Despite a lot of computer art activity, there is no body of hypertext fiction, in the way there is a body of, say, crime fiction. The first hypernovel, Ambulance. An Electronic Novel by Monica Moran (Ambulance. An Electronic Novel, Monica Moran 1993 now a web piece, available at eHollywood, see Appendix ) was published in 1993 and set the style for other comic book multimedia pieces. This was her only multimedia work. She later went on to appear in the films Sex: the Annabel Chong Story (1999) and Take Her, She's Mine an unreleased remake of the original 1963 film.

The skills learnt and used in producing such complex multimedia works are useful in their own right on the job market. Many multimedia artists do commercial work as well as experimental artistic work, due to the lack of a commercial market for this type of art.

Ergodic texts require some work to make sense, from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning work and path. (Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature Johns Hopkins University Press 1997) Aarseth developed a theory of ergodic literature that subsumes cybertexts as examples of an ancient tradition starting with temple writings and including the I Ching.

Defined as "the leaking of ontological boundaries, narrative metalepsis being a special case of ontolepsis" . (Raine Koskimaa, Digital Literature: From Text to Hypertext and Beyond University of Jyväskylä Computing Centre, Finland, 2000)

Fictional ontology (the principles and causes of being) involves the analysis of fictional worlds. In normal fiction, the world is the real world, the characters, normal (or not) human beings. In Science Fiction, Mythical, Fantasy or Experimental fiction things change somewhat. In ontolepsis there is a non-rigid boundary between stories and their characters, and the outside or real world, allowing multiple readings to take place.

"When the border between "reality" and "illusion" disappears, the writers make use of a narrative technique that can be called "ontolepsis", seepage between different levels of reality." (Johan Svedjedal, Ergodic Nightmare - The world of choices in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch University College of Borås, HumanIT Centre, 2001)

"Metalepsis an indexical symbol which refers to another indexical symbol. An individual's conception of society is a metalepsis. We refer to our inner symbol of what society is, which can only refer to the outer convention (rather than a thing in and of itself). It is an individual index of a communal index. A game of smoke and mirrors, far removed form any directly referent reality." (Jeff Ward, Metalepsis article in Visible Darkness web site Blog, 2002)

Also generally refers to the mixing and layering of a fictional characters awareness of their fictional and other environments, of future events etc.

Metalepsis and ontolepsis are related. Ontolepsis refers to the world of the story, metalepsis to the world of the character.

The diegetic is the spatial and temporal universe referred to in the primary narration. Any text can contain a number of diegetic alternative possible worlds, and these are created by the reader, usually by imagining a normal historically correct universe from different character's points of view. However it is open to the author to put in multiple meanings. This is a primary concern of experimental fiction, which includes most if not all hypertext fictions.

The reader can imagine multiple worlds from the same text. This is a standard device in any normal fiction where the author has written in two or more narrative voices, such as first person narrations from two protagonists. This is usually contrived to give the reader a more God-like overview than is normal.

These structural and theoretical concerns have led to the dominance of academic-style hypertexts rather than popular texts or works. For a contrast with the generally academic hypertext industry, examine the world of the web log or Blog (See Appendix for web address). This is a simple dynamic diary-style system that allows people to publish their thoughts online, and has had a huge growth rate since being specifically named in December 1997. It is used for anything from personal reporting, from autobiography to reviews or comments, to news, to documenting research or play and sport activities. Often the first reports from conferences (especially computer related ones) come as a stream of Blogs, days ahead of even online journals. These Blogs, since they are linear in the sense of chronological, are usually excluded from a study of hypertext, yet they are by definition hypertextual. Also, multiple Blog readings make up a full hypertextual reading of a situation, from the points of view multiple authors and so are closer to the true definition of a hypertext in the docuverse . (Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, Robin Parmar, The Electronic Labyrinth Canada Council for the Arts 1993-2000)

The sociology of Blog production could be said to be democratic and populist, compared to Hypertext production, which is academic and professional. This is clearly apparent in the names, Blog informal, vernacular, Hypertext fiction academic, subject to many definitions and interpretations, and not even informative to people in the wider world of electronic communication. Status and setting are important to hypertext fiction production, but not so with Blog production. Hypertext fiction is always very clearly presented as serious or worthy of serious study, whereas a Blog can swerve from serious to flippant in the same paragraph.

"George Landow using the hypertext as an example of a user participatory medium, he quite boldly states: "Hypertext, which challenges narrative and all literary forms based on linearity, calls into question ideas of plot and story current since Aristotle" . (George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society) The Johns Hopkins University Press 1997 ) Landow leaves two possibilities: either it's impossible to create narrative in a non-linear environment, or Aristotle was wrong. He then cites several examples of hypertext-written fiction. Case closed.

Or maybe not.

on the surface, this leaves us with good old Aristotle again, with a beginning, an end, and consequently; a middle. This middle is the really interesting part." (Jorgen Kirksather, The Structure of Video Game Narration The Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim 1998)

"The common understanding seems to be that non-linear writing or reading is an impossibility as a better alternative, the expression multi-linear has gotten strong support, to emphasise the fact that there are several possible reading orders in hypertext." (Raine Koskimaa, Digital Literature From Text to Hypertext and Beyond University of Jyväskylä

"Reading and writing are linear phenomena; they are sequential and chronological, conditioned by the durative ordering of time, although their positions as stored and in space may have a nonlinear organization. But once a word or a sentence is read, it is chosen and taken out of its nonlinear context and positioned as a sequence in the linear chain and in conditioned time. However discontinuous or jumpy the writing or reading of a hypertext might be, at one level it always turns out to be linear." (Gunnar Liestol, Wittgenstein, Genette and the Reader's Narrative in Hypertext, in G.P Landow (ed) Hyper/Text/Theory Johns Hopkins University Press 1994)

