NEW MEDIA & HYPERTEXT: Must my sentences dance?
I do love the audio visual narratives that play up the graphics and motion over story, but isn’t there a place for digital text as the main vehicle of narrative? It seems that hypertext as a way of storytelling, without the added pizazz of preferably moving visuals and audio that to me at least sounds annoying when repetitiously run throughout the piece, is either a dinosaur or needs the help of much more than color and background images. And yes, sentences that sing no long mean eloquent writing.
There’s much to think about.
(Update: a relative post at HtLit here.)
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
October 19th, 2010 at 4:28 am
Ideally, I think all of the media elements should work together. Digital text/ narratives should form a key part of the multimedia mix rather than being the absolute central backbone in a work of digitally-born fiction.
The text in many projects on Dreaming Methods is blurred, obscured, transient, animated mouse-responsive. Reading from the screen is not the same as reading from the page, and being able to fully read-to-the-end and/or completely understand (or even properly see in some cases) the streams of text within our projects is not considered a requirement for a piece to work as intended.
Best regards
Andy
October 19th, 2010 at 6:19 am
Hi Andy,
I completely agree with you here, except to state that text as priority is another concept in multimedia. Just as my personal love, hypertext, is not meant to replace the book form of literature, I think that multimedia mixes where visuals are the strongest point and bear the weight of the narrative are a wonderfully creative addition to literary endeavors. All art must evolve. But no one wants to throw away the Mona Lisa as being obsolete.
Personally, I’m really into the visual and audio enhanced story and am learning ways of technologically advancing my own writing to stretch into those formats. It’s all good!
best,
susan