Textures of Impermanence by Syar S. Alia

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

Submitted by: Syarifah Haji Said Halim

An exegesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Creative Arts (Hons)

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

La Trobe University Bundoora, VICTORIA 3086 Australia

October 2011 Â

Table of Contents Statement of Authorship

Acknowledgements

Abstract

iii

Introduction

Theory and research: memory and impermanence

ii)

Creative practice: The Resilience of Echoes

Chapter 1

Why electronic literature? i)

A contest of definitions

ii)

The appeal of disorder

Chapter 2

Disappearing Rain: a performance in gaps and bridges Chapter 3

Welcome to Pine Point: a walk down memory lane Epilogue

Reference List (including Background Reading and

Research for The Resilience of Echoes) Appendix

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my supervisor Norie Neumark for all her guidance, support and insightful feedback throughout the research, writing and brainstorming that has resulted in this exegesis and the creative work that accompanies it.

Thank you to my lecturers, Susan Bradley Smith and Gabrielle Murray, for helping me find the bones of this project in their classes, both in the fields of research and emotional exploration.

To my Issues and Methods classmates for being a most spectacular thinktank. Thank you to them for their interest and suggestions, they clarified and sharpened many of my initial ideas for the project.

Thank you to Ruth, Annika, Anneli for their veteran advice, and to Davina and Kathleen for going through Honours with me.

Finally thank you to my friends and family for their love and support.

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Abstract Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature Syarifah Haji Said Halim Supervisor: Norie Neumark

The creative process of capturing and making sense of memories, specifically in relation to death and loss, is one that has to contend with the mutable and intangible nature of remembering and forgetting. This Honours thesis comprises two parts: a creative electronic literature work titled The Resilience of Echoes, which explores the friction between impermanence and the process of memorializing the dead, and a research-based exegesis that examines two works of electronic literature, Disappearing Rain and Pine Point. By studying the way these two works present their content elements through their use of formal features such as the hyperlink and multimedia, I highlight the specific capability of electronic literature to suffuse explorations of memory with digital decay, obsolescence and mutation via external forces (the Internet). My examination of these works demonstrates the ways in which electronic literature, though its formal elements can provide a representation of memory that is both more vital and more ephemeral â&#x20AC;&#x201C; working like memory itself.

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

INTRODUCTION

START HERE:

OR START HERE:

My mother died when I was eight.

I have been blogging online since I

Ever since, I’ve felt that there was a

was seventeen and using the

line drawn, a demarcation between

Internet for even longer.

who I was when she was alive (and

Increasingly I am becoming more

who she was when she was alive)

curious about the creation of stuff

and who I am now that she is gone.

(both trivial and not) specifically

The past is a land I have lost my

for computers and the Internet –

passport to, but it is also a land that

and how the things we make, like

only exists in my mind. In itself, it

blogs, websites, animations, videos,

is no longer there and there is no

sound clips and memes, break

physically going back. All that’s left

apart, get remade, remixed and

are memories, themselves liars,

reupholstered, die off, degenerate

proof of something that no longer

or, sometimes, live forever. This

exists.

curiosity is what brought me to the field of electronic literature, a chimeric composite of old and new and a study in the transience of committing something to pixels.

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

i) Theory and research: memory and impermanence

In my research I came across Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s work, the Impermanence Agent, an application that took pieces of data – images, text, links – from the web pages users were browsing to replace bits of the fictional story it contained. It did this until all traces of the original story were gone – something new created over the body of something old. This work highlighted the impermanence of work on the Internet, the transient nature of things that live there, and how quickly they are erased, replaced or simply disappear from view. The Impermanence Agent also spoke to the person inside me who wanted to tell the story of my mother’s death. It is a story that has many voices but is markedly defined by one very large absence – this absence is what I had shaped myself around. When one feels as if the core of them is something that no longer exists, how does this affect everything that is built around it? The Impermanence Agent embodied this process of erasure and showed me a different way to look at how one “remembers” something that no longer exists. Wardrip-Fruin’s work also showed me the possibility of electronic literature as a tool to aid me in telling my story. The Impermanence Agent has similarities to a feature many web-users are familiar with: browsing history. Inasmuch as the Agent was a piece of degenerative and regenerative writing – a story that ate itself – it was also a record, a real-time archive of the places a web-user had been within a certain time span. It remembered these places, and crystallized them within itself.

