Plan for Story

27May07

Last semester, I began a hypertext project that intermixed five sections of reading: one set of poetry, two narratives, and two theoretical/historical texts. I began linking across the separate texts trying to create reading through the form, not just the content. I didn’t finish this project and feel it could be pushed further in this class. I’d like to tell one of the narratives about a girl in a library. She will be described by her interactions with books and her feelings about them. It is a postmodernist fiction that is told in third person omniscient external focalization. I think several metanarratives may emerge as the story progresses and I can payer media upon text and text upon media. The story is intended for adults of our technological age; I want to focus on reflecting a nostalgic longing for print technology and the intimacy of reading.

 

The story will be set in a library in contemporary times, but no specificity to temporal aspects will be given. The purpose is to entertain and enlighten readers with a view of how sensual reading can be. I think that as I go through this project, other possible focalizations might emerge to better tell parts of the story, like letting the books themselves speak. I think by making it interactive and digital I can force the nostalgic aspects of the narrative to the forefront and make the remediation of the forms a central development tool. I anticipate making each pass more focused of sensory experience; I could include noises and images from libraries or the act of reading. I’d like to make the act of reading, page turning, and connection with a book an experience that is missed in reading the digital text (if not missed, at least reflected upon).

 

Some possible challenges for me will be specific to the technology and trying to blend together the different media while holding to a central form that is lead by content. I am concerned about overloading the reader with too many inputs that do not relate to the story. I am also worried about using technology purely as a gimmick, not something that adds to the overall feel or readability of the narrative. I have to keep it simple and stay focused on what the experience should be like for the reader. Each pass to the next level of narrative development has to center back upon this plan; I know I tend to get excited by new possibilities for expression and can over indulge in them. I think having the story mostly written or thought out will help me center on the narrative expression and allow the technology to flow into it instead of imposing the technology onto it.

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The Internet

12May07

Read this amazing rhetorical analysis of language and Internet pictures/comics. I was thinking last night about how jokes and comics are essentially miniature narrative–complete, compact. Jokes have every component of narrative packed into as few words or images as possible. I find that I am always fascinated by how language gets used and how language uses us. I really like his understanding of metacommunication.

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Introduction

12May07

My name is Kristin and I am from Gainesville, Florida. I came to Orlando following my boyfriend of ten years. We live surrounded by woods and water in a cute apartment complex with our giant great dane, Sega. I like being around nature and getting surprised by the creatures that show up here (otters and falcons!). I paint, make digital collages, write, travel, and speak. I love teaching and creating. I am vegan and very sensitive to environmental issues. I love to bake and cook; Alton Brown and Iron Chef are icons to me. I love dancing and getting dressed up. I enjoy art and theories from Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, and Avant Garde work.

I like postmodernist fiction, where narrative is generally mixed up and nonlinear. I love Haruki Murakami, Chuck Palahnuik, Mark Danielewski, and Craig Clevanger. I am more interested in the reader’s personal experience of interacting with media than the authorial intentions of meaning or interaction. I enjoy finding alternate contexts or meanings from readings that could be used to teach or relate something else unexpected. I love movies, but haven’t seen most traditionally popular movies. I see more esoteric Japanese horror films than anything else, most of which have multiple story lines, abstract plots, and unexplainable endings. I like to play puzzle video games on my own, but I watch my boyfriend play narrative games so I can analyze them. I like to look for inconsistencies or residues; things that don’t entirely calculate into the logic of the game.

I have an amazing attention for details and aesthetics. I work mostly with the parallels between the body as a form and the book as a form. I have a serious nostalgia for traditional print media; you will often find me romanticizing libraries and old books. I find the experience of reading highly sensual and intimate. New media interactions have shifted this experience to be more public and performance like. Games are able to be watched and experienced by others–multiplayer books do not exist. I am interested in the ways people are physically involved in playing games or exploring a hypertext. I filter most of this through Lacanian psychoanalysis because of my interest in language and semiotics. I agree with Lacan’s position that the unconscious is structured like a language. Psychoanalysis is greatly related to narratology and storytelling since it is based in the experiences of one person talking and another listening and analyzing the words and meanings of the story. My most recent presentation in Australia was about how tattoos act like bookmarks and how we orient ourselves with narrative storytelling.

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Define:

11May07

Caput Mortuum is a Latin term meaning ‘death’s head’. In alchemy, it signified a useless substance left over from a chemical operation such as sublimation. Alchemists represented this residue with a stylized human skull, a literal death’s head. In its current limited usage, the caput mortuum represents decline and entropy.

Caput mortuum (also spelled caput mortum or caput mortem) is the name given to a purple variety of iron oxide pigment, an “earth color”. It is used in oil paints and paper dyes. The name for this pigment may have come from the alchemical usage, since iron oxide (rust) is the useless residue of oxidization.

It is the name of a brownish paint that was originally made from the wrappings of mummies. It was most popular in the 1600s. It was suddenly discontinued in the early 19th century when its composition became generally known to artists [The Artist's Handbook, p. 52]. A London colorman claimed that he could satisfy the demands of his customers for twenty years from one Egyptian mummy [The Chemistry of Paints and Painting, p. 236]. In recent years, it has been made with iron sulphate and impurities obtained from the residues of the distillation of scisti piritosi in the fabrication of sulphuric acid. The paint color is also known as Colcothar, Mummy Brown, Mummy, Egyptian Brown, and by combinations like Caput Mortem Violet.

from wiki

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