Articoli di riviste sul tema "Multilinear narrative"

This article offers comparative close readings of two digital fictions that feature various types and degrees of unintentional unreliable narration. Its prime focus lies on the affordances and restraints provided by hypertextual, multilinear, multimodal, interactive and ludic new media with respect to the aesthetic representation and textual embedding of unreliability. To this end, I have chosen narratives from two ‘generations’ of digital fiction – a hyperfiction par excellence, and a hypermedia narrative, both of which are multilinear by definition yet deal with the ideas of closure and narrative framing in very different ways. In particular, I shall examine how unintentional, psycho-pathological unreliability in the sense of Riggan’s (1981; cf. Heyd, 2006; Jahn, 1998) ‘madman’ are represented in afternoon, a story (Joyce, 1987) and the German hypermedia novel Quadrego (Maskiewicz, 2001). My comparative analysis shows how manifestations of deviant yet not devious, in the sense of quietly deceptive narration, are aesthetically enriched by techniques afforded by the digital medium, such as hypertextual multilinearity, lack of or partial closure, multisensory experience, fluid transitions and boundaries and, most significantly, the play with reader agency, which may – in cases of radical multilinearity – even lead to readerly unreliability.

Abstract In this paper, I study the narrative structure and the layers of meaning in the Treme (2010-2013), using the concept of rhizome introduced in A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and the Hannerzian “root metaphor” of creole culture. As for New Orleans in the Treme, music makes the narrative structure not just multilinear but rhizomatic. Moreover, spontaneity and hybridity highlight dialogicity and poliphony as well as a strong ironic and subversive capacity concerning music and creole culture. On a narratological level, analysing the critical representation of social problems after the destruction of Hurricane Kathrina raises the problems of focalization and narratorial distance

Performing a historicized analysis of John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925), this essay returns this understudied author to the center stage of modernist studies and includes the popular stage in accounts of the technologized mechanisms of modernist writing. By disclosing a deep correlation between the composite narrative tactics of Dos Passos's multilinear novel and the mass entertainments of this period, particularly Florenz Ziegfeld's annual Follies revues, it supplies new parameters for theorizing strategies of narration and characterization in modernist fiction vis-à-vis the technologies of popular entertainment and display in the early twentieth century. The discussion of Dos Passos's broad critique of the gendered specular economy of the modern metropolis in the era of Taylorism repositions his early writing as integral to the development of high modernism in the 1920s.

The portrayal of women in literary texts over the centuries has been stuck in the conviction that women are enormously subjugated, but now repetition of the same is considered unjustified. The canon of reformers in the literary world has started to interpret feminism from various perspectives. Women characters are reformulated and rethought by the new emerging authors and those authors reinforce a new dimension to the status and moral experience of women which was largely criticized in the domain of traditional literature. The present research, therefore, intends to elicit the narrative technique of Amish’s writings and his treatment of women characters in his novels. Amish’s women characters falsify the claims of traditional portrayal. The female protagonists of his novels highlight the punctuated identities of Indian women. They are strong, challenge traditional norms. In this regard Amish’s the Ram Chandra Series is a mythical fiction based on mythology of Ramayana with a multilinear narrative. This paper is intended to provide a brief and authentic exposition of status of women in India during the Vedic times with reference to the women characters in Amish’s the Ram Chandra Series in every aspect of social order like education, philosophy, religion, administration and warfare.

This article investigates the transformation of history into haecceities that allow us to grasp history through a nonlinear, cinematic sensation of pure past. Here, cinema merges classical knowledge of historical facts with the lived reality of the unrecorded past. Experiments with spatial reframings of the past in The Lady and the Duke, The King's Daughters, The White Ribbon and Coco Before Chanel are discussed to create nonlinear sensations of duration that link with Deleuze and Guattari's notions of affect and haecceity, which transform history into cinematic sets of speed, movement, and texture. Furthermore, the article analyses how the traditionally linear narrative of history is transposed into the abstract sensation of time through haecceity as pure past, where time and space come together to put the sensory quality of memory to the fore. Shifting the perspective from the linear account of history to the multilinear effects of affect and haecceity this analysis challenges the cultural hegemony of representation that favours a homogeneous image of thought. Focussing on the material and performative quality of the film image, the article analyses the spatiotemporal relations that create an analytical perception through the senses.