"Cybernetic literature presumes the text as virtual reality; based on the reader's/user's identification with the cursor. Being there, the imperative for the total immersion in the text environment, is now enabled by the reader's identification with cursor. The act of clicking anticipates the user's meeting with the clickual reality and continual linking from one part of a text to the others. On the basis of this Mark Amerika defined his cyber-cogito: "I link therefore I am" . The reading of such literary projects is principally non-trivial and cybernetic. We read according to schemes, which we try to find, returning to the beginning many times. We print individual page (if it's possible), do scripts and schemes about already chosen links, meaning that we're utmost active in composing/supplementing the "textscape". A text which requires non-trivial reading is ergodic according to Espen J. Aarseth's claims in his book Cybertext. Such reading is also risky, because "the cybertext puts its would-be-reader at risk: the risk of rejection". " (Janez Strehovec, Text as Virtual Reality (Techno-Aesthetics and Web-Literatures) paper at Digital arts and culture 98, Bergen, Norway 1998)

"The debate over whether hypertextual-constructs create nonlinear, anti-linear or multi-linear reading/viewing practices is similar to the great literary debates of the 70s over whether certain kinds of metafiction or fabulist fiction were in fact anti-realist or, even worse, immoral. Our channel-surfing consciousness (the "cyberspace" we enter when scanning cable TV) is informing our present-day reality to such a degree that it is no longer possible to distinguish one from the other, that is, consciousness (a hypertextual construct) is now compatible with more radical forms of random departure or instantaneous clickual realities than previously thought possible and our technology is finally catching up with our dream-narrative apparatus." (Mark Amerika, Grammatron http://www.grammatron.com/)

"The networks [réseaux] are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable . . . ; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language" (emphasis in original)." (Roland Barthes, S/Z. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970; S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974)

PLEASE IGNORE GLITCHES IN WORD CONVERSION

Bolter and Grusin examined various electronic media methods and put them into an historical context to show that, rather than being fundamentally new, they are in fact remediations of old media . (Bolter and Grusin, Remediation MIT Press 2001)

In an example from the world of the book, hand-drawn mediaeval illustrated manuscripts with large illustrated capital letters are shown as leading to print graphic design, such as posters with letters composed of images, such as a postcard for Coney Island, New York, which lead to the image and text heavy splash page of web design.

The authors also quote Michael Hart, the editor of Project Gutenberg, which places classic texts on the web as a resource, who sees computers as a Replicator Technology since it can reproduce texts without errors. The authors call this respectful remediation since the original is not changed (apart from being available to search and analyse statistically).

"Web and internet applications refashion the newer perceptual media of radio, television , and telephone more aggressively than they refashion print" . (Ibid)

Books as an entity, and fiction in particular, are hardly mentioned in the book. The web is seen as the great absorber of all things, in a way that the novel was once seen as "like a pig, it eats anything" (Matti Pulkkinen, Finnish author).

This was covered extensively by Marshall McLuhan (Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (illustrated) Penguin reprint 1969):

" Authorship in the sense we know it today was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Mediaeval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the books they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. Many small texts were transmitted into volumes and often authorship was lost.

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples created a reading public.

Xerography [photocopying] heralds the times of instant publishing.

As new technologies come into play, people are less and less convinced of the importance of self-expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.

A ditto device.

" " " "

McLuhan was right about the technology, but wrong about the return to an idyllic (Edenic?) anonymity. Today's web logs and home pages are very personalised, in fact that is their appeal, the electronic whiff of authenticity. Difference is now a key concept rather than generalisation. This difference applies to everything, and is a process that once started never stops, like rust or viral replication. It is caused by over-production of material goods, which leads to the promotion of consumer desire as personal destiny, since the avenues for destiny are limited and largely pre-ordained. That which is outside becomes the subject of computer games, for safe sublimation: crime, murder, power.

Information architecture (IA) is the philosophy and practise of organising all information within a given context. It is usually applied to computer data systems. It has become the primary concern of web professionals after the chaotic and expensive early years of web site development where the publishing model was used (see Bolter and Grusin Ibid ). This led to category errors when web design companies came into contact with the client's information services (IS) departments, who were familiar with database and content management issues through the long-term development of internal company networks, prior to the use of web-protocol based intranet services. The main challenges facing web site integration are still not overcome with particular activity around site design and navigation, security, version control, content management, intranets, extranets, multiple language support, disabled access, and many other micro-issues particular to each project.

Information architecture and usability issues can be applied to non-linear narrative.

Apart from the research and academic community, interest in the internet only started when the HTML standard was invented for the World Wide Web (now universally known as the web) at Cern by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. It took a while to interest the wider community, even within so-called cyberculture. In the review book Mondo 2000 published in 1992, there is a wealth of pseudo-information about virtual reality and other trendy topics such as techno-erotic paganism, and a chapter on hypertext where the Xanadu project is discussed, but there is no mention of the Internet, apart from an email address to sign up for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's EFF News . (Rudy Rucker, R U Sirius and Queen Mu, Mondo 2000 A User's Guide to the New Edge Thames and Hudson 1992)

Once images were added to the original text only browser (Lynx) and web pages with images appeared, the floodgates were opened. Because photographic images and graphics could be used, the model moved from a computer network for specialists to publishing for all, at least all of those with computer access. The online equivalent of print magazines and advertising using print-derived design principles of visual impact, contrast, accuracy and clarity became the norm for web sites, with usability issues catching up after the rush of what were in effect faulty beginner's designs. Since there were no antecedents for web pages the print models used were not always the best. An example is pixel accurate cross-browser page design, which is very hard to do, and so very costly, but demanded by most corporate clients who want absolute brand uniformity with their print documents.

Information architecture has come to mean a particular thing to web site design, namely data organisation, labelling, navigation, and searching systems to help users find and manage information more successfully. IA issues have become subsumed under the general term Usability when applied to web sites, or multi-user computer services in general. Usability services even have a guru, Jacob Neilson, who is the most famous of all practitioners and highly influential, has overtaken in profile the more flamboyant web design gurus of the late 90s such as David Siegel, author of Creating Killer Web Sites . (David Siegel, Creating Killer Web Sites Hayden Books 1997) This best-selling book and popular web site focussed on pixel-accurate page design and maximum visual impact, aggressively following the general principles of hypermediation (mixing media and drawing attention to the media itself) spelled out in the already mentioned Remediation book. Incidentally, Siegal became disillusioned with the difficulty of cross-platform and cross-browser design and took up a new career.

