Monday, November 13, 2006

Its name was Penelope

usually when i mention books here, seems like i choose to mention the ones I've never read, and only reading about them makes me intrigued and curious to do so. ...here is one: Its Name Was Penelope (1993) is a hypertext by Judy Malloy. and one of the earliest works of hypertext fiction. The narrator, Anne, is a middle-aged photographer who works in the California arts world. Malloy describes the work in these terms:

The six files (or parts) of Its Name was Penelope [...] are loosely based on books from The Odyssey. The Reader chooses which file to read and can move at will between the six files. Within each file [...] the reader is given, at the will of the computer's pseudo-random number generator ("the thread that fate spins" Rouse p. 11), a series of individual screens--each, like a photo in a photo album, representing a picture from Anne's memory--so that the work is like a pack of small paintings or photographs that the computer continuously shuffles. (correspondence with the author)

"....the work is, in fact, an essential mode of reader interaction The second way interaction is realized in Web Forward Anywhere is through an Anywhere control. It uses a random number generator to bring the reader to a new place in the work. Judy Malloy used this technique in its name was Penelope ; it very much conveys the quirkiness of human memory. It is also very effective in simulating the effect of dense interconnections: if every screen in Forward Anywhere builds in some way on what the authors have written and read before, shouldn t all the screens be implicitly related and equally .... more about the artist no matter how hard i tried to find some fragments of the the text it self, i found no trace of it!!!! i did find a place for purchasing it on-line, and lots of reviews, lots of recent art projects, such us: Revelations of Secret Surveillance, and others, never the less, it does look peculiar not to be able to read a portion of the original text i was looking for, taking in consideration that it is one of the earliest works of hypertext fiction - how can that be?

read also "...Readers of hypertext become authors, creating the work as they go..."

any one can help?

2 comments:

Diane Dehler said...

ePenelope is intriqing indeed. How ever do you find all of these things?

Diane Dehler said...

It's time for edreams and such.