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

The work highlighted how the Internet remembered, how it relied on memory and how it was, in itself, a form of memory for its users. One of the first things I did in my attempt to recover my mother, to go back to that lost land, was to Google her name. I wanted to know if the Internet remembered more than I did. This question of memory became the main focus of my own creative work for the thesis and this exegesis. As a child of multiple parentages – print, film, audio production, gaming, animation – electronic literature borrows relentlessly from old and established media while also endeavouring to be new and revolutionary. As a result, it is constantly in the process of being understood. The field of electronic literature is as large as it is undefinable. It is impossible to discuss all its elements in this exegesis; therefore I have set out to focus on a number of specific concerns relating to memory, formally and thematically. Formally my focus is on the multi-media nature of electronic literature, and how this affects the telling or presentation of an idea or story that is based on memory, which will hopefully explain my choice of it as a form. Thematically, too, my focus is on memory – how certain elements of electronic literature, like regeneration, collective memory and obsolescence make it a more conducive place to discuss memory and its related themes in a creative work. In exploring the relation of the formal to the thematic, I will ask, do these themes need to be explicitly present in the content or the text, or can the tactile and sensory reading experience – more varied than flipping pages in a book – reveal these themes to users? To explore these concerns, I will look at two case studies of electronic literature works, and analyse their characteristics in relation to these

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

questions, as well as in relation to other creative practices in the field, including my own (see Section ii of this Introduction). In Chapter 2, I look at the hypertext work Disappearing Rain, and how the use of hyperlink creates a fragmented story that replicates a “structural chaos which seems to express the actualities of lived experience” (Enns 2001, p. 17), such as the chaos of memory. In Chapter 3, Welcome to Pine Point serves as an example of a hypermedia work with less focus on text, and also one which harnesses the capacity of the Internet as a place for collective remembrance. Pine Point also highlights the tension between the transience of electronic literature and its capacity as a memory bank. Prefacing my analysis of these works, in Chapter 1, I touch briefly on broader issues within the field of electronic literature in order to frame my discussion of how features like its mutability encourage creation of work that tackles the intangible.

ii) Creative practice: The Resilience of Echoes

This creative arts project comprises two parts: this exegesis, and my own exploration of producing a work of electronic literature, titled The Resilience of Echoes, which is attached here as a CD. Employing Flash animation, Resilience combines poetry, prose, images, sound and hyperlinks that house the still-evolving and still-unfolding story of the death of my mother and my memories of her. In the current version, Resilience has five sections of varying length; it includes room for expansion in subsequent versions, a feature I will return to in the conclusion to this exegesis.

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

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My intention in making a piece of electronic literature myself was to fully participate in the very field I was researching. While Resilience currently exists as an offline work, I plan to upload it to the Internet in the near future, and directly contribute to the ether of existing works and allow it to enter a timeline that may include obsolescence (due to possible software issues) and decay (in the form of dead links or code that ceases to function). As a memory work, it is a work in progress, and as such leaves room for additions and changes by me, or by anyone else who responds to the work. Although this exegesis is not explicitly about Resilience, I do make references to it throughout, to foreground the motivations and inspirations that I came across in my research. These references will hopefully further illuminate my arguments below about the functions of electronic literature as offering a different potential for the type of open-ended and multi-linear exploration of the themes I want to pursue in comparison to traditional print literature.

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

CHAPTER 1 Why electronic literature?

i) A contest of definitions

Often the discussion of electronic literature pits it against print, placing it in a chronology that has little room for overlap or coexistence. The term’s inclusion of “literature” is especially controversial, provoking sceptics such as Sven Birkerts who describes his book, The Gutenberg Elegies, as “an elegy to old practices – to slow reading and serious books” (1994, p. 6) – practices, which he argues, are being overshadowed by the emergence of electronic literature. He goes on to assert that “the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word” (1994, p. 6). The ongoing debate around how much actual “literature” is in electronic literature speaks to the larger issue of language – the changing meanings of “literature”, “writing” and “reading” in light of the convergence between computers and literary expression, the destabilizing of the printed word in the hierarchy of media elements, as well as the struggle to define the parameters of electronic literature. Much effort has been spent trying to name this convergence, evident in the works of leading scholars N. Katherine Hayles, Espen Aarseth, Lev Manovich and many others. While these concerns form the basis of significant scholarship surrounding the field1, they are not specifically relevant to the focus of this exegesis.

1 Some of these works are included in my reference list under the section “Background Reading” (p. 31)

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

The discussion of electronic literature in this exegesis is based on the work of N. Katherine Hayles, a widely accepted expert in the field, who defined the term as encompassing “first-generation digital [objects] created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer” (2008, p. 3). She goes on to elaborate that these objects should be “[works] with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer” (2008, p. 3, emphasis mine). This definition is useful not only for its specificity, but also, for its primary focus on the role of the computer as a point of creation, exhibition and distribution. Concerns to do with the literary are perhaps more present in the creative work that makes up the main part of this project; but I will limit my discussion of the writing in the electronic literature works considered in this exegesis in terms of the writing’s engagement with the themes of memory, death and loss, and impermanence.

ii) The appeal of disorder

Growing out of the established conventions and features of its originating media, the overwhelming number of elements involved in electronic literature has created a plasticity that intrigues and attracts practitioners and scholars to the medium even as it confuses and frustrates traditionalists. There will always be those that seek new forms specifically for the new problems, and therefore potentials, they introduce. The lure of permanence – the desire to create something that will last the ages, the dream of becoming your generation’s next Austen or Shakespeare –

