Demo
Bill Bly
Independent Scholar
Biography
Bill Bly was a founding member of the Hypertext Writers Workshop, and served as recorder for the legendary Cybermountain Colloquium. Bill has taught hypertext theory and practice at New York University and Fordham University, and was Director of Writing Programs at Wagner College.
Abstract
We Descend is an old-fashioned literary hypertext, presented as an archive of writings gathered and transmitted over a vast span of time. Artifactual literature confronts the reader with a kind of research project: although the writings may be carefully and logically organized, they are not processed into a tale that can be told by a single voice, but rather are presented undigested, and the reader must assemble a coherent story for the whole on her own.
In addition, using artifacts alone to tell the story foregrounds the three domains that any writing inhabits: the familiar world of the meat; the disembodied realm of the text; and the dwelling place of the ghosts, which somehow interpenetrates the other two — and, in my opinion, threatens to engulf them.
This phenomenon is not restricted to electronic literature — in fact, it predates it by many many generations. However, recent developments in technology have ushered in an era of textual hyperinflation, and text, as I hope to show, conjures the ghosts of ourselves and each other who, among other perhaps more sinister interventions, consume all our waking hours “communicating” with us.
We Descend will provide a “test file” through which we can begin to map this mysterious domain, and thereby preserve a corner of our life in which to shelter what Kafka calls natural communication, the peace of souls.