Light-Water: a Mosaic of Meditations

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Light-Water: a Mosaic of Meditations is a "hypermedia work" [1] that utilizes and layers images and poetry to "create a striking experience of poetic meditation." [2] Created by Christy Sheffield Sanford in 1999, [3] [4] the work consists of ten poems that produce a "visual-literal meditation on light and water." [1] Through the implementation of timelines within the poems and overall work, Light-Water illustrates how "space-time possibilities for literature can now be more adequately realized through the use of spatio-temporal dhtml editors." [5]

Contents

Origins and influences

Sanford used Adobe Dreamweaver to complete this body of work, and this specific software allowed her to create a complicated, operational, and dynamic html scripting. Sanford states how "special emphasis was placed on creating Timelines...Timelines were used to explore the kinetic properties/spirit of light and water." [5]

Publication history

Light-Water was originally published in 1999 in an online journal by The New River. Through the use of the software Dreamweaver, this work exists on a web browser and is coded as a Dynamic HTML, or DHTML. As of 2022, this piece is accessible through the Electronic Literature Organization's The NEXT: Museum, Library, and Preservation Space, hosted at Washington State University Vancouver in Washington US. On the ELO Next's webpage, they note how "Amanda Hodes transferred the files for this copy to Dene Grigar in June 2022." While most of Sanford's works are no longer available or discoverable online, Light-Water remains accessible online and still remains the same as its original version and formatting. [2] [3] [4]

Plot

Light-Water: a Mosaic of Meditations connects and emphasizes the natural and synthetic natures of light and water. Sanford uses the images to convey the message and help the reader visualize her poetic descriptions. With ten different poems, Cristy Sheffield Sanford creates a calming peace by looking at life through the lens of water and light. She details how light and water not only affect human life, but plant life and the entire view of the world. She uses various light sources like street lights, colorful stop lights, fire, and the moon to illustrate how everything we see, in life and in her work, has a purpose and is beautifully made or destroyed. [6] [7] [8] In Virginia Tech's monthly NetLetter, they write, "Sanford's poems...contain moving rainbows, floating bubbles, drifting candles, and other colorful images." [9] Color is also very important to this work, as lights come in many colors and refracts in various ways within each node.

Story structure and navigation

The reader can enter the story by clicking on the image titles of one of the ten poems shown at the starting, mosaic title page. In each node and poem page, the reader can transition to the other poems through the linked titles of other poems at the bottom of the page. The three links at the bottom always include a link to the "Mosaic" title page in the middle and two different poems on either side of it. There is only one functional hypertext linked phrase within the text of the ten poems, and this link is located in the poem titled "Sweat". The navigation is simple and consistent, but it allows the reader to create their own path or follow a constructed sequence. [6] [7] Memmott notes how "For the most part, images are on equal ground with words -- there is little difference in the formal treatments of text and image. Images are intended to be metabolized as text, are meant as text -- are text. Vice versa." [8]

Genre

This piece is composed of poetry, and specifically contains a total of 10 different poems. [6] [7] Light-Water also falls under the Electronic literature, or e-lit, category since it was created "using advanced web-techniques" [2] and exists solely online through the web. [3] [4] [9]

Literary significance and critical reception

Describing the collections of works within the The New River, Timothy Luke and Jeremy Hunsinger claim that the "combination of the visual and the literal is central to the direction of hypermedia." They report how this digital story is a creative synthesis between the reader and the work due to the blend of moving images and textual literature. [1] In a critique titled "Mise en Place: Hypersensual Textility and Poly-vocal Narration," Talan Memmott explains how Sanford uses images and text interchangeably, creating metaphorical visuals by overlapping the text and images. He goes on to state that "the reader must not only read in a literary sense, but is asked to interpret the design, the contrasts, and interact with images and emergent metaphor. It is impressive just how much 'textility' images maintain in these works." [8] The Electronic Literature Organization, or ELO, the principle organization that promotes and supports e-lit, notes that, "Sanford's visual lushness opened up radical new possibilities for the look of the screen and the combination of merged image, movement, and text." [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hypertext</span> Text with references (links) to other text that the reader can immediately access

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.

In HTML and XHTML, an image map is a list of coordinates relating to a specific image, created in order to hyperlink areas of the image to different destinations. For example, a map of the world may have each country hyperlinked to further information about that country. The intention of an image map is to provide an easy way of linking various parts of an image without dividing the image into separate image files.

Hypermedia, an extension of the term hypertext, is a nonlinear medium of information that includes graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks. This designation contrasts with the broader term multimedia, which may include non-interactive linear presentations as well as hypermedia. It is also related to the field of electronic literature. The term was first used in a 1965 article written by Ted Nelson.

Visual poetry is a style of poetry that incorporates graphic and visual design elements to convey its meaning. This style combines visual art and written expression to create new ways of presenting and interpreting poetry.

Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links that provide a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction.