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

is familiar and understandable. This desire imbues the act of putting ink to paper, the act of making “durably inscribed marks that have the decency to not mutate while one is reading them” (Hayles 2008, p. 72). However, my interest here is in how the reverse of this has increasingly become appealing to those frustrated and dissatisfied with the old models. Computers and their arsenal of tools allow us to find new pathways for expressing and presenting ideas – as well as pathways that formally engages with the ephemerality and transitory quality of networked existence. Perhaps in this era of postmodernism, with growing generations of people who have grown up with the computer, the Internet and its many permutations, the margins of a bound and printed book have become too constricting. Writing has long been a way to externalize and order the internal; perhaps electronic literature is an example of “the extraordinary convergence of [current] thinking with the digital means that now give it expression” (Lanham 1993, p.51). There is a seductive quality to the “ephemeral […] and multi-part nature” (Rinehart 2011) of electronic literature, where expectations of permanence meet “variability and rapid obsolescence of the media formats often used in such works” (Rinehart 2011). Ruth Page elaborates on these ideas in the following excerpt from an essay she wrote to compliment N. Katherine Hayles’s book, Electronic Literature:

“The medium specific properties of electronic narratives aptly underscore the fragmentary nature of self representation, as the pixels on a flickering screen and the potential decay of hyperlinks give the lie to the illusion of textual permanence conferred by the printed page.

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

Representation in digital media, be it a fictional or actual world has an inescapably transitory quality.” (2008)

In the instance of The Resilience of Echoes, this “potential decay” overlaps with the infixity of electronic literature, its nature as “something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions” (Manovich 2001, p. 36) making it an appealing form for a work that deals with naturally elusive and transient themes, such as death and the nature of memory. Memory is, of course, never easy to pin down (a running theme, it seems). There have been various analogies for what human memory is like – a database of events, snapshots, an ongoing film reel, a computer with a buggy interface – all attempts to order an otherwise messy business. Lovorka GruicGrmusa, in analysing the role of memory in the novel Gerald’s Party by Robert Coover2, describes it as “process-dependent, sustaining its qualities to store data but also modifying it while some fragments of experience disappear from consciousness totally” (2008, p. 281). What better place to inscribe a constantly changing process than a surface that is also constantly changing? This instability also provides an alternative structure for creation, “an environment of ambient process and networked agency, [where] the likelihood that works will be lost is a relief, not a cause for regret” (Tabbi 2007). This alternative mode of writing departs from the tradition of permanence in print, and can imbue literary electronic works with an agency of changing and evolving on its own. The Impermanent Agent embodied this model of de/regeneration, and is today, perhaps ironically or perhaps 2 An author of works that often experimented with the conventions of print literature, Coover also wrote what some see as the first herald for the age of hypertext, subtly titled “The End of Books” (1992).

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

completely logically, no longer active as an application. Its pages contain many dead links, much like the hypertext Disappearing Rain, explored in the next chapter. This process of creation is not about preservation or recovering lost ideas (a notion contradictory to the aims of groups like the Electronic Literature Organization3) but is more about fostering an environment of constant production and evolution. While the desire not to lose ideas and the desire to document works for future generations is understandable, so too is the idea of creating work whose impermanent form and ability to embody “forgetting [as] a condition of memory” (Tabbi 2007) mirrors its thematic concern with impermanence – an idea to which I am drawn for its formal and thematic potential. For example, a work about death could “die” in the great folds of the Internet, or degenerate to the point of a half-life, its structure losing original parts, and this could imbue the work with secondary layers of meaning that might not otherwise be apparent. In contrast to the general digital decay that comes from the rapidly morphing state of electronic literature, there is also infinite room for expansion, collaboration and growth. A work can be published while still being constructed, blurring the line between writing and publishing, between author and reader, turning a work into “the witnessed act of literary performance” (Marsh 2001). This performance also has the potential for longevity; a work could stay alive through generations, either by its original form being transported from various storage devices (as is the case for the

3 http://eliterature.org/

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

hypertext classic by Michael Joyce, afternoon: a story4, originally written in 1987) or by its original form being dispersed and embedded into other works in altered guises. The constant tension between these different features of electronic literature – its ephemerality, long/short term memory, decay, plasticity and rapid evolution – produces an exciting friction that sparked my desire to create a work that both utilized and recreated or captured this same tension. I also began searching for this tension in other works, to find other expressions in electronic literature that were also interested in aspects of memory, from its intangible nature to the relationship between human memory and electronic memory. The following two chapters discuss works that I consider to draw out this tension, and to do so through the use of different forms and media.

