This is great -- I've got hegira running by itself, one in each monitor, and Kelly and I
were eating dinner in the lab break room, I come back here to get
something, and one screen has defaulted to black, and the other to white.
They're spinning in binaries ...
Watch it, there it goes.
It seems Moulthrop is setting
up binaries with the marginalia, opposed to each other, and deposed by the
larger middle-text. He's also keeping us aware, with the HTML gags, of
the very medium in which he's writing.
Interesting that revealing source is the only way to stop it from
spinning; showing its constructedness brings it to a halt. Let's all
look, and what the hell does <td><imb><a href><hr> mean?
View source.
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Michael Joyce has noted that print "stays itself" while hypertext "replaces itself." This is true in the sense that there is an ephemeral quality to hypertext, even that lexias once visited can change upon re-reading, but Hegirascope is the first Web hypertext that we have seen that actively replaces itself. Unlike the falling tree in the forest unheard for lack of a hearer, Moulthrop's narrative continues on with or without the reader. You have to choose, or the story
will go on without you.
[breakdown, or, the medium clouds our message]
it seems that revealing the codes in a web browser does a few things, and
maybe does these things in hegirascope as well
i see reveal codes as a way to get to the constructedness of language,
both in HyperText Markup Language, see the words before they're
"interpreted" (and differently, depending on platform and browser, i might
add) by your browser (why is it called a "browser"? why are "servers"
called so -- the language of computing is very revealing in terms of
structures of power and control, and illusory choice. how about "finger?"
"motherboard?" etc.)
that there exists a base unit of signification we
can get to with html is very interesting to me -- it reveals something
else, also (certainly not on purpose, but this doesn't matter) -- the
manner in which signification operates in a system of arbitrary signs: by
difference, only with respect to that which it is not. this system isn't
so obvious, save to english geeks like us who've studied it perhaps, but
it's much more available in the computing world. it's *obvious* HTML is
arbitrary -- in fact, it's obvious that the language isn't even
*finished* yet [what languages are? dead ones ...]. this powerfully
echoes the act of signification and even more powerfully anticipates the
slipping image-signifier that can only refer to itself. in the e-world,
there has only and always been just a copy ...
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