With regard to literary hypertexts, the main failures (or successes, if ergodicity is the aim) are in the areas of:

navigation loss of place, ignorance of direction

search how to find a particular text in body of texts

labelling what is this text compared to that text

organisation how to return later to the same state, what is that state.

One of the gurus of interface design , Ben Schneiderman, has these general comments to make about hypertext (Ben Shneiderman, Designing the User Interface Addison Wesley Longman, 1998):

"The dual dangers are that hypertext may be inappropriate for some projects and that the design of the hypertext may be poor (for example, too many links or a confusing structure). Of course, hypernovels, hyperpoems, hyper-fairy tales, hypernewspapers and hyperbooks are possible, but they require creative rethinking of the traditional forms to satisfy the Golden Rules of Hypertext.

The golden rules are:

1 There is a large body of information organised into numerous fragments

2. These fragments relate to one another
3. The user needs only a small fraction of these fragments at any one time."

Schneiderman's "too many links and a confusing structure" is almost a definition of ergodic hypertext fiction.

The idea that any new reading of texts is possible with the hyperlinking of the web is not considered by the majority of web developers, whose aim is to lay out pages of text that can be easily navigated. This has led to the use of small, more concise texts, which can be size-controlled by the browser device. Even data input form design has changed with the use of multi-part forms with many short questions, with contingent navigation depending on user choices, rather than one long page. These also represent a strand of hypertextual non-linear navigation as the user's answers generate the appropriate form.

The aim is to make text use and user input as seamless and non-thinking as possible. A most useful study in this area is The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin . (Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface Addison Wesley 2000) He divides the mind of the user into the cognitive conscious and the cognitive unconscious and defines a new area of Cognetics to complement the old study of ergonomics. (The term was coined by the psychologist Kihlstrom). As such the aim of usability and interface designers is to make as much of the user's experience automatic, happening in the cognitive unconscious, as this will speed up information flow and reduce stress. The cognitive conscious is then used for steering the information flow, rather than working out how to use the navigation system.

The hyperlink of a web page is a basic navigating tool, with the structure ultimately provided by the information itself. This method is used in content management software where the content is defined by the navigation system, after initial data tagging during the site build phase. It is in effect positioned in the structure of the web site on the fly depending on how it meets filtering criteria.

The problem with non-linear hypertext fiction is that is negates this basic rule of web page design, in order to add ontoleptic effects to ergodic texts (see previous definitions). It is as if the disciplines of information architecture and usability are contradicted, in order to produce texts that are difficult to read, in the name of special effects from the traditional domain of literary fiction. The most prominent feature becomes the linking, rather than the text itself, and these navigation decisions are moved from the cognitive unconscious to conscious. This reduces attention on the actual content of the text (the story) or narrative and focuses attention of the structure of the document.

"the Web is developing as we speak, and experiments happen on the open Internet with us all as test subjects (not in a videotaped usability lab)." (Jacob Neilson, Designing Web Usability New Riders Publishing 2000)

"Digital environments are spatial: The new digital environments are characterised by their power to represent navigable space." Janet H Murray . (Janet H Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck MIT Press edition 2001)

It is as if experimental writers were attracted by this new power, and so started the experiments with spatial navigation, as if the texts were laid out on scraps of paper on a large table. The software used for these hypertexts, such as Storyspace , (Software available from Eastgate Systems Inc. see Appendix for web address ) encourage this approach.

This also leads to the idea that perhaps the early experiments in online or computerised fiction were also experiments that have had their day, and are now of historical interest only, due to advances in usability studies of user interaction.

"We are, in fact, in a situation where we really have to consider the question if hyperfiction is, in the ten years from Joyce's Afternoon to Twilight (1997), come to the end of its road. This would not mean the total extinction of the genre, but rather the shift of focus to different areas, especially towards virtual reality worlds (or, narrative story worlds)." (Raine Koskimaa, Ibid)

The newer strand of film-style hypertexts, where images and movie clips are used to tell or supplement the story, often within a sophisticated rich client application like Macromedia Flash or Director, removes some of the problems in using text, as the user will assume they are watching a movie, and so have a completely different set of interface expectations.

Virtual Reality (Custom systems: ActiveWorlds and open source systems: VRML: see Appendix for web references ) worlds have been around for some time now, since the speed of computers allowed three dimensional simulations to be rendered in real time. There are a number of VR worlds accessible on the internet. These are multi-user and are popular if rather useless. The big growth area is, as usual, games, with online gaming moving from the office or home network to the internet. It is quite common for offices to turn into networked frag-fests at 6pm, or when the boss goes home, with the office network running the multi-user game Doom or similar. Social bonding takes place as the competitive combat encourages trust.

These spaces are not part of this study, as the stories within them are more a part of the live experience of the web, rather than deliberately written for the web or computer display.

However, there was an amusing experiment at the Digital Storytelling Festival (Digital Storytelling Festival , Crested Butte, Colorado, USA, 1997, reported at The Salon http://www.salon.com):

"A country road. A tree. Evening." Two guys in hats -- Didi and Gogo, as they call each other -- are stranded in a desolate void, awaiting someone named Godot.

Finally, one of them cries out: "It's Godot! At last! Gogo! It's Godot! We're saved!"

It's a false alarm, as Samuel Beckett wrote the line. But wait! In this performance, there is somebody there -- some dude named Muscleman, a recumbent beefcake model straight out of a men's underwear ad. He pops in and asks, "Why are you waiting for him, anyway? I forgot."

The text was Beckett's. But the "stage" was a Palace chat room on the Net. The characters were those in the original play -- joined by anyone else logged onto the Palace that night who happened to stumble into the virtual room ("The Waiting Room") where the drama was unfolding.

In "Waiting for Godot," as one critic famously put it, "nothing happens, twice"; in chat rooms, nothing happens over and over again, as people gather every evening and, mostly, wait for something to occur, for someone to say something interesting, for some diversion to help pass the time. To the artists who conceived and executed the stunt they called "Waiting for Godot.com" -- Adriene Jenik, Lisa Brenneis and Jonathan Delacour -- Beckett's existential vaudeville offered a perfect commentary on the world of online chat.