4 afternoon can be read on the website for the special web edition of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction at www.wwnorton.com/college/english/pmaf/hypertext/aft/

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

CHAPTER 2 Disappearing Rain: a story in reassembly

“Imagine that you are given the task of reassembling an object. Not a difficult assignment if you know how the final object should appear. If, however, you have no idea whether you are working with fragments of a vase, a skull, or a toy, you have no idea where to begin. You may well construct some object, yet it may be far from the original.” Maxine Harris, The loss that is forever: the lifelong impact of the early death of a mother or father (1996, p. 229)

“Questions outlast the answers with which they first came, and hypertext is very good for asking questions.” Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Page to screen: taking literacy into the electronic era (1998, p. 340)

Disappearing Rain is a hypertext authored and published by Deena Larsen in 2000, revolving around the story of Anna Mizunami, a girl who disappears into her computer, and the story of her family’s search for her. A hypertext is a series of pages or segments, otherwise known as lexias, connected to each other via hyperlinks embedded in texts or images. Disappearing Rain is composed of 144 lexias and several options for how to navigate between them. You can choose to enter the story by clicking one of two parts: Water Leavings or River Journeys. This leads you to a page where there are groupings of links built out of the lines of haikus, links arranged to

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

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look like the kanji of water or river, and a collection of links that group lexias based on the six characters in the story. Examples of the pages are below:

The main page showing the various links into the work (Larsen 2000)

Part 1: Water Leavings, with links arranged over the kanji for water (Larsen 2000)

The navigation page for the characters Amy and Anna (Larsen 2000)

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

The theme of water runs throughout all threads of the story, illustrated with the use of a light blue wavy background for all the lexias and light blue for the links. Some lexias contain external links that lead to the websites of certain organizations, corporations, online communities and to images and webcam footage of places like streets and waterfalls. Most of these links are no longer active, so a present day reading of the work relies, in a certain sense, on the knowledge of missing pieces and imagery. The hyperlink, the building block of the hypertext, performs several functions in the making of a narrative or presentation of one or several ideas. While one might think that it is a bridge, hyperlinks introduce gaps into a story and break it into fragments. Links “suggest relations but also control access to information” (Burbules 1998, p. 105) in that they change the way lexia A is read because of its link to lexia B (and vice versa), but without it readers would not know of the existence of Lexia B at all (Burbules 1998). Hypertexts sometimes work by obscuring their structure and collection of components, leaving the reader to discover sections and connections that aren’t explicitly presented. This approach allows readers flashes and glimpses of content without revealing the size, shape or form of the larger structure, which mirrors the nebulous nature of memory. An example of this type of hypertext is The Jew’s Daughter, programmed and crafted by Judd Morrissey, which is a work that is presented on a single page. An exercise in regenerative text and repetition, the “links” in this work require only that a reader hover over them in order for portions of the text to be replaced with new words. The machinations of The Jew’s Daughter are more “invisible” than in Disappearing Rain, as its words change

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

within the limits of one single page. This level of aesthetic complexity allows readers to watch the text unfold and transform right before them, presenting them, somewhat ironically, with a “live process” that can be witnessed. In the creation process of Resilience, I attempted to emulate this “aliveness”, and to emulate a mutating, non-static text that could represent the constant shifting and multiple dimensions of the memory process. Disappearing Rain employs a different navigational model; it provides readers with a map of entry points, allowing them to enter the work in whatever way they choose as well as providing them with exits they can take to explore other parts of the work. While this provided methods of navigating the work in a “reader-friendly” way, it did not reduce the complexity and scope of the work, because it still tasked readers with making their own figurative and literal connections between a sizable 144 lexias. Furthermore, while Disappearing Rain implicitly engages with the formal process of remembering and forgetting through the size of the work and the multiplicity of navigation, it explicitly engages with themes of memory and absence through its prose – a duality that, I found, created a compelling reading experience. Larsen’s multilayered story explores themes that echoed the things I wanted to explore in my own work: the search for lost family, the use of loss as a catalyst to reveal family secrets and history, the relationship between mothers and daughters5, and a portrayal of how the living grieve the dead. My first reading of Rain began with a section on Anna’s disappearance, which subsequently motivated my choices as I clicked the links to move through the 5 The story contains four generations of women in the same family: Yuki, Anna’s great grandmother, Sophie, her grandmother, Kit, her mother and Anna herself, along with Amy, her twin sister.

