Being Creative on the Web
On this page you will find links to two "creative" projects I have been
working on.
The first, "A Tale of Three Kings (and one who would be)," is an
experimental, collaboratively constructed mixture of poetry, prose,
and graphics. This project, which some have described as stretching
the traditional boundaries of between author and reader,
is an example of an extreme application of reader response theory taken.
It began as a single poem
which I wrote the day
after the Los
Angeles riots of 1992, and later revised and imported into Storyspace.
I then passed the disk along to fellow participants in an NEH summer
institute I attended in the summer of 1995. In October of the same year, I
converted the
Storyspace version to HTML and posted it on the Web, along with a form
which allowed readers to react to certain portions of the text--after the
reactions were mailed to me, I would link them to the original text, then
link reactions to other reactions, etc., creating a work which contains a
wide variety of viewpoints and writing styles.
The second, Fly, is
just the opposite.
I call it "an experimental non-hypertextual
hypertextual narrative." It is non-hypertextual in that, unlike most
hypertext fiction that I and others have written, the reader is not
provided with several choices of links/paths to follow--there are only
two choices for the reader: 1) follow the link to the next node, or 2) read
each section separately and linearly. It IS hypertextual, in the most basic
sense,
in that it consists
of several nodes which are connected by links. I use Fly as a
starting point when introducing students and others unfamiliar with hypertext
fiction to the concept of following links without the frustration of "getting lost"
in the text. I then introduce them to more complicated works which contain
multiple paths and a variety of links to follow.
A Tale of Three Kings (and one who
would be)
A Tale of Three Kings (and one who would be)
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Fly
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