Thus the apparition of Muscleman, who -- like Thumper, a saucy- looking brunette pin-up, and several other avatars -- crashed the performance and interjected some ad libs. At one point, Didi and Gogo left their "Waiting Room" home to visit a crowded Palace space called the Pit, where their presence evoked comments like, "I think we should all change our names to Dodo and Gigi" and "didi and gogo r u hackas?" The improvisatory interruptions came full circle when Muscleman, getting into the spirit of the event, changed his avatar's name to Godot. That made this "Godot" a first: one in which Godot finally shows up. "

[Speculative Sections removed, see other documents]

The academicised world of hypertext fiction is sanitised and sterile, since, unlike real world fiction, it is actually an evasive device. This is promoted as a technique, the circling of the core of a story, incrementing knowledge by discovering texts, like the ergodic explorer of a maze.

It is a maze that can be switched off but not examined. This opacity to inspection, unlike a real world book, gives these literary experiments a puzzle quality.

Some online hyperfictions contain thousands of discrete pages, and even small ones have almost innumerable possible routes. The experience of reading these texts is very unlike traditional linear fiction. When reading these hypertexts the motivation is exploration and collection, navigating around them has the aim of finding new texts until the full set had been collected. This is a classic gathering activity plus some addiction-satisfying filing. Once a set of texts has been filed, the brain sets about making sense of it all, almost as a gestalt. In a hypertext fiction, the gestalt, or overall meaning, has to be deduced or surmised by the reader.

This puts the experience on the same level as forming a whole of daily scattered events, which again brings us to classic modernist texts such as Ulysses by James Joyce. With this in mind, these hyperfictions could be called meta-filings of ideas, emotional sequences etc. The idea of a coherent linear story is lost, replaced by a diffuse impression of life events. Although some software tools allow areas to be guarded to prevent premature disclosure, the open narrative structure is a defining feature. At an extreme, the author assembles a vast collection of pieces, and links them in an arbitrary and idiosyncratic way. The reader reads, but automatically, due to over-learnt comprehension techniques, they collect and sort these minute pieces of text into a whole.

This activity is so far removed from traditional story-telling, or what is known as narrative, that it could be seen as nearer to a computer filing activity. The reason for the story filing axis is that the activity takes place on a computer and that the main activity with multiple objects on a computer is filing. It is almost as if this is the defining factor between hyperfiction on the computer, and electronic text or linear text reading, which would include ebooks, and normal information web sites. Hyperfiction is in a perilous position because concepts of computer filing have been applied to the interpretation of literary texts.

As I have shown above, there is some confusion around the terms hypertext fiction, non-linear narrative etc, and the scope of the topic. Non-linear narrative is a very loose term that is used to describe particular forms in computer games, cable TV shows, normal printed books and online hypertext fictions. Generally, the more serious practitioners use the term hypertext fiction for non-linear narratives read on a computer or portable reader, although the term hypertext describes the majority of things on the internet. Even the type of processing used to display pages is termed hypertext markup language. So calling non-linear narrative hypertext is like calling a golf caddy a vehicle: accurate but not descriptive.

Many books have been published on traditional materials which have an open chapter or section order. Historical antecedents of the supposedly new art of hypertext narrative might be the I Ching, which uses a chance act to select hexagrams which are used to provide enigmatic but profound advice. To jump forward historically, the Dada Exquisite Cadavers, where text or images are created independently but within a sequence, to give arbitrary readings on completion, are similar to the traditional party game Consequences. Marc Saportas Composition No. 1 (1962), had a deck of one hundred loose leaf cards, meant to be shuffled before each reading, so giving a random order for the text.

Printed book examples include Cortazar's Hopscotch (Rayuela in Spanish) , (Cortazar's Hopscotch (Rayuela)) which can be read in any order, but has a suggested non-linear chapter order printed at the front, with expendable chapters. Hopscotch is also a book full of jazz references, a music which thrives on improvisation. As an émigré from Argentina in France, the idea behind the lack of dictated linear structure is to encourage a search for many things, including "an alternative order that would transgress accepted notions of reality"; values, social organization, knowledge & understanding (reason), language, family, city, nation; intellectually derived certainty; intellectually articulated self; For the reader: a similar quest" . (Latin American Prose Fiction: An Archaeology of the "Boom" University of Puget Sound 2001)

The earliest Western book example is Laurence Sterne's comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. This was published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1766. Childrens' books have often used this non-linear approach. The Dadaists created the Exquisite Cadaver, a game made up of separate sections, based on the game Consequences. Automatic generation of texts was a particular Dadaist trick (Tristan Tzara's Dadaist Poetry). Early scrolls were discrete texts, and it is only recently that the idea of the narrative novel became predominant. As now on television, part publication was the norm. For instance, Dicken's works were published as parts, enabling easy purchase by his army of keen readers.

Project Gutenberg is the most famous example of an online electronic text library. These works are not only available for free, they are also of more use to students and researchers as they can be word searched, and stylistic analyses can be done, for instance to establish probable authorship in the case of texts of unknown origin. Other online text libraries include Textz, which as many modern texts and most publisher web sites which have sample chapters from many books.

Text adventure games in the Dungeons and Dragons style have a long history, being the first fictional use of the developing internet, excluding digitisation and networking of texts such as papers and collaborative workgroups. MUD (multi-user dungeons, or domains) were set up to facilitate adventure game playing, with users reading bits of story action then typing in instructions such as open door get key etc to navigate the game space. This basic method still works for a lot of modern high-resolution immersive shooter games such as Wolfenstein, Goldeneye, TimeSplitters etc.

What might be called classic hypertext fictions are mainly text-based, but might have some graphic illustration, and involve moving around links to navigate a pre-ordained (although sometimes changing) structure. Mark Amerika's term clickual describes the user interaction with this type of work. Examples are Michael Joyce's Afternoon. A Story (1987), Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1991) and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995). All are available from the Eastgate web site . (Eastgate see Appendix for web address ) Incidentally, the hyperfiction that Eastgate sell is relatively expensive, especially given the amateur nature of the field, suggesting an academic and research, rather than just normally curious, audience. The self-proclaimed first hyper-novel, Ambulance by Monica Moran, is considered later.

