Author: aiedmondson

How to Rob a Bank is a bizarre piece detailing the adventure of amateur bank robbers and their quest to (initially) retire on stolen money. At first, there is only a man named Ted who begins looking up how to rob a bank which is visualized by showing a phone screen with him typing searches in google. It displays him searching for how to rob a bank, which banks are the best, and how much money he needs to retire. Ted begins to question his morals and finds a very rudimentary moral test, which is more of a symbolic statement of his internal doubts. Before he robs the bank, he messages someone named Elizabeth who turns out to be his significant other. At first she declines his messages and calls. But after he robs his first bank and sends her perfume, she joins in with him. His first bank robbery was rough, and he had to take a hostage. And in another one, he almost starved in a desert after going hiking to escape the police, but later robberies with Elizabeth went fairly smooth except with one silent alarm incident which they escaped. The family ends up settling and having a baby, but they end up restless and pick up bank robbing again (even using the baby as a ruse). It shows online articles of the public supporting them for affecting those who control the money, and they become known as the modern Bonnie and Clyde. Elizabeth’s own sister reports her to the FBI earlier, but they were still failed to be caught and continued on their escapades, stealing millions of dollars.

In the end it was hard to glean a message from the story, however, it was an interesting piece and reminded me of other database style stories. How to Rob a Bank consisted of ordered pictures and GIFs that successfully told a story of amateur bank robbers through the viewpoint of a phone screen.

Her Story is a deep delve in the story-telling style of using databases. From the beginning, it is clear you are dealing with a murder mystery. In front of the user is a console that looks a lot like a police database with the word “murder” typed in the search field. A few videos will appear that the user can watch, revealing what appears to be a woman who is answering questions and recounting her experiences. After watching the first few videos, you can track your progress using another app on the desktop and then try more search terms to find additional videos. The goal is to review as many of the videos as it takes for the user to figure out what happened. Once a key number of specific videos are watched, a small chat window will appear allowing the user to confirm if they understand what happened, however, the story is confusing and difficult to put together.

As the story progresses, and you have watched more videos, it is clear that there is some confusion with who is who. There are details of the stories that do not match up, and forgetfulness that might carry over to the next day. At first, it seems like a case of multiple personality disorder as the main character changes attitudes consistently day to day. The striking fact though, is the “Eve” character that appeared in several of the interviews, and after carefully reviewing the key word “twins,” one can finally determine that there is not just one person, but actually two. Eve is the only one who really tells the whole story however, so that is only if we can take her word as truth. When you listen to her interviews, you can find out about what is actually truth, and what is false, as some of her statements are tested by the lie detector (where she fails at confirming her name is “Hannah,” her twin sister).

Overall, Her Story is a complicated piece that takes a long time to work through. There are many stories, and since you jump around by entering key words, there is no way of definitively watching in order. The database format is sensible for documenting the interviews, but the lack of easy ordering makes it difficult to appreciate the story amidst the vast confusion of jumping around, very unlike The Whale Hunt which gave the user linear progression. Her Story is still an interesting work and gives a different view on how to make a story from a database.

In a movie, speed can make a film more action packed, and can sometimes even leave your audience behind if done improperly. Dakota is a Flash literary animation that uses speed, but with the purpose of locking in attention, even if the audience gets lost in the process. Immediately as you start the work, music begins to pick up with the background changing with the beat. Following that, a countdown begins, alternating between numeric and character representations of the numbers, hinting at the chaos to come. Soon after the countdown, the title appears, only to immediately descend into chaos as words start flashing on the screen at high rates of speed. Even if it feels fast at the start, the words flash faster and faster as you progress through the piece, matched with the music in the background. Large font and fast paced music and transitions leaves the audience overwhelmed as they try to piece together what is occurring, leaving no time to truly process the references or comparisons they made. It was difficult enough just to keep up with the actions that were taking place. In Speed Reading, Jessica Pressman goes into detail how Dakota is based off of The Cantos. In the beginning, it starts off mid sentence just like in The Cantos, but many parts of the poetry is mirrored in Dakota, but at such a high rate of speed, that it is impossible to appreciate the comparisons that were being made.