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

story in search for Anna. Someone else experiencing Disappearing Rain could have encountered the story of Anna’s grandmother first and been more absorbed in the story of Anna’s Japanese roots and the story of her family. Much like the way in which the story follows the journey of more than one character, a reader’s own journey through the work can take many forms. I found myself coming to Disappearing Rain with a few expectations based on my experience with traditional literary conventions. Accustomed to the linearity of the book form, I took for granted that my memory as a reader would match the story’s memory. One could not traverse the story’s multiple threads chronologically due to the sheer variety of links contained within lexias. I could arrive midway through a narrative thread, knowing that I remembered a different past (Anna’s father Richard setting up a website to find her) than the segment I had just begun reading (Sophie having a conversation with Amy) and I could not trust that I would be able to return to any lexias I had navigated away from. Some readers may find this capacity to choose overwhelming or burdensome, as opposed to empowering. The hypertext is a fragmentary work that is composed of gaps and filled segments. The sheer number of links could, for some, “[offer] too much choice with too few reasons to choose” (Laure-Ryan 2004, p. 332) which could result in a lack of coherence and a lack of conventional closure. At times, as I was reading Disappearing Rain, I wondered how many clicks I had left to go before there was some sort of recognizable resolution. A hypertext can, in this way, exhaust a reader or force them to stop, making them feel like they are abandoning the narrative (Enns 2001, p. 18).

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

What kept me going was my stubborn conviction that there was a resolution. I wanted Anna to be found. And I was intrigued that the text seemed to prevent me, or any of the characters, from doing so. The lexias and the links acted as barriers between me as a reader and whatever truth was hiding underneath. My frustration felt like a direct link to the frustration of the characters, a new way of empathizing with them in their search. My engagement with the interface of the work readjusted my definition of “closure” and its importance in relation to story of Disappearing Rain. Both the works discussed here illuminate some of the multiplicity of thematic and formal configurations possible in hypertext – a multiplicity that inspired me in my own creation of The Resilience of Echoes. Disappearing Rain’s structure (as well as its prose and story) allowed multiple interpretations while eschewing any concrete answers. The tension this produced in the work and the reader is relevant to a discussion on memory, erasure, and impermanence, in that it retains the lack of closure in the memory process. I wanted to replicate this structure in my attempt at electronic literature, an attempt to create my own unreliable text, one that reveals its “artificiality, incompleteness and constructedness” (Manovich 2001, p. 205).

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

CHAPTER 3 Welcome to Pine Point: a trip down memory lane

“The document functions therefore as a trace left by the past. Collected and organized, this body of material becomes the theoretical premise and material basis for the construction of the archive and the writing of history. From this perspective, therefore, traces are not simply residual remains, signs and clues, but the material evidence, the stuff of history, the archive. Pointing to the link of passing and pastness whereby what passes by leaves a trace of what has past, [Paul] Ricoeur remarks on the apparent paradox. The thing has passed or the passage is no longer, while the trace exists and remains.” Charles Merewether, The Archive (2006, p. 121 & 122)

“There is a concentrated sadness in mementoes, they commemorate something that might never be again.” Michael Simons, Welcome to Pine Point (2011)

Welcome to Pine Point is an interactive film presentation, funded by the National Film Board of Canada, created by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons of The Goggles in 2011. Combining animation, illustration, video, images, audio and text, it tells the story of a mining town in Canada that was closed down and erased from the map in 1988. Through testimonies of former residents, archival footage and public records, the work presents the legacy of a place that no longer exists.

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

Similar to Disappearing Rain, Pine Point contains many separate pages linked together, although its navigation system follows that of the book6 with buttons marked “previous” and “next” enabling a reader to go only backwards and forwards. However, Pine Point has a much larger focus on non-text elements, steering away from the word-focused hypertext form. The work employs archival footage and newly shot video from present day that play behind strips of text which, when clicked, move off the screen to allow better visibility of the media behind it. Combining the look of a school yearbook, a family album and a television report or documentary, the text in Pine Point acts as captions for the various media being presented as opposed to being the work’s primary focus. Screencaps of the work are presented below.

Welcome to Pine Point’s entry page (Shoebridge & Simon 2011)

6 The work’s colophon states that the project started out as a book and that “it could have been a book, but it makes more sense that it became this” (Shoebridge & Simon 2011)

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

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An example of being able to clear the text to the sides of the screen to better view the video or image background. (Shoebridge & Simon 2011)

The pop up menu of the ten sections in the work (Shoebridge & Simon 2011)

The background for this page incorporates still images and video into one collage and includes a link to a pop-up music video (Shoebridge & Simon 2011)

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

An example of writing from ‘Welcome to Pine Point’ (Shoebridge & Simon 2011)

Sherry Turkle discusses how big events in our lives “produce photographs and videotapes that displace the event and become our memories of it” (1995, p. 47); she points to how they become one’s “access to the thing itself but there is no other thing itself” (1995, p. 47). Pine Point embodies this displacement in the way that it foregrounds the accumulation of tangible artefacts left behind by the “death” of the town of Pine Point. Objects play a big role in the work, as they do in the process of remembering, providing a tangible way to capture “the past [which] survives only symbolically, as recollections, dormant until activated” (Gruic-Grmusa 2008, p. 282). The death of anything – a town, an idea, a person – leaves behind a good deal of debris, detritus and paraphernalia and Pine Point’s hypermedia form allowed a place to explore these items as the residue of something that once existed. This residue encompasses both the physical objects of the town as well as the residents, whose connection to the town has taken on a second meaning

