Why introduce a new way of reading a book, instead of the one that moves, like life, from beginning to end, from birth to death? The answer is simple: because any new way of reading that goes against the matrix of time, which pulls us toward death, is a futile but honest effort to resist this inexorability of one's fate, in literature at least, if not in reality.

-Milorad Pavic, Landscape Painted With Tea

Abstract:

Contemporary electronic media endures much criticism simply because it does not resemble the book. Complaints of vertigo, confusion, displacement, portability, and access are common. These problems are compounded by the fact that, particularly on the WWWeb and the internet, no one seems to know when or where to stop reading. The solution for many is to stop reading and start surfing. As a writer of hypertext fiction the author claims that the new media is a particularly fertile site for the creation of compelling new works and offers an interpretive structure based on memory. The paper contends that within a hypertext document an associational link functions as a mnemonic through areas of artificial (written) memory. Examples are taken from: architectural writing (the plan), cartographic writing (the map) and photographic writing (the picture).

Mnemonics

Prudence is the knowledge of what is good, what is bad and what is neither good nor bad. Its parts are memory, intelligence, foresight [memoria, intelligentia, providentia]. Memory is the faculty by which the mind recalls what has happened. Intelligence is the faculty by which it acertains what is. Foresight is the faculty by which it is seen that something is going to occur before it occurs.

-Cicro De Inventione

The purpose of the mnemonic is to allow what has been perceived to be recalled with ease. In the process of memory the mnemonic is a syndetic catalyst; never itself the final end, it is powerful by association. This definition might capture the usual understanding of mnemonic as exemplified by such devices as rhymes "... 30 days has September, April June and November..." Yet there are forms of memory which exist beyond the individual and require a different mnemonic to assist the group mind. An oral tradition holds collective memory. The mnemonic of collective memory is the folk tale, the story and the verse. A materialist culture places its memory in objects: the album, the anthology, the dictionary, the encyclopedia, the atlas; and places these objects in institutions: the library, the gallery, the museum, the office, the home. If it is true that the purpose of individual memory is to survive the death of the moment, then it is equally true that the purpose of collective memory is to survive the death of the individual.

A hypertext may hold the objects of collective memory in an electronic form (as digitized text and images). In such an environment the link functions as the mnemonic. It provides the mechanism for recollection of information and is more or less useful depending upon the relationship between that information and the user. This is an alternative model for understanding electronic media which is opposed to many assumptions of print technology.

Traditional models for organizing data (the index, the catalog, the data table) all function on a linear hierarchy: lexicographic, numeric, temporal, etc. The ordering of elements is established through their placement within a series. The book is arguably the ideal repository for such information as its physical structure (page after page) is also a linear series. Reference works such as a Thesaurus or Dictionary of Synonyms are powerful precisely because they subject a highly complex semantic order to a simple linear one. In this case the mnemonic which facilitates easy recollection of information is the alphabet or the ordinal numbers; devices which are used so often their organizational role has become transparent.

The print-bound work of literature need not be linear. Yet it is superimposed upon the linear space of the book, so that while its content may encompass complex and non-linear structures, the reader maintains a sense of place by reference to the work's physical container: the book. The Toronto Research Group, who have looked long and hard at experimental formats, announced some of the strongest influences of the physical book in their Research Report #2 : "In the mechanics of page, the support surface for text and literature, there is a phenomenal and chronological constraint: enforced consecutivity, a mandate for sequentiality, linear compaction, and unilinear direction."(165)

When the physical structure of the book is removed what is lost is both the constriction inherent in the bound format and the sense of place it brings. In his work "Lost in the Funhouse: Rethinking Hypertext Theory and Practice" C. J. Keep argues that this sense of place is coextensive with a sense of self:

"The codex book is an exemplary fetish object; apprehendable as a single, bounded, and discrete form, its apparent completeness recalls the image of totality in relation to which the ego first "discovers" its autonomy. Held in the hands, its pages caressed and turned, or even flung away like a lover scorned (and it is significant in this regard that one of the most oft-repeated complaints about electronic texts is that "you can't take them to bed"), the book is a reassuring comfort to the ego's deep-seated concerns for its own illusory integrity."