There is a small but growing market for ebooks which are electronic versions of normal linear texts for use with computers or portable devices, such as laptops or Palm Pilots, or dedicated readers such as the Gemstar eBook, or the more general use eBookMan from Franklin (USA) or the Of course these ebooks can be read in any order but so can a printed text. The aim of these ebooks is to emulate rather than enhance the reading experience, although basic computer functions such as copy and paste are available on some texts. Note that the Adobe Acrobat PDF (portable document format) does not allow copy and paste of text, and is often used by businesses for this reason, to prevent easy copying of documents, although this is also its most irritating feature.

Hypertext in HTML and Javascript can be created in a simple text editor. Dedicated software exists for making hypertext web pages and assembling them into web sites with data representation, navigation and overall structure such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage . (See Appendix for software details ) There are also specific tools for fiction or creativetext.

The main hypertext fiction site on the web is Eastgate Systems (Ibid): "At Eastgate, we create new hypertext technologies and publish serious hypertext, fiction and non- fiction: serious, interactive writing." But they also say "At a time when even the best hypertext, on or off the Web, often seems empty and superficial in relation to a new piece of work they are selling. This site has many interesting and informative articles, reviews etc, some in normal page style, and some as hypertext. As such it is a good place to see whether hypertext actually works. For instance, Mark Bernstein, the technical director of Eastgate, has a small hypermedia piece Chasing Our Tails (1997) on the site which explores issues around books, hypermedia, etc. This is an absorbing way to spend ten minutes and raises some good points; but it seems that a normal linear version is trying to jump out of the links. There is also the structure of this piece of hypermedia, displayed in Storyspace, a product for creating linked texts. In this the simple and admirably clear paragraphs are shown as a large cloud of texts with many links. What was a straight-forward essay has become a jumble of possible links. What is gained by viewing it as a hyperfiction? It is not clear.

I will use my own work as an example of a story generator.

In the early 80s I was experimenting with the then-new home computer, specifically the Sinclair Spectrum 48 and the Acorn BBC Micro. The two of interest to this study were:

Cow Boils Head (story text generator, Spectrum, 1983-84)

SCUM Manifesto (animation, Spectrum, 1983-84)

These came out on my own Micro Arts data cassette software label and were later distributed as telesoftware by Prestel (1984-85). Other titles included conceptual pieces, graphics and animations . (See Appendix for software details)

It was distributed as a data cassette, and telesoftware on the original Prestel network, which had many unused resources as it had not really been taken up by any community. It had been invented in 1979 as part of BT and no-one knew what to do with it, so it was given to the public at no cost as part of the telephone service. When Micro Arts approached them in 1984, we were given 500 pages and told to do what we wanted. At the time, Micro Arts was also working with London Video Arts on an art version of Teletext for Channel 4. This was broadcast in 1985 under the name C5 (no relation to the current Channel 5). All this mid-Eighties activity has been lost to history as the protagonists (Micro Arts, and even London Video Arts) were not connected to the mainstream of academic activity, and so the activities were not documented.

Story text generator. (Spectrum, Micro Arts 1983 see Appendix for software details)

This had a short story Cow Boils Head concerning the displeased reaction of cows to the BSE crisis. This new type of disease, based on toxic protein material called prions, had just hit the scientific headlines many years before the news reached the general public.

The text (2000 words) of the story was made into data banks which contained synonyms and antonyms for all of the words, without changing their classification, so verbs corresponded to verbs, nouns with nouns etc. When the software generator ran it selected between the possible words for that position in the sentence and created new sentences. These were not random as they were all entered in the first place, rather than coming from a large dictionary, so it could be categorised as a multiple path hyperfiction on a sentence level.

The texts it produced were similar to the language substitution experiments of Raymond Queneau in Cent mille milliards de poemes, part of the 1960s group OULIPO . (See Appendix for web details) This work was published as a book with pages cut into one line strips. His aim was poetry should be made by everyone.

Cow Boils Head was shown at the 1985 London Film Festival along with the SCUM Manifesto animation. It was left running for 4 days at the Camden home of the London Film-Makers Coop. Although the endless surreal text generation caused a ripple of interest within the nascent video art community (David Larcher, Steve Hawley, Cerith Wynn-Evans etc) the experiments were not followed up as I moved to Zimbabwe to write normal linear fiction. I later worked at Sheffield Hallam University as the lecturer/manager running their new Computer Graphics facility, and my interest moved towards the computer production of 3D and 2D images. In those days it was not that easy to find out about things in any possible hypertext fiction scene, as the web did not exist, and the computer art genre was much despised, or at least ignored, by the mainstream art scene. At that time there was only JANET (Joint Academic Network) for email and file transfer, and the great explosion of communication caused by the web had yet to come. Text and computers was also a difficult and unrewarding genre, perhaps only worthy of experimentation.

The Cow Boils Head hyper-stories were lurid and shocking substituting Angels and Lizards etc for Cows, in the best tradition of experimental fiction.

Figure 15: Cow Boils Head onscreen scrolling text (ZX Spectrum PC emulation)

The author William Gibson wrote semi-autobiographical poem Agrippa: a Book of the Dead (See Appendix for web details ) specifically for computer reading with distribution by disk. Gibson is famous for the novel Neuromancer (1984) which introduced the term Cyberspace and the genre Cyberpunk. Agrippa was distributed with a limited release of special reader screens. The reader units had etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh which were light-sensitive and changed from one image to another when exposed to light. The text of the poem, when read, was erased from the disk, it could only be read once. The text disappeared off the bottom of the screen never to be seen again. This text has since been uploaded to the web.

A current example of computer poetry is the Cybernetic Poet Poem Generator (Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies, Inc see Appendix for web details) although this produces randomised text supposedly in the style of famous poets. There are now many examples of this type of software on the web, including corporate blurb generators, pornolisers that can regenerate any input web page as hard core gibberish, and so on.

Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt developed some randomised text instructions with his Oblique Strategies. These were text cards with advice for people in recording studios, applicable to a number of creative situations (these are now available as a download (See Appendix for web details)). At the time these concepts were not mainstream at all, and seemed very exotic outside of the art school, despite the slight similarity to Tarot cards.

Animation, Spectrum, Micro Arts 1983.

Money Work System from the SCUM Manifesto was an excerpt from Valerie Solanas polemic book of the same name . (Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men), Matriarchy Study Group 1968 ) The animation had very crude illustrations and animations with garish colours. On checking copyright, the Matriarchy Study Group had folded. This piece was not conceptually challenging, comprising simple graphics and text.

The story of Solanas attempt on Andy Warhol's life has been shown in the film dramatisation I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996. (See Appendix for film details)

Images have been removed

There are examples such as the police action series mvMax , (See Appendix for web details ) written and structured by Kent Massey, which allows the viewer to choose a course of action at a decision point. These affect the narrative as different video clips are available for playing. However the narratives work their way back to the same node point for the next interactive user decision. These are still genuine non-linear narratives even if the multiple courses are predefined, and can be called multi-linear narratives.

Audience participation has become less fashionable, but there are many examples of plays where the audience chooses outcomes. This often had a political or sociological aim, to empower the audience against the powerful hand of the author. The Wheel of Fortune, BBC Radio's first-ever interactive radio drama was broadcast in three streams in September 2002 . (See Appendix for details) It was written by Nick Fisher, an experienced TV and radio playright. The different narrative streams could be followed on two different radio stations (BBC Radio 3 and 4) and the internet, with the narrative course controlled by the listener switching channels.

Narrative sound would include anything with a lyrical element, such as opera, folk music, country music, and some rock, jazz and blues. However instrumental music can follow a narrative course, as in Tchaikovsky's1812 Overture (formally called The Year 1812) to commemorate the Russian defeat of the Napoleonic invasion 1812, with cannons and bell-tolling. Progressive rock developed the concept album, where a theme is developed over many songs, or fewer long arranged pieces. Often the music is as much a part of the story as the lyrics, as in the Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, or Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, both about madness and social pressure.

Interactivity in music software is usually musical as lyrical and singing content is difficult to simulate in real time. Now that computers are fast enough to process large chunks of data, audio arranging software has become available, usually known as looping software, as they work with repeating loops of audio data. Audio sequencing and mixing software is available in any style. In fact many software packages are aimed at a subset of the market such as guitar, hip-hop, techno, ambient etc.

Monica Moran's Ambulance. An Electronic Novel was a murder / drug / horror story promoted as the first on-floppy-disk novel. It was badly received as it was very punky, and the bass-heavy music and graphic page-turns caused as much interest as the drug-saturated and gory story. The particular black and white comic style would probably be more popular now than then, just at the point when smoothly rendered colour computer graphics were becoming fashionable amongst the digerati. Jaime Levy, the 27-year-old producer/publisher of Ambulance, created the first electronic novel on disk, and went on to run the web site Word (now sadly defunct), an art / text site that was innovative and entertaining. Ambulance was "Animated graphics and floppy fiction". Monica Moran calls it hyper-comics. Levy now runs the eHollywood web site. (See Appendix for web details)

This now seems not that shocking, and still has a great comic book feel (Jaime Levy illustrated Love and Rockets comic).

My own contribution to this area comes with the multimedia piece for the novella Life in the Bubble World (Geoff Davis, Life in the Bubble World Em Publishing 1997-1998-1999 see Appendix for web details ) which was a simple click-through animation with audio. This was designed by Resident, and was available from the publisher's web site and as a stand-alone site.

Most computer games involve a non-linear narrative. These include adventure games, platform games, first person shooters, driving and sport games. All games that are posited in a virtual world need a structure supplied by reference to the real world. In games without a clear story-line, such as a sports simulations, there is a series of targets, leagues etc., which require team-building and learning exercises which involve achieving tasks set by the computer within a structured world. The games outside of this are the pure memory or spatial games such as solitaire or Tetris, and even these exist in a real world of achievement and task accomplishment.

This is a very large area, and now the divisions between films and games have blurred. All action films have a game for the new games platforms, which offer back-story, multi-stranded narrative, contingent events etc.

Explore virtual world with very pretty and realistic scenery, solve puzzles, find new levels. Good ambient audio settings. First major game to work on art level. The user has to work out what is going on, so is in mystery genre.

After the success of Sim2000, Sim3000, which are city and environment building games, they moved to simulating people and families, and relationships.

"Sims speak gibberish, and dream and converse by using icons rather than words. Unlike other failed attempts to realistically simulate human life and language, Wright, the author of game, came up with an elegant solution that not only works but also encourages the players to project their thoughts on the cute little computer people" Gonzalo Frasca (Gonzalo Frasca on Game Studies web site http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/frasca/)

Sit-com genre.

Much-hyped recent game with creation of deity that rules villagers. Sets up a moral world with repercussions from actions. Battling with other demons, monsters etc.

Religion / Fighting genre.

Such as Reign of Fire 2002, in the film, dragons take over the world, heroes save world, in the usual Fantasy genre way. The game has the same story as the film, but with the added ability to act as a dragon, not a human, with different aims.

These games have story lines from the films, and are not open ended as all the game play depends on completing missions that are like small scale scenarios based on the film events. There is no particular character development.

Fantasy / Action / Sci-fi genre.

Many driving / sport skill games appeal to virtual sports enthusiasts. Story lines are usually missions (driving games, usually from the gangster genre) or long-term competition (football, skiing, etc with tournaments and leagues involving team selection etc).

Genre Sports, Gangster, Action, Simulation

My own work is rather minimal but was programmed by an ex-Middlesex Electronic Arts MA student, Robert Mettler, so it is worth a mention.