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

now that the town itself is gone. Pine Point looks at the demarcation that exists in the lives of the uprooted. It touches on the question of identity: who were you when you were in this place, and how has the loss of this place changed who you are now? I have asked these questions of my own experience after my mother’s death, in an attempt not just to discover the effects of impermanence on the shaping of my own identity but also to speak more broadly on these questions around memory and identity. Pine Point’s heavy incorporation of video seemed to also capture and maintain the “aliveness” I referred to in Chapter 2, the video being tangible representations of actual people and their lives. One could see this use of video, images, audio and animation as a way to fully engage all senses involved in a story and to address what Marshall McLuhan called the “inadequacy of words to convey visual information about objects” (2001, p. 171). It could also be “consistent with a general trend in modern society toward presenting more and more information in the form of time-based audio-visual moving image sequences, rather than as text” (Manovich 2001, p. 78) – a trend that celebrates the roles of the visual, the aural and generally non-textual elements involved in the process of remembering. As an illustration of another general trend of modern society, the story of Pine Point begins with the rather modern image of a man sitting down at a computer, looking up a place he once knew on the Internet. The work also includes the story of former resident Richard Cloutier and the website he built documenting the town and keeping up with other former residents – this website gave rise to Welcome to Pine Point, adding to existing ephemera on the town. This element of the work highlights how “digital media, especially

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

the Internet, offer possibilities for individualization and in consequence pluralisation of remembrance” (Donk 2009, p. 13, emphasis mine). This collective remembrance differentiates Pine Point as a work of electronic literature from works like Disappearing Rain, which is the output of a single voice (in the guise of multiple characters). Further, while works like Disappearing Rain engage with the Internet as a source of supplementary material, for Pine Point the Internet serves as a larger system of remembering and storing memories. I see Resilience as part of this larger system approach. My mother was a professor before she died, and her printed work appears on a few bibliographies, but she has little online presence and her books are no longer in print. In my research, which included reading about life writing, memoir and auto/biography, I came upon this quote by Richard Freadman speaking of writing about his father that stuck with me:

“I guess, too, that part of me wanted to spare you the indignity of oblivion. […] [It] seems insane, indecent, an utter scandal, the way we pour ourselves into our lives the way we strive to flourish, to make a difference, leave a mark and then it’s all over.” (2004, p. 140)

One of my aims in creating Resilience was to erect an “impure tribute” (Freadman 2004, p. 141) to my mother, and to draw on the ether of the Internet as a place where people construct themselves in scattered pieces and where the power of group memory can be harnessed to keep just one thing alive – be it a cancelled TV show, an obscure film or in my case, the mother I had for a brief time. Pine Point, with its evocative personal musings on

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

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nostalgia and reinvigorating powers of the stories we tell and pass on to each other, compelled me through its exploration of themes highly relevant to my personal interests. But, even more, as a work of electronic literature, it showed me the levels of aesthetic beauty I could aspire to in terms of presenting my own collection of ephemera leftover from my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life (as opposed to just my writing), as well as the new ways technology can collate multiple voices into explorations of timeless themes such as loss, death and life-after-death. Â

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

EPILOGUE

My interest in the field of electronic literature began with a curiosity about the nature of creation online of things both trivial and more substantial. What I have found in my research and in my experimentation with the genre has resulted in a deeper understanding of a field that has changed my relationship to writing, reading and expression. As I stated in my Introduction, electronic literature is a vast space in which many search for horizons. As such, I can only reiterate my findings so far and hope they contribute in some way to this collective, ongoing conversation. In my inquiry into the nature of memory in relation to death – how this discontinuity of events affects the process of remembering, preserving the past even as it reconfigures it – I have found that electronic literature possesses a number of important features that enable it to contribute specifically to an exploration of this theme. In engaging with and analysing the hypertexts Disappearing Rain and The Jew’s Daughter, I explored how navigation, via the use of hyperlinks and animation, exposed the construction of a work and thereby produced a second layer of meaning and experience in the reading of the work. Disappearing Rain exemplified a frustrating search for someone who could not be found through the fragmentation of linearity, chronology and the insertion of gaps through the use of multiple hyperlinks. In this way, electronic literature with its capacity for chaos, obsolescence and decay can bring to life other intangible experiences, specifically to do with impermanence. In Welcome to Pine Point, it was electronic literature’s capacity for constant evolution and growth that showed itself through a story that grew