Digital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers. Digital poetry can be available in form of CD-ROM, DVD, as installations in art galleries, in certain cases also recorded as digital video or films, as digital holograms, on the World Wide Web or Internet, and as mobile phone apps.

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cybertext</span>

Cybertext as defined by Espen Aarseth in 1997 is a type of ergodic literature where the user traverses the text by doing nontrivial work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason Nelson</span> American poet

Jason Nelson is a digital and hypermedia poet and artist. He is Associate Professor of Digital Culture and a PI at the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, where he was also a Fulbright Fellow from 2016-17. Until 2020 he was a lecturer on Cyberstudies, digital writing and creative practice at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He is best known for his artistic flash games/essays such as Game, game, game and again game and I made this. You play this. We are Enemies. He has worked on the Australia Council of the Arts Literature Board and the Board of the Electronic Literature Organization based at MIT.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of hypertext</span>

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Early conceptions of hypertext defined it as text that could be connected by a linking system to a range of other documents that were stored outside that text. In 1934 Belgian bibliographer, Paul Otlet, developed a blueprint for links that telescoped out from hypertext electrically to allow readers to access documents, books, photographs, and so on, stored anywhere in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">María Mencía</span>

María Mencía is a Spanish-born media artist and researcher working as a Senior Lecturer at Kingston University in London, United Kingdom. Her artistic work is widely recognized in the field of electronic literature, and her scholarship on digital textuality has been widely published. She holds a Ph.D. in Digital Poetics and Digital Art at the Chelsea College of Arts of the University of the Arts London and studied English Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink was an American writer, scholar, and teacher. Writing hypermedia fiction under the pen name M.D. Coverley, she is best known for her epic hypertext novels Califia (2000) and Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day (2006). A pioneer born-digital writer, she is part of the first generation of electronic literature authors that arose in the 1987–1997 period. She was a founding board member and past president of the Electronic Literature Organization and the first winner of the Electronic Literature Organization Career Achievement Award, which was named in her honor. Lusebrink was professor emeritus, School of Humanities and Languages at Irvine Valley College (IVC).

Laboratory NT2 is a research group based in Quebec that hosts a database of more than 4000 works of electronic literature with an emphasis on Francophone works. The full name is Laboratories de recherche sur les arts et les littératures numériques, or in English, the laboratory for research into digital arts and literatures.

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<i>These Waves of Girls</i> 2001 hypermedia novella by Caitlin Fisher

These Waves of Girls is a hypermedia novella by Caitlin Fisher that won the Electronic Literature Organization's Award for Fiction in 2001. The work is frequently taught in undergraduate literature courses and is referenced in the field of electronic literature as a significant example of early multimodal web-based hypertext fiction, placing Fisher "at the forefront of digital writing".

Lexia to Perplexia is a poetic work of electronic literature published on the web by Talan Memmott in 2000. The work won the trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Award that year.

Tramway is a combinatorial and interactive poem by Alexandra Saemmer, first published in 2000 and recreated in 2009. Its central theme is the act of closing the eyes of her father on his death. Tramway, by Alexandra Saemmer is a multimedia hypertext work based on her experiences with her father's death. This work is a notable use of Flash as a transitory medium and the content was designed to degrade as computing power increased. It is written in French.

Christy Sheffield Sanford is an American new media writer, artist, editor, and project designer, who lives in Florida. She coined the term "web-specific" for her work.

Caitlin Fisher is a Canadian media artist, poet, writer, and Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Toronto where she also directs the Immersive Storytelling Lab and the Augmented Reality Lab. Fisher is also a Co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab, former Fulbright and Canada Research Chair and an international award-winning digital storyteller. Creator of some of the world’s first AR poetry and long-from VR narratives. Fisher is also known for the 2001 hypermedia novel These Waves of Girls, and for her work creating content and software for augmented reality.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Luke, Timothy W.; Hunsinger, Jeremy, eds. (2012). Putting Knowledge to Work and Letting Information Play (2nd ed.). Rotterdam: SensePublishers. p. 144. doi:10.1007/978-94-6091-728-8. ISBN   978-94-6091-728-8.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Computing Literature Vol. 8: #WomenTechLit". The NEXT. Retrieved 2023-10-25.
  3. 1 2 3 "Light-Water: a Mosaic of Meditations". The NEXT. Retrieved 2023-10-25.
  4. 1 2 3 "Light Water: A Mosaic of Meditations | ALN | NT2". nt2.uqam.ca. Retrieved 2023-11-15.
  5. 1 2 "Issue 1". www.cddc.vt.edu. Retrieved 2023-10-25.
  6. 1 2 3 "Light-Water: Mosaic". archive.the-next.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2023-10-25.
  7. 1 2 3 "Light-Water: Mosaic". www.cddc.vt.edu. Retrieved 2023-11-15.
  8. 1 2 3 "New Page 2". www.heelstone.com. Retrieved 2023-10-25.
  9. 1 2 "VTNetLetter June 1999 New River Valley Journal". www.vtmonthly.vt.edu. Retrieved 2023-10-25.
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