This article intends to explore how interactivity and new technologies promote new spectatorship performances and subsequently affect the interactor’s subjectivity. Through the analysis of three interactive documentaries, I propose and describe a taxonomy for addressing the felt experience of interacting in digital environments. Each selected documentary corresponds to a different mode of interaction and, therefore, engages the audience in a particular way: Bear 71 (hyperlink mode), Fort McMoney (conversational mode) and A Journal of Insomnia (participative mode). Throughout the analysis, I consider the interactor and the digital object as two interrelated and dependent entities that influence and shape one another. I argue the objects of interaction affect the viewers by inducing bodily felt sensations and shaping their subjectivity. As so, the sensuous encounter between the interactor and the digital documentary provides a virtual gratification for the spectator’s performance. Delving into a phenomenological and post-phenomenological investigation, I focus my attention in the microperceptions, as structures of sensory perception in the bodily dimensions of experience, translated as senses. As fragmented, multilinear and dynamic forms, interactive documentaries provide the audience with the agency of manipulating and developing the narrative, while conversely engender in the interactors what I address as ways of affection. I propose or adapt eight digitally disrupted and induced sensations, or senses of, for describing how interactive documentary affects users during the interaction performance: sense of control, sense of presence, sense of Self, sense of place, sense of belonging, sense of almightiness, sense of endlessness, sense of incompleteness.

Literature does not need to be solely confined to text, but can be accompanied by moving images, animation, sound, music, as well as a multi-linear narrative, which has become easier to integrate due to the use of hypertext and augmented reality (AR) technology. One author who readily uses such innovations is Stu Campbell, more widely known by his alias, Sutu. Aside from being a writer, Campbell is also an interactive designer and illustrator who combines art and technology in order to produce unique and experimental works. Campbell is inspired by multiple genres and formats through which he addresses poignant themes, such as memory and its loss, the imminent passage of time, as well as the meaning of identity and reality in our increasingly digital and fast-paced environment. Therefore, this paper discusses the selected works of Stu Campbell in the context of their experimental and technological nature drawing on Paola Trimarco’s discussion of “affordances,” a term originally derived from psychologist James L. Gibson, denoting the opportunities and limitations in certain environments. The works discussed are the following: Modern Polaxis, a multilinear comic in the form of a private journal which depends on AR technology to advance its narrative, Nawlz, a cyberpunk webcomic created on a horizontal interactive digital canvas, and These Memories Won’t Last, a semi-autobiographical webcomic which incorporates music, sound and animation. Eksperymentalna twórczość Stu Campbella. Użycie nowych mediów w tworzeniu komiksów online Literatura nie musi ograniczać się wyłącznie do tekstu, ale może towarzyszyć jej ruchomy obraz, animacja, dźwięk, muzyka, a także wieloliniowa narracja, która stała się łatwiejsza do zintegrowania dzięki wykorzystaniu hipertekstu i technologii rozszerzonej rzeczywistości (AR). Jednym z autorów, który chętnie korzysta z takich innowacji, jest Stu Campbell, szerzej znany pod pseudonimem Sutu. Oprócz bycia pisarzem Campbell jest także projektantem interaktywnych aplikacji i ilustratorem, który łączy sztukę i technologię, tworząc unikalne, eksperymentalne utwory. Campbell inspiruje się wieloma gatunkami i formatami o poruszającej tematyce, takiej jak pamięć i jej utrata, nieuchronny upływ czasu, a także znaczenie tożsamości i rzeczywistości w naszym, coraz bardziej cyfrowym i narzucającym szybkie tempo, środowisku. Dlatego w niniejszym artykule omówiono wybrane prace Stu Campbella w kontekście ich eksperymentalnego i technologicznego charakteru, odwołując się do refleksji Paoli Trimarco na temat „afordancji”, terminu wywodzącego się z dorobku psychologa Jamesa L. Gibsona, a oznaczającego możliwości i ograniczenia w określonych środowiskach. Artykuł omawia Modern Polaxis, wielowierszowy komiks w formie prywatnego dziennika, którego narracja opiera się na technologii AR, Nawlz, cyberpunkowy komiks internetowy stworzony na płaskim, interaktywnym, cyfrowym „płótnie”, oraz These Memories Won’t Last, na wpół autobiograficzny komiks internetowy, zawierający muzykę, dźwięk i animację.

RESUMO: O artigo aborda a importância do audiovisual publicitário na Web como um meio de diversão e entretenimento on-line que possui grande força estratégica de relacionamento entre marca e consumidor. O foco principal de estudo é dado à narrativa multilinear aplicada ao conteúdo audiovisual publicitário veiculado na Web. Apresenta como estudo de caso as campanhas interativas ??A hunter shoots a bear? e ??Hunter and bear??s 2012 birthday party?, ambos da marca de corretivo Tipp-Ex divulgadas no Youtube. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Publicidade na Web; Conteúdo audiovisual; Narrativa multilinear; Diversão e Entretenimento on-line

