I was fortunate enough to see some profoundly great hypertext writers displaying their visual pieces. I was relatively new to the hypertext world but I was intrigued. Discovering broad forms of new media to display your literary work is quite an exciting endeavor. With intricate webbing of lexia, you can throw out the conventional static texts and page turning; welcome to the non-linear pathways of hypertexual writing.
I was encouraged to start writing in the hypertext format for a project, alas the program Tinderbox only comes in mac flavor. But the idea was one that was cultivating like that creature in the Twilight Zone who would crawl inside your head to plant it’s eggs. It was an idea I had while reading a great book on psychology called Madness And Civilization by Michel Foucault. It was the an idea from that very book by a Renaissance writer Sebastian Brant. He wrote a fictional book, The Narrenshiff or “Ship of Fools” literally the drunken boat. During the first half of the 15th century social misfits ranging from criminals to the “deranged minds” were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners. This ship of drunken madmen crisscrossed seas and canals of Europe until they would reach a port and then be entrusted to the local pilgrims or sent back to sea. Now these prisoners of passage were actually on a spiritual journey also. And the water that carried their boat; purified them.
The innovation that is hypterxtuality allows for a new experience each time you read the same story. A different variable is added, changing the way someone reads a link or lexia. A cycle described as a Joycean cycle can be achieved by creating a loop of the lexia, thus allowing for different lexia being viewed each time a new loop is activating changing not only the contextual meaning but the overall correlation of the text which has now been changed or altered. The reader personalizes the text, making it his/her own experience every time they click on a different link.
My ship of fools has been replaced by the large underground asylum in the Labyrinth. The vagabonds, criminals, and the psychotics are all the social misfits embarking on a great symbolic voyage in search of their own destiny and truths. But the boat has been replaced by the asylum or madhouse.
A post-apocalyptic descent into madness. Only in hypertext could these ideas be vividly displayed. The hypertext format allowed a certain word or phrase to link to another lexia allowing for a passage which literally created a “flow” or transfer of thoughts and ideas. The relationships between the words is crafted by the author who controls each link and when they are present and the duration they are presented to the reader, allowing for complete control.
This is my personal experience with hypertext using Tinderbox.
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