Thinking back on my blog post for this class I noticed a pattern in discussing the properties of electronic literature. The usual darkness that exists in most of the pieces we’ve seen, the mundane and the creepy, the interactive fiction and navigating an undefined space. And in which category do we place these; are they pieces of art, of literature or are they video games?
My first post focused primarily on the importance of authority, control and power in these works of IF. Is it the reader/viewer/gamer or is it the author/game engineer/plot of story? In my second post I definitely focused on “the dark, the mysterious and the futuristic”. A lot of the works and games that we visited, such as My Body – A Wunderkammer or Howling Dogs are characterised by the unknown, the unsettling darkness and the futuristic/sci-fi thriller. These definitely influenced my Tracery project but also reminded me of many other digital study courses where we heavily discussed such topics. My third and fourth posts focused a lot on works such as The Flat and Her Story, where the line between game and art gets blurry. We talked a lot about associating these pieces of works with something that we would see in a modern art museum and the artist’s/creator’s/writer’s meaning behind the game or art work that is left to be explore in the vast field of the internet.
I think that I would strongly attribute my strong intriguing of viewing this type of literature and works with a more dark and spooky perspective probably because of the previous connection I have made from other digital study classes that involved futuristic worlds. I think it would have been interesting if I had started off with a clean slate and had to try and figure out what else these works could be representations of.