I had a cyberpunk novella Nnn Goes Mobile published (Geoff Davis, Nnn Goes Mobile Juma Publishing 1994 ) and it seemed a good idea to produce a piece of multimedia to go with the book. The publisher insisted the piece had to fit on a single floppy disk. Robert Mettler had just finished his MA and set to work from my vague instructions, read the book, to produce a game-style multimedia piece in Macromedia Director which was called ParisieNnn as the action was in Paris. It was really an adventure game, with some multiple paths, leading to a single resolution. It also had a soundtrack and interactive sound cues at certain points.

However it was difficult to play as the clues were very cryptic and the clickable areas on the multiple screens were quite hard to find. At the time the adventure genre had puzzles and keys or pick-ups, or finding, discrete objects or places, in order to proceed, as their main navigation control devices, and this was no exception. The puzzle was working out how to use it, and the keys were almost impossible to find.

These are references from within the text, and some other interesting items. I have put their particular terms for 'non-linear narrative on a computer' after the reference (eg Cybertext) as it is interesting to see the range of terms used for this field.

Author: Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature

(1997, The Johns Hopkins University Press)

Parts of the book are online at

This includes the definitions of Ergodic literature and historical examples.

Aarseth's home site

(site for owner of above site)

Online immersive 3D virtual space with avatars

AWEDU

Software

"A hypertext tool to hold your knowledge in place"

Unix X-Windows

"The Aquanet hypertext system described in this paper is designed to support knowledge structuring tasks. Aquanet is a browser-based tool that allows users to graphically represent information in order to explore its structure.

The power of hypertext derives from its dual nature: hypertext is simultaneously a tool for managing and presenting information and a tool for representing the underlying structure of that information."

Fiction site run by Abbe Don, he doesn't use any new media terms. Preferring, Storytelling in the Digital Age

http://www.bubbe.com/

Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado, US, 1997

Reported at The Salon online magazine

Adventure - gameography

Timeline (2000), Eidos Interactive

Amazon (1984), Telarium

Cybernetic Poet

Software

Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies, Inc

"A screen saver that writes poetry, a Poet's Assistant that helps you write poetry (and song lyrics!), and 50 professionally - designed "poet personalities."

RKCP reads a selection of poems and then creates a "language model." RKCP then writes original poems from that model."

Not hypertext but interesting as electronic text producer.

All-inclusive web site

Has all definitions, links not updated so some missing (see Project Xanadu, emphasising link integrity).

Site with graphical fictions, mostly done in Flash, UK arts sensibility here

From Text to Hypertext and Beyond

Raine Koskimaa 2000, University of Jyväskylä

Computing Centre, Finland

Mostly gone, part of Westminster University

http://www.daimi.au.dk/~sbrand/mmp2/Dissimulations.html

The Interactive Story

Largest and most authoritative site, selling a software tool Storyspace, which will favour certain types of activity. Also a note management system Tinderbox.

Eastgate is a home for serious hypertext and has the very respected hypernovels, Michael Joyce's Afternoon. A Story (1987), Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1991) and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995), and many others. It also sells the reprint of Ted Nelson's classic Literary Machines.

See also Storyspace and Tinderbox.

Production studio for the web, but is also a site for filmic multimedia and links

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/elab.html

"A study of the implications of hypertext for creative writers looking to move beyond traditional notions of linearity". Refers also to InterMedia development team (Yankelovich), and Delany & Landow.

Oblique Strategies Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt also popularised an aleatory technique with his Oblique Strategies. The series stopped on Peter Schmitt's untimely death on holiday in Spain in 1980.

It is available for free download for Apple Mac (Hypercard), Windows and Palm Pilot.

From Edition 1 (1975), sample instructions were:

Abandon normal instruments

Accept advice

Accretion

A line has two sides

Allow an easement (an easement is the abandonment of a stricture)

Are there sections? Consider transitions

Site promoting software Erasmatron for making, devised and run by Chris Crawford.

http://www.erasmatazz.com/

Interactive storyworlds ("Interactive storytelling allows a player to act inside a dramatic universe called a storyworld." declines inclusion in other definitions)

Three-way narrative broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and the internet simultaneously.

"The fray is a place for people who believe the web is about personal expression and a new kind of art"

Gareth Bushell, James Lane and Anthony Rowe

Producers Squid Soup.

Text entered into a 3D vortex.

"Ghosts explores digital communication, the longevity of information and leaving ones mark on another's experience.

Visitors to the installation can enter text messages and see them appear within a virtual, permanent, 3D sculpture."

This digital sculpture is also available at

AGRIPPA (A Book of The Dead)

Etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh

(C)1992 Kevin Begos Publishing

Disk distributed etext.

Text now online at:

See also Neuromancer etc

Mark Amerika

Theory and fiction

From Apple, still available from the store, but no longer under development.

Hypercard 2.4 now sold as presentation tool

"Hypercard 2.4.1 is a comprehensive package of tools for authoring media-rich interactive solutions. Create your own wide range of applications including multimedia presentations, CD-ROM titles, courseware, and computer-based training materials."

Resources:

Alternatives to Hypercard: "The most popular HyperCard-like programs are SuperCard (an excellent program, though Mac-only), MetaCard (a powerful, cross-platform program), and Revolution (which uses the MetaCard engine, but with a friendlier interface). MetaCard and Revolution are too expensive for most hobbyists, but free demo versions are available which might be all you need." From HyperCard Heaven

General news site

http://hypertext.pair.com/

Software

Jerry Tutsch

Mac only

Introduction To HTT:

"HyperText Tool, "HTT" for short, is an easy to use Macintosh program that enables you to write and read hypertext documents. It can be used to learn how to write self-contained nonlinear computer based documents and to create HTT generated WWWeb documents. It provides true WYSIWYG hypertext editing. It is a structure editor, not an HTML editor."

Shop site

http://www.duke.edu/~mshumate/list01.html

Hypertext fiction

Site for games-style software

Interactive fiction

http://cmc.uib.no/dac98/papers/kirksaether.html

The Structure of Video Game Narration, Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim 1998

Cyberpoetry site, University of Queensland, Australia

University of Puget Sound 2001

Some Essential Notes on Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch:

Hopscotch was filmed as Rayuela Directed by Jaime Kogan (1994)

"Wittgenstein, Genette and the Reader's Narrative in Hypertext", in G.P Landow (ed) Hyper/Text/Theory, 1994, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Published by Electronic Hollywood

Author of Victory Garden (1991); Professor, School of Information Arts and Technologies,Yale Gordon College of Liberal Arts, University of Baltimore

"An information-age practice called "cybertext". This is writing (or more accurately, textual production in various media) that depends on a feedback mechanism operated and partly controlled by the receiver to evoke a particular state of a variable or combinatorial text."