A complexa sistematização das narrativas interativas se processa nas inovações homem-máquina, potencializadas pelo uso de ferramentas tecnológicas que manipulam interfaces de aplicativos hipermidiáticos, modelando scripts em linguagem HTML que se traduzem em conceitos narratológicos e conteúdo multitrama aos usuários em plataformas e redes de comunicação. O recorte desta pesquisa parte do processo de criação hipertextual em multitrama, Bandersnatch, e seu tratamento em roteiro de longa-metragem de ficção interativa. A sistematização narratológica gravita um processo de readequação estrutural por conta das potencialidades interativas que o meio digital on-line propicia ao interator na fruição do filme-jogo. O fenômeno ocorre conforme um menor ou maior grau de abertura da obra ou compartilhamento indicial de autoria, em que a dimensão multilinear da história provoca cognitivamente o sistema nervoso por meio do “envolvimento extensivo do corpo na sua globalidade psicossensorial, sinestésica”[1] (SANTAELLA, 2010). Objetivo demonstrar como a manipulação dos elementos estruturais dos mundos ficcionais da narrativa interativa revela a multidimensionalidade do real frente às relações entre o virtual e o atual, operando complexidades intersemióticas por meio dos fenômenos de linguagem e signagens. [1] SANTAELLA, L. Culturas e artes do pós-humano: da cultura das mídias à cibercultura. 4ª ed.. São Paulo: Editora Paulus, 2010, p. 227. [1] SANTAELLA, Lúcia. Culturas e artes do pós-humano: da cultura das mídias à cibercultura. 4ª ed.. São Paulo: Editora Paulus, 2010, p. 227.

Este artigo pretende discutir as relações entre corpo e cotidiano no chamado “cinema de fluxo”, vertente transnacional do cinema das duas últimas décadas, marcada pela emergência de um realismo sensório. Trata-se de um cinema cujas narrativas são calcadas em ambiências e por uma experiência audiovisual conduzida pela sobrevalorização de uma sensorialidade multilinear e dispersiva. Nossa abordagem será centrada em dois aspectos: num primeiro momento, faremos uma revisão conceitual do cotidiano e de sua importância no cinema de fluxo; num segundo momento, discutiremos as relações entre o cinema de fluxo e a estetização do efêmero, analisando o cinema de Hou Hsiao Hsien (e a influência de Ozu em sua obra) e discutindo a ideia de um “plano-fluxo”.

Este relato de experiência é parte de uma pesquisa de mestrado concluída, um processo cartografado com estudantes surdos numa escola pública. A surdez é considerada, nesta investigação, como uma experiência visual e cultural, fora do plano medicalizante das políticas da deficiência. Assim, realiza-se um exercício cartográfico que tenciona a Pedagogia Visual como campo de estudo, propondo como intervenção a realização de oficinas experimentais de produção de vídeos de animação, que envolvem diversas técnicas visuoespaciais, corporais e de escrita. O objetivo desta reflexão consiste em pensar o processo formativo de estudantes surdos, por meio de propostas de ensino visuoespaciais, tendo como contorno metodológico um exercício cartográfico no qual se produz um dispositivo multilinear do fazer-narrar na produção de oficinas experimentais, na escrita literária de microrrelatos e na produção de narrativas imagéticas.

Bone-marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs) are one of the most widely studied postnatal stem cell populations and are considered to utilize more frequently in cell-based therapy and cancer. These types of stem cells can undergo multilineage differentiation including blood cells, cardiac cells, and osteogenic cells differentiation, thus providing an alternative source of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) for tissue engineering and personalized medicine. Despite the ability to reprogram human adult somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in culture which provided a great opportunity and opened the new door for establishing the in vitro disease modeling and generating an unlimited source for cell base therapy, using MSCs for regeneration purposes still have a great chance to cure diseases. In this review, we discuss the important issues in MSCs biology including the origin and functions of MSCs and their application for craniofacial and periodontal tissue regeneration, discuss the potential and clinical applications of this type of stem cells in differentiation to maxillofacial bone and cartilage in vitro, and address important future hopes and challenges in this field.