Because of the difficulty in close reading, the fast music, and rapid animation, it is hard to call this piece a traditional literary work, however, the focus on text also means it cannot be excluded from being a literary work. Therefore, it sits in this middle ground, not a film, and not a literary work. And yet, that is the benefit of electronic works, Dakota combines both the traditional work of playing off of previous pieces, and yet creatively puts it into a riveting electronic form that holds its audience’s attention.

The way language is presented and the choices available can make a reader truly understand and empathize with the main character. In Will Not Let Me Go, the reader takes the role of an aging man with Alzheimer’s. The piece first starts out saying that the game will remember where you are, and as the text fades, ‘remember’ stands out a little longer to give a hint as to whats to come. The reader is then launched into the scene of a funeral. People are sad nearby the main character, Fred, but he feels he is only there since he is expected to be. He also has no idea who is next to him despite some physical similarities. What the reader does not realize at this crucial moment is that the person who has died is Fred’s wife, and the man next to Fred is his son, and he has no memory of who they are.

This beginning launches the reader into the realization that if he does not recognize his own family, then there must be a problem with his memory. The story then reverts back in time to when the problem first started, letting the reader connect deeply with Fred by making decisions for him. Fred will either cope his ever growing memory problem, or lash out and become aggressive to everyone and everything that slightly bothers him. As a reader, one must make a decision that seems the best given the limited context since Fred begins not to remember anything.

As time progresses, it reaches a point to where the text just gives you snippets of whats occurring as Fred barely even knows what is going on around him. Even after he lapses back into a period of partial stability, he does not even remember his own family who come to see him, creating an ever furthering burden upon them that he regrets causing.

As the text becomes more sporadic and confused, it is a representation of the evocative meaning that Fred is not in tune to what is happening. This is similar to the idea that My Father’s Long, Long Legs has a meaning that is evoked from the way the story unfolds. Will Not Let Me Go cleverly immerses the reader in a world that might otherwise be hard to understand, conclusively showing how the use of language and choices can allow the reader to connect to a main character in unfamiliar circumstances.

In the work ‘my body — A Wunderkammer‘ by Jackson, hyperlinks were used as a way to explore the author’s past and interpretations of herself. Throughout the piece you are invited to click on various drawn body parts which then redirect you to another page with an anecdote about that particular part. By reading the passages written by the author, we are able to learn about the insecurities faced by the author, either physical or mental. As the author of ‘Electronic Literature‘ explains, Jackson interpreted the body as “a kind of inscription surface for personal history and memory.”

Among these different pieces within the hypertext story we can see patterns appear that reveal deep-set insecurities. For example, in the ‘hips‘ and ‘shoulders‘ section, she constantly compares different parts of her to male ones. She remarks in ‘shoulders’ that she appeared to have male genitalia but was potentially glad she did not. At the same time, in the hips section she remarked she had musculature similar to men idolized by the Greeks. Both of these remarks seem portray to the idea that she was uncomfortable with parts of her body and how some aspects of her did not hold up to her image of a proper female body.

These remarks went further than just physical, they also bled into psychological uncertainties as well. In one section called ‘tail‘ the author claims she has a tail that likes to move on its own and even assault her. In one recollection, she talks about her friend using her tail for sexual pleasure. The unlikelihood of this part seems to instead point at her insecurity of her body and how it is not perfectly “female” to her. She even describes trying to remove it by tying it to a door handle without success. From this we can assume the tail is a manifestation of her mind of how her body appears partially masculine.

This work is an intense view into the author’s mind and cleverly uses hyperlinks to portray a story of both body and mind. Similar styles that use hyperlinks can be seen in other hypertext stories from class including the like of ‘Uncle Roger‘ that contains several stories hidden away until the user accesses them through a hyperlink. Jackson clearly showed the versatility of hypertext stories and how the author can use it to explore many different aspects of life.