Get Your Read On (Digital Fiction - Blog Post 3)

So, this week we got to explore the ElectronicLiterature Collection (which is about the coolest thing on the planet) and interact with lots of different kinds of digital fictions from lots of different decades. I’m pretty sure that site is going to take up a significant amount of my time for the rest of my natural born life. Still, you HAVE to check it out.

I started off with Caitlin Fisher’s “Everyone at This Party Is Dead,” which pretty much reaffirmed that titles are super important, as I know Jen tried the same one. Because the technology on that one was a bit out of date, it required you to download an entire game file, which definitely wasn’t happening on my satellite interwebs, so off I went in search of something else.

Next, I was drawn to a digital fiction called “Umbrales,” from Volume III. The concept seemed really cool and I was stoked to get started, but alas, when I clicked on BEGIN I discovered that the entire thing is in Spanish! And while I’ve got some Spanish skills, they aren’t nearly sufficient enough to interpret Spanish word art.

At last, I landed on a digital fiction novel and interactive experience called “Queerskins” by Illya Szilak that ended up gobbling a day and a half of my life and is probably one of the most amazing things I’ve experienced on the internet (or in life) ever. But I’m putting together a presentation about that, so you’ll have to wait to find out how many boxes of tissue I went through while reading its 62 chapters.

I thought I’d finally landed on something viable when I discovered “Fitting the Pattern” by Christine Wilks, which is this awesome little memoir that uses adobe flash and requires you to use tailor tools on a pattern on the screen to uncover the text fragments of memoir underneath. As you went along, you could follow the progress of your cutouts and see how many more pieces you had left of the pattern. This one was so much fun and I was really excited to figure out what I was making, but right before the last piece was completed, the tool I was using (some kind of stitch ripper) wouldn’t go down far enough to rip the stitch I needed and thus I could not progress in the memoir. Talk about frustrating! I’d made it to the very end and was loving every second of the thing and then I was robbed. Like, I want to send a strongly-worded letter full of expletives to whoever is maintaining the site because I was madder n’ a wasp in water. In any case…

But whatever, I don’t even like baseball… so I kept on digging.

Next, I moved on to “Strings” by Dan Waber, which is a really nifty little animation that uses the concept of human handwriting in cursive, which is represented on the screen as a single string that spells cursive words and is animated to give the word emotions. Okay, that was a mouth-full, I know. But here’s an example, you click on the word “flirt” and the string forms the word “yes” and the word “yes” bounces in and out of the frame, mostly not visible at all, flirting with the reader who is trying to grasp the word. Pretty cool huh? There’s another one where the string spells “Your” then “arms” then it turns into a circle that spins around, then “me.” Self-explanatory, right? But the emotions these words and experiences evoke are visceral because they require so many parts of me to put them together and interact with them. So while this one was really short, I really found myself attached to it. The piece ends with “Words are like strings that I pull out of my mouth,” which is a final thought I can definitely relate to.

Finally,

I explored a lot more of these digital fictions, but I don’t want to give too many of them away, and I’m at my word limit. So for now, I’ll just highly encourage you in my scariest sergeant voice to go check out the Electronic Literature Collection. You won’t be disappointed!

, my lovelies.

😼😼😼~Bree 😼😼😼