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

from the seeds of other people’s memories. With its inclusion of the aural and visual along with the textual, this work also exemplified the equality of all media that can exist in electronic literature, as opposed to just privileging text. Both of the works that I have examined here engaged with the themes of impermanence and memory in their contents. Pine Point did so more explicitly with its discussion on nostalgia and the construction of memory7. Disappearing Rain, with its sprawling structure of multiple lexias and navigation that allowed multiple points of entry, engaged with memory in a different way by tasking the reader with choosing their own path through the story. These formal features have provided creative and technical inspiration for my conceptualising and construction of The Resilience of Echoes. Some have been successfully incorporated into the work itself, such as using hyperlinks to add new dimensions to prose and poetry, employing “filmic” cuts and fades for the presentation of images to represent memory as analogy (in the case of Resilience, a slideshow, or an old home movie) and basic methods of navigation. There are other elements I encountered in my research that I have not engaged with in this iteration but which could contribute to future versions of Resilience, such as the invisible regeneration in The Jew’s Daughter and the randomization of content so as to better mimic the unreliable presentations of memory (Disappearing Rain achieved this to some extent with what I can only assume was a complex structure to link all 144 lexias together). While it has been a huge challenge to construct a work of electronic literature as a complete newcomer (assisted technically by another fellow 7 See image on page 21

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

newcomer) to the field, to its conventions, its inconstancy and the various technologies, I know that this is merely the beginning. Although I do wish to expand The Resilience of Echoes, I do hope meanwhile that the current version will contribute to the field through my engagement with the themes of impermanence and its place in the exploration of memory and death. I have taken a broad view that relates to my own personal experience, and my experience, after all, is limited to my own mind and my own voice; but I also hope that Resilience might spark others who have other stories to tell within the same frame, other experiences with the same themes. There is a point somewhere in all our futures where we cease to be the ones that write and if we’re lucky, become the ones written about, entering a space between permanence and impermanence. For my mother, it was a day in 1996 at the age of 47. Today, I grapple with the pieces she has left behind. Essentially they remain the same – photo albums, old letters, family anecdotes, and treasured possessions – but their meanings change even as I gaze at them. In her book Computers as Theatre, Brenda Laurel emphasizes, “human experience demands every modality of narration that we can bring to it” (1998). While this point was made more than a decade ago, I think in this age of so many technological advancements and options, it is more relevant than ever. I can only keep trying to learn the language that will decode these pieces and reach out to those who are doing the same.

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

REFERENCE LIST

Birkerts, S 1994, The Gutenberg elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age, Fawcett Columbine, New York. Burbules, NC 1998, 'Rhetorics of the web: hyperreading and critical literacy', in I Snyder (ed.), Page to screen: taking literacy into the electronic era, Routledge, London. Coover, R 1992, 'The end of books', The New York Times, 21 June, viewed 24 April 2011, <http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/cooverend.html>. Donk, A 2009, 'The digitization of memory: blessing or curse? A communication science perspective', paper presented at the Media in Transition Conference “MIT6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission”, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, April 24-26, viewed May 26 2011, <http://web.mit.edu/commforum/mit6/papers/Donk.pdf>. Douglas, JY 1998, 'Will the most reflexive relativist please stand up: hypertext, argument and relativism', in I Snyder (ed.), Page to screen: taking literacy into the electronic era, Routledge, London. Enns, A 2001, 'Don't believe the hype: rereading Michael Joyce's Afternoon and Twelve Blue', Currents in Electronic Literacy, no. 5, viewed May 20 2011, <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall01/enns/enns.html>.

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

Freadman, R 2004, 'Decent and indecent: writing my father's life', in PJ Eakin (ed.), The ethics of life writing, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York. Gruic-Grmusa, L 2008, 'Past and present interacting: a memory discourse in Robert Coover’s 'Gerald’s Party'', English Text Construction, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 281 - 296. Harris, M 1996, The loss that is forever: the lifelong impact of the early death of a mother or father, Plume, New York. Hayles, NK 2008, Electronic literature: new horizons for the literary, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana. Lanham, RA 1993, The electronic word: democracy, technology, and the arts, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Larsen, D 2000, Disappearing Rain, Hypertext, viewed 28 April 2011, <http://www.deenalarsen.net/rain/>. Laurel, B 1991, Computers as Theatre, Addison-Wesley Reading, Massachussets. Manovich, L 2001, The language of new media, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussetts. Marsh, B 2001, 'Reading time: for a poetics of hypermedia writing', Currents in Electronic Literacy, no. 5, viewed May 20 2011, <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall01/marsh/marsh.html>. Merewether, C 2006, 'A language to come: Japanese photography after the event', in C Merewether (ed.), The archive, Whitechapel, London. Morrissey, J 2000, The Jew's Daughter, Hypertext, viewed 28 July 2011, <http://www.thejewsdaughter.com>.