Abstract Background Speech and language analysis from free speech protocols has recently provided a discriminative signal, useful for early diagnosis of schizophrenia. Although different aspects of language (such as structural and semantic coherence) have been applied to different contexts using different data collection protocols, we need to standardize a safe and minimum-effort protocol that can reveal discriminative data, enabling large and remote dataset collection. Also, it is important to understand the correlations between semantic, structural and emotional analysis from the same dataset. In the past decade, we have developed a non-semantic structural analysis based on graph theory that was able to automatically discriminate speech samples from patients with schizophrenia diagnosis with more than 90% accuracy in chronic, first-episode patients, and in different languages. Moreover, we could verify correlations of structural attributes with negative symptoms, as well as with cognitive performances in patients and in typical children at regular school time. But the most predictive contents were a dream report (sometimes absent) or a negative image report (which could cause a psychological burden for some subjects). The current project aims to verify the accuracy to discriminate schizophrenia reports from 3 different positive image prompts, using a minimum of 30 seconds reports. Furthermore, we want to verify correlates between semantic, structural and emotional analysis. Methods We analyzed reports of 3 positive images from 31 subjects (10 matched controls and 21 at the first episode of psychosis - 11 with schizophrenia and 10 with bipolar disorder as a final diagnosis after 6 months of follow-up). We performed speech graph analysis to extract speech connectedness attributes. Next, we combined connectedness measures from the 3 prompts (after extracting collinear measures) to create a disorganization index (performing multilinear correlation with the PANSS negative subscale). We used this index as an input to a machine learning classifier to verify the accuracy to discriminate reports from the schizophrenia group. Finally, we studied the correlations between the connectedness-based disorganization index and minimum semantic coherence between consecutive sentences, and the emotional intensity measured by the proportion of emotional words. Results Speech connectedness of positive image reports was correlated with negative symptomatology severity measured by PANSS negative subscale (R2 = 0.73, p = 0.0160), and the disorganization index was able to discriminate the subjects diagnosed with schizophrenia disorder six months later with AUC = 0.82. Moreover, the disorganization index was negatively correlated with positive emotional intensity (Rho = -0.48, p = 0.0061), but not correlated with minimum semantic coherence (Rho = -0.06, p = 0.7442). Emotional intensity was not correlated with minimum semantic coherence (Rho = 0.17, p = 0.3458). Discussion This safe, short and standardized data collection protocol seems to be informative and reveals an interdependent relationship between different aspects of computational language analysis. With less than two minutes of oral speech data, we can accurately discriminate reports from the schizophrenia group at the first interview, and verify that the less connected the report, the fewer positive emotional words are used. Future directions point to the feasibility of automatic and remote access of a large and diverse population, allowing the upscaling of this type of assessment to big data.

Abstract Purpose This review aimed to evaluate the efficacy of intra-articular injections of bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs) for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis (KOA). Methods This narrative review evaluates recent English language clinical data and published research articles between 2014 and 2019. Key word search strings of (((“bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cell” OR “bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cell” OR “bone marrow stromal cell”)) AND (“osteoarthritis” OR “knee osteoarthritis”)) AND (“human” OR “clinical”))) AND “intra-articular injection” were used to identify relevant articles using PMC, Cochrane Library, Web Of Science and Scopus databases. Results Pre-clinical studies have demonstrated successful, safe and encouraging results for articular cartilage repair and regeneration. This is concluded to be due to the multilineage differential potential, immunosuppressive and self-renewal capabilities of BM-MSCs, which have shown to augment pain and improve functional outcomes. Subsequently, clinical applications of intra-articular injections of BM-MSCs are steadily increasing, with most studies demonstrating a decrease in poor cartilage index, improvements in pain, function and Quality of Life (QoL); with moderate-to-high level evidence regarding safety for therapeutic administration. However, low confidence in clinical efficacy remains due to a plethora of heterogenous methodologies utilised, resulting in challenging study comparisons. A moderate number of cells (40 × 106) were identified as most likely to achieve optimal responses in individuals with grade ≥ 2 KOA. Likewise, significant improvements were reported when using lower (24 × 106) and higher (100 × 106) cell numbers, although adverse effects including persistent pain and swelling were a consequence. Conclusion Overall, the benefits of intra-articular injections of BM-MSCs were deemed to outweigh the adverse effects; thus, this treatment be considered as a future therapy strategy. To realise this, long-term large-scale randomised clinical trials are required to enable improved interpretations, to determine the validity of efficacy in future studies. Level of evidence IV.

Chen Yi’s Ba Ban (1999) for solo piano, like many works of Western-trained Chinese composers, situates fragments of evocative traditional folk melody within a post-tonal discourse that is well described by transformation theory. The eponymous folk tune that it quotes is a standard of the sizhu (“silk-and-bamboo”) repertoire. In sizhu performance practice, the evenly pulsed rhythm of the 68-beat melody is augmented and each pitch is highly “flowered,” that is, decorated. Chen’s piece, often simulating the timbral quality of sizhu heterophony, reproduces some of the directed temporal qualities of this repertoire by quoting distinctive phrases and elaborating their pitches. Intermingled with this discourse, however, it presents multilinear threads of motivic transformation through virtuoso figurations typical of Western piano repertoire. The free rhythm evokes a different folk music tradition, mountain song, that Chen mentions as inspiration. At first, as the post-tonal structures are introduced, they disrupt the linear continuity of the Ba Ban folk tune and create an undirected associative network. Eventually, however, they gain control over temporality as firmly as Ba Ban did at first, and then Ba Ban itself is transformed into ametrical pulse. Considering the contrasting gendered connotations of mountain song and sizhu, I suggest how my narrative of these rhythmic processes might resonate with some ideas of feminist theory.