The card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three-dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation. (And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar assimilates it into his own card index.)

The printed book is a collection of what "belongs together" with an implication that what does not belong is apocrapha or false memory. The book is a subtle and miraculous form of incorporation, literally, of embodyment. In order to challenge the assumption of "what belongs" it is necessary to produce the counter volume (hence introducing the possibility of multiple personalities) or to destroy the original. When the library at Alexandria was razed what disappeared was the written past. When the Futurists announced their intention to burn the galleries and flood the museums what they wanted was a change in collective memory. Book burnings are a form electroshock therapy proscribed for the group mind in the hopes that memories can be erased.

Indeed, the printed book fulfills its expectations so well that the pervasive belief in linear order which so marks the print tradition is often carried over into the new electronic media, just as the first printed books carried over the traditions of scribes into the age of moveable type. The unbinding of the physical text, rather than being embraced for its potential multiplicity, has led many to propose a new grammar to prevent the Diaspora of the unbound work. David Whitehead, in his work "Experimenting with Hyperfiction", tells us to "Write a strong linear backbone to the story," and one should, "Write a complete story: thin at the start, thick in the middle and thin at the end," Recommendations such as these are suspect, not so much for their vaguess (how does one write thinly?) as for thier forced assumptions about the media. They are certainly not recommendations for any "experiments" with hyperfiction.

Lexicography

When attending the Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus at the Banff Centre for the Arts, hypertext author Michael Joyce announced that: "The first bioapparatus was the word." Hence claiming a position for language as the formative prosthetic enhancement to the human form. William Burroughs, on the other hand, would have us believe that the word is not prosthetic but virulent; not a limb reaching out but a virus reaching in. Both models position the word as an external entity and both examples carry the implication that the word shall survive the death of its host.

Writing, historically viewed as a physical manifestation of language, is a paradigmatic example of externalized memory. The word and the phrase are ideal mnemonics, hence they are the first logical choices for links in a hypertext document. Early hypertext fictions (most notably those from Michael Joyce, Stuart Moulthrop, Carolyn Guyer, J. Yellowlees Douglas, Mary-Kim Arnold and others published by Eastgate Systems in a disk-based stand-alone format) function primarily through word connections. The word calls a subsequent page of text which the reader understands in relation to the previous page. The Storyspace program, which Eastgate also produces, provides a kind of graphic word processor where one may see the text spaces represented by tiny boxes splayed across the plane of the computer screen. Lines travel between the nodes to represent links. Although it graphically presents the unbound book and provides an excellent writing environment for the construction of hypertext, as a reading format it is at best difficult and unintuitive. This is due mainly to the complications of screen size and three dimensional navigation. Despite the computer's innovation, in these works, additional graphic elements are still used mainly for illustration rather than navigation.

Yet the power of modern software, and in particular browsers for the World Wide Web, is their ability to move beyond the lexicon and into the realm of images. The use of images allows at least three forms of graphic writing: architecture, cartography and photography, to be used. These are distinct mostly in virtue of what form of space they depict; the scene, the place and the structure. Yet these boundaries are largely arbitrary and one space has a tendency to become another. A map is also a blueprint of the area it shows, and a blueprint is produced by what is essentially a photographic process. A photograph, when it is a portrait, also maps a facial structure onto the human landscape.

A second advantage of the electronic medium is that it allows these spatial representations to be written through. The text may be re-called by pointing at an area on the map, the blueprint, or the photograph. Hence a multiplicity of pages exists behind every image–these are the aphoristic "thousand words" that each picture is worth. This format would be structurally impossible to present in a printed book.

Architecture

Pre-Socratic schools of rhetoric often instructed students to recall the intricacies of a long speech through the construction of a "memory palace." The speaker would imagine a building and associate each room with a section of the speech. For example, the stairway leading into the building might form the introduction and the hallway might set up the speaker's argument. The speaker then walked through the structure during oration. He or she kept their place in the speech by keeping their place in the palace.

Electronic media allows the memory palace to be turned inside out. Through the device of clickable maps, a reader can recover the rhetorician's words by selecting items within the electronic memory palace.