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Page, R 2008, Stories of the self on and off the screen, viewed April 10 2011, <http://newhorizons.eliterature.org/essay.php@id=6.html>. Rinehart, R 2011, A system of formal notation for scoring works of digital and variable media art (as part of the 'Archiving the avant garde' project), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film archive, viewed 3 August 2011, <http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about/avantgarde>. Ryan, M-L 2004, 'Will new media produce new narratives?', in M-L Ryan (ed.), Narrative across media: the languages of storytelling, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Shoebridge, P & Simons, M 2011, Welcome to Pine Point, Interactive film, National Film Board of Canada, viewed 28 May 2011, <http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/pinepoint>. Tabbi, J 2007, Toward a semantic literary web: setting a direction for the Electronic Literature Organization's directory, Electronic Literature Organization, viewed 5 April 2011, <http://eliterature.org/pad/slw.html>. --- 2009, The Electronic Literature Directory: postproduction, viewed 5 June 2011, <http://directory.eliterature.org/node/198>. Turkle, S 1995, Life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet, Simon & Schuster, New York. Wardrip-Fruin, N 1998, The Impermanence Agent, Web application, viewed 6 April 2011, <http://www.impermanenceagent.org/agent/>.

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BACKGROUND READING

Aarseth, EJ c1997, Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland. Bump, J 1999, 'Left vs. right side of the brain: hypermedia and the New Puritanism', Currents in Electronic Literacy, no. 5, viewed May 20 2011, <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall99/bump.html>. Douglas, JY 2001, The end of books - or books without end?: reading interactive narratives, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Electronic Literature Directory, Website, Electronic Literature Organization, viewed 6 May 2011, <http://directory.eliterature.org/>. Grigar, D 2008, Electronic literature: where is it?, Electronic Book Review, viewed 27 April 2011, <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/invi gorating>. Hayles, K 2001, Cyber|literature and multicourses: rescuing electronic literature from infanticide, Electronic Book Review, viewed 28 March 2011, <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/intersp ecial>. Merewether, C (ed.) 2006, The archive, Whitechapel, London. Montfort, N 2000, Cybertext killed the hypertext star, Electronic Book Review, viewed 2 April 2011, <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/cyberd ebates>.

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Morris, A & Swiss, T (eds), New media poetics: contexts, technotexts, and theories, MIT Press, London. Pressman, J 2008, Navigating electronic literature, viewed April 10 2011, <http://newhorizons.eliterature.org/essay.php@id=14.html>. Siemens, R & Schriebman, S (eds) 2007, A companion to digital literary studies, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, Massachussetts. Snyder, I (ed.) 1998, Page to screen: taking literacy into the electronic era, Routledge, London. Bump, J 1999, 'Left vs. right side of the brain: hypermedia and the New Puritanism', Currents in Electronic Literacy, no. 5, viewed May 20 2011, <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall99/bump.html>. Douglas, JY 2001, The end of books - or books without end?: reading interactive narratives, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Pressman, J 2008, Navigating electronic literature, viewed April 10 2011, <http://newhorizons.eliterature.org/essay.php@id=14.html>. Siemens, R & Schriebman, S (eds) 2007, A companion to digital literary studies, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, Massachussetts. Swiss, T 2000, Literature in a hypermedia mode: an interview with Marjorie Luesebrink, author of: Califia (under the pen name M. D. Coverley), PopMatters, viewed 24 April 2011, <http://www.popmatters.com/aand-i/000909.html>. Wardrip-Fruin, N 1999, Hypermedia, eternal life, and the Impermanence Agent, viewed 12 May 2011, <http://www.impermanenceagent.org/agent/essay.html>. --- 2002, The Impermanence Agent: project and context, viewed 12 May 2011, <http://www.impermanenceagent.org/agent/essay2/>.

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Wardrip-Fruin, N & Harrigan, P (eds) 2004, First Person: new media as story, performance and game, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Zalis, E 2003, 'At home in cyberspace: staging autobiographical scenes', Biography, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 84 - 242.

RESEARCH FOR THE RESILIENCE OF ECHOES

Edelman, H 1994, Motherless daughters: a legacy of loss, Hodder & Stoughton, Australia. --- 1995, Letters from motherless daughters: words of courage, grief and healing, Hodder & Stoughton, Sydney. Ellis, C 1993, '"There Are Survivors": telling a story of sudden death', The Sociological Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 711-730. --- 2007, 'Telling secrets, revealing lives: relational ethics in research with intimate others', Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 3-29. Friday, N 1977, My mother my self, Fontana, London. Gilbert, SM 2006, Death's door: modern dying and the ways we grieve, W. W. Norton & Company, New York. McGoldrick, M & Walsh, F (eds) 1991, Living beyond loss: death in the family, W. W. Norton & Company, New York. McNay, M 2009, 'Absent memory, family secrets, narrative inheritance', Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 7, pp. 1178 - 1188. Peters, AM 2004, 'Creating voice(s): losing (my) mother and the poetic process of grief', Master of Arts thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC.

Textures of impermanence: an exploration of memory through the changing form of electronic literature

Rich, A 1991, Of woman born: motherhood as experience and institution, Virago, London.

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