raising heads

"The Last Day of Betty Nkomo" combines the visual effect with the sound but in a way that the raw meaning of the simple words not only surves as an analogy to the raw reality and a simplicity of the world Betty is living and dying in, but also it penetrates in almoust a hypnotic and violent way to the readers counsciousness. The reader can not interfere in the poem, but only sit and absorbe. The most important component of this e-poem is the background story  that reaches out across the whole world into a completely different world , a world of high possibilities and low awarenes, so different from the Bettys one.  
That is why it sings, screams and flashes before it dissapeares in a moment, a glimpse, in a half of a sentence..
To be awaken and to raise our heads as she raises hers for seeing someone she cares about..
 She dies then, but in that moment as the poem ends and we see an unfinished sentence, unfinished cycle
and the black screen along with the silence, we became more than spectatores, observers and in that moment the distance between Betty and the reader dissapeares and the forgotten people of the forgotten world get a glimpse of hope we'll remember..

Lexia to Perplexia

In Lexia to Perplexia the boundary between artificial and real life is fading, human and computer technologies merge (which is specifically visible in a variety of language coinages) and the information seems to flow through a mutation/transformation/the cybernetic circuit of the two.

The Examples of Croatian Electronic Literature

Kata Mijatović: Mreža snova
http://www.g-mk.hr/online/dreams/
Andreja Kulunčić: Razmišljanje kretanjem, kretanje razmišljanjem: http://www.andreja.org/rk-kr/index.html

And the additional work that you have to read for tomorrow:
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/memmott__lexia_to_perplexia.html

one woman, one question

How can we know wich electronic literature is good/ or not ( wich are the criterions / or example for bad electronic literature) ?

is universe computational?

Although there is a certain code (neither in complete control nor out of control) which must be followed, it feels as if e-lit gives even more power to the reader, underlining random behaviour and multiagent interactions so that the meaning is given by the process of analysis, analogous to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle where: 'What we observe is not nature (text in this sense) itself, but nature/text exposed to our method of questioning.' The fact is that the outcome of an observation/interpretation depends upon the interest and the perspective of the observer, which showed that even in the physical sciences the classical distinction between subject and object was not tenable any longer. Instead of such a distinction—which had been based upon the Cartesian partition of the observable world—there is now the awareness of a high degree of connectedness and even interdependence between subject and object, as prof. Hayles stated 'a complexity', 'recursive feedback loops between humans and intelligent machines dynamically interconnecting', it became clearly evident that the act of observing actually influenced the result of the observation (quantum mechanics). This new view of the natural sciences, the thought that the selective nature of the observation had already interpretative qualities, has simultaneously appeared in the humanities and shaken historical undertakings in particular, for as Hayden White acknowledged 'we storify'... As prof. Hayles mentioned, Daniel Dennett’s work supports this idea of our brains multitasking, performing emergent complexities, overlaping processes that represent human consciousness. Dennett also mentions the hypothesis that there is an Orwellian mechanism in the brain, a revisionist historian of sorts who notices that the unvarnished history in this instance doesn’t make enough sense, so he interprets the brute events by making up a narrative about the intervening passage, and installs this history in the memory library for all future reference. Since this mechanism works fast, within a fraction of a second, the amount of time it takes to frame a verbal report of what one has experienced and the record one relies on, which is stored in the library of memory, is already contaminated. A perfect example of this is Girls' Day Out whith its 'shards' from the papers and 'nothing to see' except for the 'windtorn field' above the layers of hidden past/present/future (reminds me of Derrida's 'cinder'—remains of sth but non-existant) or the 'coiling and uncoiling' in The Jew's Daughter, of the text, words, narrators, actions ('haltless'—walking like 'Qlippoth, the Shells of the Dead' (Pynchon) which eventually halt and then resume again), leaving trails: 'scarf, wallet, or glove'... From Dennett's perspective all this could be a distraction of some kind, even a subterranean memory of some other event/person/detail that contaminates our memory in general. The “historical fact” has transformed thanks to the contamination of memory that came maybe one second after the event in question. The characters end up having false memories of their actual “real” experience. The subject’s point of view is spatially and temporally smeared...

10:01

Lance Olsen and Tim Guthrie are authors of dynamic "10:01". It can be read in different ways -  one can choose to read characters' storys by clicking on each figure if he is interested in specific character, or he can follow plot clicking on timeline on the bottom of the page. But the timeline isn't linear, it is divided in 10 different colors, who are assoretd lineary, through two rows.  I liked it because of that timeline and I found the characters' stories interesting.  Snoring sound gives everything a realistic tone and two characters who are on a date are interesting to follow. We can see what they are thinking about the same actions and how their date is going to end very soon.

Dreamaphage

Jason Nelson's Dreamaphage impressed me with it's ambiguity. It is a hypertext that, at the same time depends on mechanical (old fashioned) way of scrolling through text, and on the other side, consists of, computer enabled hypertext in digital environment. It is this kind of amalgam that, in my view, clearly represents the position of literature today. Literature cannot (and should not) exclude the Other, whether it is the electronic that excludes the traditional print, or the other way around.
Furthermore, I believe that the angrybovinedisease clearly points to the premise that everything is interconnected, the premise that was explored throughout the science-fiction movement (most notably in cyberpunk), and the other various representations in popular culture. Professor Katarina Peovic Vukovic noted that this is a kind of literature that is not easily read. I must agree. Not only that the pictures and sounds often serve as a distraction, but the flickering signifier is frequently "random", causing the burst of unexpected motion on our display.