What follows are some selections from the drawings completed by Architects Thomas Bessai, Maria Denegri, and Bruce Haden in collaboration with the author. The project was submitted as part of an "ideas" competition. The object was to design a pavilion for the display of architecture. On the completed drawings the icons point to one of three rooms in the pavilion, each illuminated by a different type of light. On paper the text is displayed next to the floor plan. In the hypertext format, however, one selects the icons to call up the text and the text calls up the detail.

Cartography

The map is perhaps the most direct index to the territory. The historical atlas attempts to show the world as it was, while the contemporary atlas shows the world as it is. It is also possible to detail the world as it may be and the world as one imagines it. What follows is a more abstract example of mapping from Elizabeth Fischer's "Dogmap." Choosing any of the graphic elements in constellation about the dog calls up related dog material. Clicking on the body of the dog calls up the main body of the story.

Photography

The photograph is widely regarded as an exacting temporal object. In 1839 William Henry Fox Talbot wrote in the monograph announcing his discovery that "The most transitory of things ... may be fixed forever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy."(xviii) Perhaps far more than either the blueprint or the map, the photograph exists as an external memory, surviving beyond both the moment and the individual. The image outlives its subject, thus creating a profound disquiet which charges the image. In the words of Roland Barthes;

"By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe, which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. (96).

If what the photograph remembers is its own inevitable ruin, what might be exposed by writing through it? The work "25 ways to close a Photograph" uses two historic group photographs found in a used book shop to explore the idea of character. The reader engages the text by clicking directly onto the faces. The works bracket a central narrative which the reader engages through a retouched photo-postcard. One of the photographs and some of the character descriptions follow:

Conclusion

How one views the construction of pathways through the realm of collective memory; the album, the atlas, the scrolls of blueprints and charts; is essentially a problem of bringing compositional skills to the art of interface design. To illustrate this end I have used three broad structural metaphors. I have not defined what makes for an elegant or subversive composition technique within these tropes. It seems the link works well when its associations are coherent: when the point of departure invokes the destination. Yet invocation is a complex and subtle matter. A theory of iconography and semantics is as useful to the hypertext designer as a knowledge of grammar is to the traditional writer. But what will move any work beyond the merely competent use of the media will be imagination and a devotion to the craft.

Biography

Tim McLaughlin is a Vancouver writer who has been working in hypertext for a number of years. He has published works on the WWWeb in the electronic magazine NWHQ. (URL=http://www.knosso.com/NWHQ/) He has presented live readings of these works at the Western Front, The Centre for Image and Sound Research, and the Vancouver International Writers Festival. His hypertext novella "Notes Toward Absolute Zero" has just been published. A recent collaboration with Vancouver architects Bessai, Denegri, and Haden was accepted for exhibition at the Venice Biennale and Toronto's Design Interchange.

Bibliography

Art Institute of Chicago. On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography. Little Brown, London, 1989.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Tr. by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, New York, 1981

Bessai, Thomas. Denegri, Maria. Haden, Bruce. McLaughlin, Tim. Pavilion. Successful competitor for the Venszia 1995 National Ideas Competition. Vancouver, 1995.

Fischer, Elizabeth. "Dogs" NWHQ . (URL=http://www.knosso.com/NWHQ/) Vancouver, 1994.

Joyce, Michael. "The Momentary Advantage of our Awkwardness" Bioapparatus. The Banff Centre, Banff, 1991.

Keep, C.J. Lost in the Funhouse: Rethinking the Body in Hypertext Theory and Practice. Posted to the list: fiction-of-philosophy@world.std.com, 1994.

McCaffery, Steve. bpNichol. Rational Geomancy. Ed. Seve McCaffery. Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1992.

McLaughlin, Tim. "25 Ways to close a Photograph ... With Men of Progress ... And Women of Vision" NWHQ. (URL=http://www.knosso.com/NWHQ/) Vancouver, 1994.

Whitehead, David. "Experimenting with Hyperfiction: Ten Rules for Writers," Writers' Retreat on Interactive Technology & Equipment: Conference Proceedings . Vancouver, 1994.