Early in 1990 I completed a "HyperNovella", executed
in Apple's HyperCard for the Macintosh computer, as a contribution
to the exploration of desktop hypermedia as an artist-generated
("fine arts") medium. Hucklefine is an illustrated reworking
of Mark Twain's 1885 Huckleberry Finn in what seems a proper form
for a hundred and five years later.
A reading of Huckleberry Finn produced a few words or motifs from
each chapter, a subjective aide-memoire, a funhouse-mirror Cliff's
Notes. These motifs or phrases were used or updated through contemporary
analogies to be developed into single-paragraph Hucklefine chapters.
The prose was shaped into episodic chunks to fit a field occupying
half of the Macintosh screen.
For Hucklefine's content I looked to Huckleberry Finn. Regarded
by the academic canon as America's greatest novel, the American
roadapple road epic tradition began with this rather strange yarn
of escape from drunken fathers, faked disappearances of children,
travelling confidence men, talentless tent shows, cross-dressing,
clan fueds and a near-lynching. More disturbing than Poe's morbidity,
Huckleberry Finn becomes irradiated by hero Huck's growing concious
distrust of the American strangeness, "the peculiar institution"
of slavery and the race relations that have followed it. I have
set my Hucklefine lightly into an interracial landscape of pop
musicians, an arena Black and White have both defined themselves
with arresting sound and image and intermingled in American culture.
In Hucklefine I also allude to the highly choreographed novel
Hopscotch by Nobel laureate Julio Cortazar, who claimed its 155
chapters could be read in linear order, or in the alternate one
he provided. Italo Calvino described a literary form with multiple
short, dense narratives emerging from multiple beginnings as an
"open encyclopedia" or "hyper novel", in one
of his Six Memos for the Next Millenium (Harvard, 1988).
Hucklefine's visual imagery sometimes relies on its own randomness
for the connections, the reverberations of meaning, even before
that of its relation to the text. The illustrations to Hucklefine
are collages as well, each image passed before the eye of the
Apple Scanner before any further manipulation. The landscape of
art (and by extension, the Arts) becoming more collage-like was
compared to a bulletin board in John Berger's Ways of Seeing (Penguin,
1974) in discussion of the effect of industrial-scale proliferation
of art imagery. The Apple Scanner and cut-and-paste capabilities
HyperCard further the collage aesthetic.
When Apple's Bill Atkinson conceptualized--and with his team
realized--the desktop Hypermedia HyperCard, Bill had just extended
his graphic communications builder MacPaint over the time-space
continuum, right? HyperCard was soon employed in the creation
of interactive children's fiction by Amanda Goodenough. More ornate
works by others developed in HyperCard--like Manhole and Cosmic
Osmo--showed hyperliterature to be a cousin in the lineage of
the"total" multisensory work of art that went from ornate
Wagnerian opera a century ago to manifest itself in this century--sometimes
at great corporte cost--in the cinema. Many cinematic choices
were put in the hands of the spectator in the 1980's, in electronically
interactive pieces by artists Lynn Hershman and Stephen Wilson
and interactive literature by Edinburgh's Gordon Howell. The culmination
of this process in the near future could be all-encompassing virtual
realities, now solving problems of space and structure before
moving on to surfaces. Will they soon be brimming with a plethora
of imagery like Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony?
Yet there is also a critical response to new computer spaces.
Cyberpunk might be defined as an antiauthoritarian attitude to
issues of the computer-human interface. I look forward to HyperLiterary
forms that contain its acerbic social content and appreciation
of collage inerited from Punk Rock. Links and webs of association
and juxtaposition forge inclusive Right Brain generalist epiphanies
that inevitably subvert the status quo. Be inspired to connect
the unconnected, the philosophically unconnectible, every scripted
stitch in the potential fabric of meaning. Confined only to the
computer, hypermedia is a tempest in a CPU teapot. Artists of
the 1990's, call for the Hypermediation of Modern Life!
-- 4/1/90