Chen Yi’s Ba Ban (1999) for solo piano, like many works of Western-trained Chinese composers, situates fragments of evocative traditional folk melody within a post-tonal discourse that is well described by transformation theory. The eponymous folk tune that it quotes is a standard of the sizhu (“silk-and-bamboo”) repertoire. In sizhu performance practice, the evenly pulsed rhythm of the 68-beat melody is augmented and each pitch is highly “flowered,” that is, decorated. Chen’s piece, often simulating the timbral quality of sizhu heterophony, reproduces some of the directed temporal qualities of this repertoire by quoting distinctive phrases and elaborating their pitches. Intermingled with this discourse, however, it presents multilinear threads of motivic transformation through virtuoso figurations typical of Western piano repertoire. The free rhythm evokes a different folk music tradition, mountain song, that Chen mentions as inspiration. At first, as the post-tonal structures are introduced, they disrupt the linear continuity of the Ba Ban folk tune and create an undirected associative network. Eventually, however, they gain control over temporality as firmly as Ba Ban did at first, and then Ba Ban itself is transformed into ametrical pulse. Considering the contrasting gendered connotations of mountain song and sizhu, I suggest how my narrative of these rhythmic processes might resonate with some ideas of feminist theory.

AbstractTissue engineering approaches have emerged recently to circumvent many limitations associated with current clinical practices. This elegant approach utilizes a natural/synthetic biomaterial with optimized physiomechanical properties to serve as a vehicle for delivery of exogenous stem cells and bioactive factors or induce local recruitment of endogenous cells for in situ tissue regeneration. Inspired by the natural microenvironment, biomaterials could act as a biomimetic three-dimensional (3D) structure to help the cells establish their natural interactions. Such a strategy should not only employ a biocompatible biomaterial to induce new tissue formation but also benefit from an easily accessible and abundant source of stem cells with potent tissue regenerative potential. The human teeth and oral cavity harbor various populations of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) with self-renewing and multilineage differentiation capabilities. In the current review article, we seek to highlight recent progress and future opportunities in dental MSC-mediated therapeutic strategies for tissue regeneration using two possible approaches, cell transplantation and cell homing. Altogether, this paper develops a general picture of current innovative strategies to employ dental-derived MSCs combined with biomaterials and bioactive factors for regenerating the lost or defective tissues and offers information regarding the available scientific data and possible applications.

