Alan Bigelow
Alan Bigelow is the “borrower” for this entry because my interest in new digital fiction was born when I saw two pieces of his work, My Summer Vacation and Saving The Alphabet. I am currently greatly taken with his piece, Deep Philosophical Questions.
My interest in Bigelow's work, along with my fascination with Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, became the nucleus for my end of term project for MATX 601, Text and Textuality. That paper, The Textual Machine, explores the differences in readership, authorship, and textuality as they move from early modes of hypertext to new digital fiction. Using work by Alan Bigelow, Shelley Jackson, Geoff Ryman, Andy Campbell, Alexander Mouton, Robert Scholes, Robert Coover, Lucy Anderton, and Elizabeth Tornes, the paper traces how the reader’s experience of a text changes based on its media, how the struggle for the control of that text moves between reader and author as media becomes more interactive, and the various ways the textuality of a piece effect its experience.
One of the requirements of the paper was that it could not be submitted as a printed text, but had to exist in some kind of electronic form. I elected to create a website for the paper that included small traces of hypertext contextually. To that end, the links about the authors are designed to fill in their biography in the same way a hypertext is interpreted, in the navigatable space of the links.
The Textual Machine2008
Dreamweaver CS4, Photoshop CS4, CSS
Text, Images
Three connected pages (Readership: 20 KB, Authorship: 12KB, Textuality: 16KB)
(opens in a new window)