The term Hypertext is used more generally.

This is a very complex area ("There is an infinity of scales. Scales may also be created while composing. Composers such as Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, and Bela Bartok, among others, have done so in the recent past." Teoria website) but a good introduction is at:

and

See also

This can get very specialised, see

for North Indian overview

Interactive television company developing a multi-linear cop drama.

Augmentation

NLS means online system

Douglas Engelbart

http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. interesting view of narrative as part of AI, "narrative as a way of understanding the world"

Creator of a software framework he named Project Xanadu to process non-linear texts.

Invented the term Hypertext in the 1960s.

Also, hypergrams (branching pictures), hypermaps (with transparent overlays), and branching movies.

See Project Xanadu

Usability expert, author of Hypertext and Hypermedia, etc

"OULIPO is the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature, a group of writers and mathematicians. Members include Raymond Queneau, François Le Lionnais, Claude Berge, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino.

This laboratory of literary structures produced, among other works, Queneau's outlandish book: Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, which indeed offers the reader one hundred trillion (1014) poems."

http://www.nous.org.uk/oulipo.html

See Queneau, Raymond

Collaborative and Interactive Cybermedia (expired)

Ted Nelson summary

Everett, Hugh

The Everett Relative State interpretation (Many Worlds Interpretation)

Doctoral thesis Cambridge University1957, developed by DeWitt and Graham (1973) and David Deutsch (1985, 97)

See also Multiverse

Cent mille milliards de poemes, part of the 60s group Oulipo.

See Short History of Interactive Fiction at

See OULIPO

Narratology, Construction of Narrative Space

Creating Killer Web Sites

Online worlds for Sim characters plenty of narrative here, but no terminology used at all just make your own world etc.)

The SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men)

The SCUM Manifesto was written in 1967 and published in 1968 as a Phoenix Press booklet, the year she shot and wounded Andy Warhol. Republished 1983 by the Matriarchy Study Group.

Also a film I Shot Andy Warhol 1996, dramatised documentary, Director Mary Harron.

Mac and Windows

Eastgate Systems Inc

"A Hypertext Tool for Writers and Readers"

"Storyspace is a hypertext writing environment that is especially well suited to large, complex, and challenging hypertexts. Storyspace focuses on the process of writing, making it easy and pleasant to link, revise, and reorganize. Storyspace is available for Windows and Macintosh computers."

See also Eastgate and Tinderbox.

Text as Virtual Reality

(Techno-Aesthetics and Web-Literatures)

Paper at Digital arts and culture 98, Bergen, Norway 1998

See also Hypercard

Ergodic Nightmare - The world of choices in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

"A TextArc is a visual represention of a text, the entire text (twice!) on a single page. A funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary; it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning."

Visual representation of a text, not a common hypertext, but uses visual processing and selection as a tool to analyse full texts of books

http://textarc.org/

Mac only

Eastgate Systems Inc

http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

"The PERSONAL content management assistant"

"Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant. It stores your notes, ideas, and plans. It can help you organize and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs.

Tinderbox's agents automatically scan your notes, looking for patterns and building relationships. Agents help discover relationships and help make sure important things don't get lost. Agents are easy to make and easy to modify. They're flexible and powerful.

Tinderbox can even gather and update changing information and breaking news from the internet."

Surrealist Games

"To make a Dadaist poem:

Take a newspaper.

Take a pair of scissors.

Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.

Cut out the article.

Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.

Shake it gently.

Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.

Copy conscientiously.

The poem will be like you.

And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar."

Virtual Reality Modelling Language (and other systems)

Home of the Web 3D Consortium

Metalepsis article in Visible Darkness web site Blog, 2002

"This is a place for poetry and fiction born to pixels rather than the page--writing that's digital down to its bones. Art is the technology of the soul. New media poetry and fiction."

Word Circuits also have a good hypertext authors page:

Software and general site

Word Circuits Connection Muse (formerly called the Connection System) is a set of software tools specifically for authors of Web-based hypertext poetry and fiction. Most hypertext tools available today for the Web are intended primarily for creating informational Web sites where readers will usually browse (in the original sense of rather haphazardly sampling some of the content) or seek out specific information. Literature, on the other hand, demands a system designed for whole-text reading--that is, one designed to accommodate readers who wish to consume an entire hypertext in a satisfying manner.

Home for retro adventure gamers

http://www.xyzzynews.com/

Interactive fiction

Text adventures

Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature Johns Hopkins University Press 1997

The Theatre and Its Double: Essays Calder Publications 1993

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings Penguin Books 2000

Consciousness Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2002

Mapping the Mind Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1998

The Complete Illustrated Lewis Carroll Wordsworth Editions Ltd 2001

Hopscotch (Rayuela) Spanish 1963, Avon Books 1966

Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (MasterMinds Series)

Permutation City 1994 Millennium Books

China A Cultural History Batsford 1990

Interface Culture Basic Books 1997

The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious Princeton University Press 1981

Human Information Processing 2nd Edition Academic Press 1977

The Medium is the Massage (illustrated) Penguin reprint 1969 (USA 1967)

Hamlet on the Holodeck MIT Press edition 2001

Designing Web Usability New Riders Publishing 2000

Towards a User-Friendly Web Reader, one-day seminar Amsterdam, April 7 2000

Selection of usability papers.

The Humane Interface Addison Wesley 2000

The Computer in Art Studio, Vista 1971

Mondo 2000 A User's Guide to the New Edge Thames and Hudson 1992

Creating Killer Web Sites Hayden Books 1997

Designing the User Interface 3rd edition, Addison Wesley Longman 1998

The SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men)

Matriachy Study Group

Barthes and the Empire of Signs Postmodern Encounters Icon Books 2001