"Interactivity implies two agencies in conversation, playfully and spontaneously developing a mutual discourse" -- Sandy Stone (11) I. On Interactivity The difference between interactivity as it is performed across the page and the screen, maintains Sandy Stone, is that virtual texts and virtual communities can embody a play ethic (14). Inserted like a mutation into the corporate genome, play ruptures the encyclopaedic desire to follow seamless links to a buried 'meaning' and draws us back to the surface, back into real-time conversation with the machine. Hypertext theorists see this as a tactic of resistance to homogenisation. As we move across a hypertextual reading space, we produce the text in this unfolding now, choosing pathways which form a map in the space of our own memories: where we have been, where we are, where we might yet be. Play is occupying oneself with diversions. II. Space, Time and Composition Reading in time, we create the text in the space of our own memories. Hypertext theorists maintain that the choices we make around every corner, the spontaneity and contingency involved in these choices, are the bringing into being of a (constantly replaced) electronic palimpsest, a virtual geography. The dislocation which occurs as we engage in nodal leaps draws us back to the surface, rupturing our experience of the narrative and bringing us into a blissful experience of possibility. III. War against the Line There is the danger, on the one hand, of being subsumed by the passive subject position demanded by infotainment culture and the desire it encourages to seek the satisfaction of closure by following seamless links to a buried 'meaning'. On the other hand, we risk losing efficiency and control over the unfolding interaction by entering into an exchange which disorientates us with infinite potential. We cannot wildly destratify. The questions we ask must seek to keep the conversation open. In order to establish a new discursive territory within which to understand this relationship, we should view the interface not simply as a transparency which enables interaction with the machine as 'other', but as a text, a finely-wrought behavioural map which "exists at the intersection of political and ideological boundary lands" (Selfe & Selfe 1). As we write, so are we written by the linguistic contact zones of this terrain. Hypertext is thus a process involving the active translation of modes of being into possible becomings across the interface. The geographic 'space' we translate into a hypertext "is imaginational... . We momentarily extend the linear reading act into a third dimension when we travel a link" (Tolva 4). A literal spatial representation would break from the realm of hypertext and become a virtual reality. Thus, the geographic aspect is not inherent to the system itself but is partially translated into the geometry of the medium via our experience and perception (the 'map'), a process describing our 'line of flight' as we evolve in space. Directional flows between time and its traditional subordination to space in representation implode across the present-tense of the screen and time literally surfaces. Our experience of the constantly-replaced electronic palimpsest is one of temporal surrender: "we give in to time, we give way to time, we give in with time"(Joyce 219). In other words, the subject of hypertext subverts the traditional hierarchy and writes for space, producing the 'terrain' in the unfolding now in the Deleuzian sense, not in space as desired by the State. Johnson-Eilola aligns the experience of hypertext with the Deleuzian War Machine, a way of describing the speed and range of virtual movement created when the animal body splices into the realm of technology and opens an active plane of conflict.. The War Machine was invented by the nomads -- it operates by continual deterritorialisation in a tension-limit with State science, what we might call the command-control drive associated with geometric, dynamic thought and the sedentary culture of the Line. It "exemplifies" the avant-garde mentality that hypertext theorists have been associating with the electronic writing space (Moulthrop, "No War Machine" 1). Playing outside. The State desires an end to the resistance to totalisation promulgated by contingent thought and its thermodynamic relationship to space: the speed which assumes a probabilistic, vortical motion, actually drawing smooth space itself. The war machine is thus an open system opposed to classical mechanics via its grounding in active contingencies and spatio-temporal production. The nomad reads and writes for space, creating the temporal text in the space of her own memory, giving way to time and allowing existent points to lapse before the trajectory of flight. Nomad thought is not dependent on any given theory of relationship with the medium, but works via disruption and (re)distribution, the gaps, stutterings and gasp-like expressions experienced when we enter into conversation with the hypertext. The danger is that the war machine might be appropriated by the State, at which point this light-speed communication becomes of the utmost importance in the war against space and time. As speed and efficient retrieval replace real-space across the instantaneity and immediacy of the terminal, the present-time sensory faculties of the individual are marginalised as incidental and she becomes "the virtual equivalent of the well-equipped invalid" (Virilio 5). In other words, as the frame of real-space and present-time disappears, the text of the reader/writer becomes "sutured" into the discourse of the State, the only goal to gain "complete speed, to cover territory in order for the State to subdivide and hold it through force, legislation or consent" (Virilio, qtd. in Johnson-Eilola). This is when the predetermined geometry of hypertext becomes explicit. The progressive subsumption (or "suturing") of the multiple, nomadic self into the discourse of the computer occurs when "the terms of the narrative are heightened, as each 'node' in the hypertext points outwards to other nodes [and] readers must compulsively follow links to arrive at the 'promised plenitude' at the other end of the link" (Johnson-Eilola 391). When we no longer reflect on the frame and move towards complete speed and efficiency, when we stop playing on the surface and no longer concern ourselves with diversion, the war machine has been appropriated by the State. In this case, there is no revolutionary 'outside' to confront in interaction, as all has been marshalled towards closure. Keeping the conversation open means continuously reflecting on the frame. We cannot wildly destratify and lose control entirely by moving in perpetual bewilderment, but we can see the incompleteness of the story, recognising the importance of local gaps and spaces. We can work with the idea that the "dyad of smooth/striated represents not a dialectic but a continuum" (Moulthrop, "Rhizome" 317) that can be turned more complex in its course. Contingency and play reside in the intermezzo, the "dangerous edges, fleeting, attempting to write across the boundaries between in-control and out-of-control" (Johnson-Eilola 393). The war machine exists as at once process and product, the translation between smooth-striated moving in potentia: the nomadic consciousness can recognise this process and live flux as reality