we're doing is 'real' writing or not, we just get on with making work."

Teri Hoskin, curator of the electronic Writing Research ensemble (eWRe), attributes Australian writing's success to a "relaxed attitude and perhaps a simple, skilled and sophisticated use of technology. Perhaps it's because we do not draw such sharp distinctions between literature and visual arts."2 This relaxed approach presents a challenge in defining changing and adapting literary practices. Miles describes hypertext as "perhaps the oldest 'new media' which has a very sophisticated understanding of narrative, interactivity, multilinearity and multivocality. Things that most other 'new' media are still grappling with ... I think hypertext has, over a number years, explored many issues with structure, pattern, rhythm and multivocality that new media would do well to learn from."

Hoskin observes that "we don't have a vocabulary for online art/writing - we are still making it." Neologisms like cyberpoetry, eliterature and mezangling emerge, diverge and converge as hypertext. New South Wales based Mez, describes her spliced and mangled texts as 'mezangling' and Queensland-based Komninos develops concrete and performance poetry to generate 'cyberpoetry'. While poetry and text are adaptable in the digital environment, there is an obsessive focus on definition and identification. Adelaide-based geniwate has instigated a discussion list and website for Australian electronic literature practitioners as a means of channelling this discourse and desire for definition. The list and website will develop into an extensive resource for electronic writing. Such ruptures indicate that these practices don't readily inure as a genre. Their defining commonalties are the use of digital technology and a willingness to become or reshape 'writing'.

Many new media works contribute to the field of hypertext despite not being concerned with the literary. Miles said that he prefers to "think of hypertext as being primarily about links and nodes and their relations, which may or may not privilege words". The winner of last year's Faulding Award for Multimedia was Melinda Rackham's [carrier] which investigates viral symbiosis and defines its interaction specially for each user. When such an interactive and visual piece receives what is ostensibly a literary prize, it's apparent that 'writing' isn't what it used to be.

In this post-literate world where words don't determine the form of writing, how else should one conceptualise hypertext? Over several years, eWRe has initiated projects which contribute to discourse about hypertext and partnered with trAce Online Writing Centre and ANAT to develop a series of online writing residencies in the late 1990s. Hoskin developed the projects, ensemble logic + choragraphy, lux: notes for an electronic writing and Verve: the other writing, for eWRe. She also edited ensemble logic, an anthology of extracts from works published on the eWRe site.

This interest in the plasticity of texts extends to Hoskin's own work. In meme_shift, she works with constructions and artifacts of Japanese culture for a postcolonial narrative of engagement. As a work in progress which Hoskin refers to as a 'notebook', meme_shift is steeped in fascination and a desire to know more. By working on the web, Hoskin's writing is concerned with "playing with what [the internet] might do for the way we read a text, the way one can write."3 Such an approach is evident in daily bred, produced in collaboration with performance artist, Anne Walton from a writing performance residency at Sydney's Squat Space. In this piece, clicking through email exchanges between the artists opens new windows, producing layers of sound and image from Quicktime movies.

Throughout her body of work, Francesca da Rimini has maintained an inquiry into identity, power and gender. Her current work-in-progress, identity_runners ... the eyes of Liquid_Nation is produced with Ephemera (NYC) and Discordia (Roma). Da Rimini exploits the predatory psycho-sexual imagination expanding within spaces of communications: "I give you your fantasy and I make you deal with me."4 Adopting and developing persona such as Gashgirl, [dollyoko] and Liquid_Nation, da Rimini has worked collaboratively and independently through email, discussion lists, MUDs and MOOs as well as the web. In Los dias y las noches del muertos news-media imagery is spliced with texts about war and struggle from Napoleon, the US Space Command and the Zapatistas: this pastiche is presented on a split screen. Da Rimini's work is often uneasy: eerie and haunted, deceptively seductive, direct and articulate in its delivery.

With funding from Cinemedia, Ballarat-based Sally Pryor's work examines writing systems and the human-computer interface. Pryor is one of the few Australian writers who is programming her own works. With an Australia Council New Media Arts Board Fellowship, she is currently developing As I May Write and by the end of 2001, she will complete a prototype for a new interface on cd-rom, Writing in Bits. Pryor approaches her work with a theoretical emphasis which draws on linguistic theory, particularly Integrational Linguistics. In 2001, Pryor travelled to Oxford University in the UK to study linguistics. Pryor has also produced the cd-rom, Postcard from Tunis which is a personal portrait of Tunis and Arabic drawing on the artist's experiences of living there. Crossing cultures and languages, this work also explores reading and writing with a purpose built interface.

Collaborative work is flourishing on the web and Tasmanians, Diane Caney and Robin Petterd have produced several works jointly. With Caney as writer and Petterd as artist, their work crosses artforms. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, Caney describes their hypertexts as "assemblages" which the reader 'assembles' by interacting with the works. "It stemmed from my fascination with collage ... as it operates across the minds of reader/viewers as they assemble their own readings," Caney said.5 They have produced four works together - Surface, archiving imagination, travels towards and Imaginative Reading - which reflexively explore textuality. In the production process, after one of the collaborators has instigated a new work, the artists take turns to work on the piece as ideas develop .

Hypertext itself is a work in progress which continues to tentatively fold and unfold. Artists from all artforms are producing hypertextual work and the delineation of artforms is subject to some continental drift. Miles observes that "hypertext fiction in Australia seems to have aligned itself more strongly with the new media community than has happened elsewhere." If this is the case, then connection across artforms is occurring through exchanges among those artists who are exploring new media and embracing the textual and spatial promises of cyberculture.

Linda Carroli

Sites and writers mentioned in this article:
Electronic Literature Organisation http://www.eliterature.org
trAce Online Writing Centre http://trace.ntu.org.uk
AltX http://www.altx.com
Komninos Zervos http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/~komninos/kom.html
Mez http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/
geniwate http://www.idaspoetics.com.au
Adrian Miles http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/adrian/
Convergence: Australian elit discussion list and website http://www.ozemail.com.au/~geniwate
Melinda Rackham http://www.subtle.net
electronic Writing Research ensemble http://ensemble.va.com.au
Australian Network of Art and Technology http://www.anat.org.au
Josephine Wilson and Linda Carroli http://ensemble.va.com.au/water
Verve: the other writing http://vervewriting.org
Teri Hoskin http://ensemble.va.com.au/meme_shift
Teri Hoskin and Anne Walton http://ensemble.va.com.au/dailybred
Francesca da Rimini http://sysx.org/gashgirl
Sally Pryor http://www.ozemail.com.au/~spryor
Diane Caney http://www.overthere.com.au
Robin Petterd http://otheredge.com.au


Notes
1. Adrian Miles, email interview, June 1, 2001
2. Teri Hoskin, email interview, June 4, 2001 (all Teri Hoskin's comments from this interview unless otherwise footnoted)
3. Teri Hoskin, Artist Statement, meme_shift, http://ensemble.va.com.au/meme_shift
4. Francesca da Rimini, "Tutte le donne sono fantasmi", Intervista a Doll Yoko (aka Francesca Da Rimini), The Thing, March 1, 2000, translation of "i tuoi dati, le tue fantasie... e io ti faro vedere le mie.", http://www.ecn.org/thingnet/frameset.html
5. Diane Caney, email intervew, June 13, 2001