itself, or consistency. In sum, we avoid subsumption and appropriation by holding open the function of the text as process in our theorising, in our teaching, in our reading and writing across the hypertextual environment. We can either view hypertext as a tool or product which lends itself to efficient, functional use (to organise information, to control and consume in an encyclopaedic fashion), or we can view it as a process which lends itself to nomadic thought and resistance to totalisation in syncopated flows, in cybernetic fits and starts. This is our much-needed rhetoric of activity. IV. An Alternative Story No matter their theoretical articulation, such claims made for hypertext are fundamentally concerned with escaping the logocentric geometry of regulated time and space. Recent explorations deploying the Deleuzian smooth/striated continuum make explicit the fact that the enemy in this literary 'war' has never been the Line or linearity per se, but "the nonlinear perspective of geometry; not the prison-house of time but the fiction of transcendence implied by the indifferent epistemological stance toward time" (Rosenberg 276). Although the rhizome, the war machine, the cyborg and the nomad differ in their particularities and composition, they all explicitly play on the dislocated, time-irreversible processes of chaos theory, thermodynamics and associated 'liberatory' topological perspectives. Rosenberg's essay makes what I consider to be a very disruptive point: hypertext merely simulates the 'smooth', contingent thought seen to be antithetical to regulated space-time and precise causality due to its fundamental investment in a regulated, controlled and (pre)determined geometry. Such a deceptively smooth landscape is technonarcissistic in that its apparent multiplicity actually prescribes to a totality of command-control. Hypertext theorists have borrowed the terms 'multilinear', 'nonlinear' and 'contingency' from physics to articulate hypertext's resistance to the dominant determinist episteme, a framework exemplified by the term 'dynamics', opposing it to "the irreversible laws characteristic of statistical approximations that govern complex events, exemplified by the term, 'thermodynamics'" (Rosenberg 269). This resistance to the time-reversible, non-contingent and totalised worldview has its ideological origins in the work of the avant-garde. Hypertext theorists are fixated with quasi-hypertextual works that were precursors to the more 'explicitly' revolutionary texts in the electronic writing space. In the works of the avant-garde, contingency is associated with creative freedom and subversive, organic logic. It is obsessively celebrated by the likes of Pynchon, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage. Hypertext theorists have reasoned from this that 'nonlinear' or 'multilinear' access to information is isomorphic with such playful freedom and its contingent, associative leaps. Theorists align this nonsequential reasoning with a certain rogue logic: the 'fluid nature of thought itself' exemplified by the explicitly geographic relationship to space-time of the Deleuzian rhizome and the notion of contingent, probabilistic 'becomings'. Hypertext participates fully in the spatio-temporal dialectic of the avant-garde. As Moulthrop observes, the problem with this is that from a topological perspective, 'linear' and 'multilinear' are identical: "lines are still lines, logos and not nomos, even when they are embedded in a hypertextual matrix" ("Rhizome" 310). The spatio-temporal dislocations which enable contingent thought and 'subversive' logic are simply not sustained through the reading/writing experience. Hypertextual links are not only reversible in time and space, but trace a detached path through functional code, each new node comprising a carefully articulated behavioural 'grammar' that the reader adjusts to. To assume that by following 'links' and engaging in disruptive nodal leaps a reader night be resisting the framework of regulated space-time and determinism is "to ignore how, once the dislocation occurs, a normalcy emerges ... as the hypertext reader acclimates to the new geometry or new sequence of lexias" (Rosenberg 283). Moreover, the searchpath maps which earlier theorists had sensed were antithetical to smooth space actually exemplify the element of transcendent control readers have over the text as a whole. "A reader who can freeze the text, a reader who is aware of a Home button, a reader who can gain an instant, transcendent perspective of the reading experience, domesticates contingencies" (Rosenberg 275). The visual and behavioural grammar of hypertext is one of transcendent control and determined response. Lines are still lines -- regulated, causal and not contingent -- even when they are 'constructed' by an empowered reader. Hypertext is thus invested (at least in part) in a framework of regularity, control and precise function. It is inextricably a part of State apparatus. The problem with this is that the War Machine, which best exemplifies the avant-garde's insurgency against sedentary culture, must be exterior to the State apparatus and its regulated grid at all times. "If we acknowledge this line of critique (which I think we must), then we must seriously reconsider any claims about hypertext fiction as War Machine, or indeed as anything en avant" (Moulthrop, "No War Machine" 5). Although hypertext is not revolutionary, it would be the goal of any avant-garde use of hypertext to find a way to sustain the experience of dislocation that would indicate liberation from the hegemony of geometry. I would like to begin to sketch the possibility of 'contingent interaction' through the dislocations inherent to alternative interfaces later in this story. For the time being, however, we must reassess all our liberation claims. If linearity and multilinearity are identical in terms of geometric relations to space-time, "why should they be any different in terms of ideology", asks Moulthrop ("Rhizome" 310). V. On Interactivity Given Rosenberg's critique against any inherently revolutionary qualities, we must acknowledge that hypermedia "marks not a terminus but a transition," Moulthrop writes ("Rhizome" 317). As a medium of exchange it is neither smooth nor striated, sophist nor socratic, 'work' nor 'text': it is undergoing an increasingly complex phase transition between such states. This landscape also gives rise to stray flows and intensities, 'Unspecified Enemies' which exist at the dangerous fissures and edges. We must accept that we will never escape the system, but we are presented with opportunities to rock the sedentary order from within. As a group of emerging electronic artists see it, the dis-articulation of the point'n'click interface is where interaction becomes reflection on the frame in fits and starts. "We believe that the computer, like everything else, is composed in conflict," explain the editors of electronic magazine I/O/D. "If we are locked in with the military and with Disney, they are locked in not just with us, but with every other stray will-to-power" (Fuller, Interview 2). Along with Adelaide-based group Mindflux, these artists produce hypertext interfaces that involve sensory apparatus and navigational skills that have been marginalised as incidental in the disabling interactive technologies of mainstream multimedia. Sound, movement, proprioception, an element of randomness and assorted other sensory circuits become central to the navigational experience. By enlisting marginalised senses, "we are not proposing to formulate a new paradigm of multimedial correctness," stresses Fuller, "but simply exploring the possibility of more complicated feedback arrangements between the user and the machine" (Fuller, qtd. in Barnet 48). The reader must encounter the 'lexias' contained in the system via the stray flows, intensities, movements, stratas and organs that are not proper to the system but shift across the interface and the surface of her body. In Fuller's electronic magazine, the reader is called upon to converse with the technology outside of the domesticated circuits of sight, dislocating the rigorous hierarchy of feedback devices which privilege the sight-machine and disable contingent interaction in a technonarcissistic fashion. The written information is mapped across a 'fuzzy' sound-based interface, sensitive at every moment to the smallest movements of the reader's fingers on the keys and mouse: the screen itself is black, its swarm of links and hotspots dead to the eye. The reader's movements produce different bleeps and beats, each new track opening different entrances and exits through the information in dependence upon the fluctuating pitch and tempo of her music. Without the aid of searchpaths and bright links, she must move in a state of perpetual readjustment to the technology, attuned not to the information stored behind the interface, but to the real-time sounds her movements produce. What we are calling play, Fuller explains, "is the difference between something that has a fixed grammar on the one hand and something that is continually and openly inventing its own logic on the other" (Fuller & Pope 4). The electronic writing space is not inherently liberatory, and the perpetual process of playing with process across the interface works to widen the 'fissures across the imperium' only for a moment. According to Fuller and Joyce, the 'process of playing with process' simply means complicating the feedback arrangements between the user's body and the machine. "We need to find a way of reading sensually ... rather than, as the interactive artist Graham Weinbren puts it, descending 'into the pit of so-called multimedia, with its scenes of unpleasant 'hotspots,' and 'menus' [that] leaves no room for the possibility of a loss of self, of desire in relation to the unfolding'" remarks Joyce (11). Interactivity which calls upon a mind folded everywhere within the body dislocates the encyclopaedic organisation of data that "preserves a point of privilege from where the eye can frame objects" by enlisting itinerant, diffuse desires in an extended period of readjustment to technology (Fuller & Pope 3). There are no pre-ordained or privileged feedback circuits as the body is seen to comprise a myriad possible elements or fragments of a desiring-machine with the potential to disrupt the flow, to proliferate. Mainstream multimedia's desire for 'informational hygiene' would have us transcend this embodied flux and bureaucratise the body into organs. Information is fed through the circuits of sight in a Pavlovian field of buttons and bright links: interactivity is misconceived as choice-making, when 'response' is a more appropriate concept. When the diffuse desire which thrives on disruption and alternative paradigms is written out in favour of informational hygiene, speed and efficient retrieval replace embodied conversation. "Disembodied [interaction] of this kind is always a con... . The entropic, troublesome flesh that is sloughed off in these fantasies of strongly male essentialism is interwoven with the dynamics of self-processing cognition and intentionality. We see computers as embodied culture, hardwired epistemology" (Fuller 2). Avant-garde hypertext deepens the subjective experience of the human-computer interface: it inscribes itself across the diffuse, disruptive desires of the flesh. Alternative interfaces are not an ideological overhaul enabled by the realm of technê, but a space for localised break-outs across the body. Bifurcations are enacted on the micro level by desiring-machines, across an interface which seeks to dislocate intentionality in conjunction with the marginalised sensory apparatus of the reader, drawing other minds, other organs into localised conversation with command-control. "The user learns kinesthetically and proprioceptively that the boundaries of self are defined less by the skin than by the [local] feedback loops connecting body and simulation in a techno-bio-integrated circuit" (Hayles 72). She oscillates between communication and control, play and restraint: not a nomad but a "human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms" (ATP, 422). VI. Desire Working from across the territory we have covered, we might say that electronic interaction 'liberates' us from neither the Line nor the flesh: at its most experimental, it is nothing less than reading embodied. References Barnet, Belinda. "Storming the Interface: Mindvirus, I/O/D and Deceptive Interaction." Artlink: Australian Contemporary Art Quarterly 17:4 (1997). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Fuller, Matt and Simon Pope. "Warning: This Computer Has Multiple Personality Disorder." 1993. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.altx.com/wordbombs/popefuller.php>. ---, eds. I/O/D2. Undated. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.pHreak.co.uk/i_o_d/>. Hayles, Katherine N. "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" October Magazine 66 (Fall 1993): 69-91. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. "Control and the Cyborg: Writing and Being Written in Hypertext." Journal of Advanced Composition 13:2 (1993): 381-99. Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext, Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Moulthrop, Stuart. "No War Machine." 1997. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/essays/war_machine.php>. ---. "Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 299-319. Rosenberg, Martin E. "Physics and Hypertext: Liberation and Complicity in Art and Pedagogy." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 268-298. Selfe, Cynthia L., and Richard J. Selfe. "The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones." College Composition and Communication 45.4: 480-504. Stone, Allucquére Roseanne. The War of Desire and Technology. London: MIT Press, 1996. Tolva, John. "Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word." 1993. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/HT96/P43/pictura.htm>. Virilio, Paul. "The Third Interval: A Critical Transition." Rethinking Technologies. Ed. Verena Conley. London: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 3-12. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Belinda Barnet. "In the Garden of Forking Paths: Contingency, Interactivity and Play in Hypertext." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php>. Chicago style: Belinda Barnet, "In the Garden of Forking Paths: Contingency, Interactivity and Play in Hypertext," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Belinda Barnet. (1998) In the garden of forking paths: contingency, interactivity and play in hypertext. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php> ([your date of access]).