Creative Processes in Hypermedia Literature: Single Purpose, Multiple Authors

Doménico Chiappe

Translated by Rob Rix

Published in Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman, ed. Latin American cyberculture and cyberliterature. Liverpool University Press, 2007

Hypermedia Narratives

With the arrival of digital formats changes have occurred in the process of literary creation. In the traditional book, whatever the narrative voice or voices used in the text, the point of view corresponded solely to the author who worked alone, concerned only with his or her text. This is no longer the case. A hypermedia work will not usually have a single author, given the complexity of its conception. The creation of a multimedia narrative requires the involvement of a number of disciplines and therefore the intervention of numerous authors. The contrasting points of view of the artists involved, who interpret the story and transmit their perceptions, all converge in the work to be exhibited and this poses a challenge for these multiple authors. Writers of multimedia works—part of the artistic vanguard which I term ‘Hypermedism’—must explore innovative creative formats and, at the same time, achieve high quality content. Hypermedia works must display more than formal innovation, giving a literary depth to the works offered to readers.

In an authentic multimedia project the authors share the credit, as each one contributes a narrative plane from the artistic elements which, in the work’s totality, are in balance and have equal importance. Alongside writers, plastic artists, musicians and photographers there is the programmer, who interprets the ways in which different arts are related to each other within the hypermedia narrative. The programmer in that sense contributes the collective vision of organising what could be really quite chaotic. To use a theatrical comparison, the programmer fulfils the director’s role, and the designer of the multimedia work fulfils that of set designer. Another relevant contributor who should be included in the authorial credits, is the person who conceptualises the work and the way it can be navigated: the technical script that ensures that aleatory navigation of the work does not lead to a loss of coherence. This may be the programmer, the designer, or the ‘author’ of the work.

And finally, there also exists an executive function which the authors must fulfil or delegate, which consists of analysing, approving and correcting the results of each stage of the work and communicating all the information pertaining to the project, so that the necessary debates can take place at the probable points of conflict and relevant decisions can be made as the project progresses. The person attending to this task must also evaluate the results of the assemblage of the work as a whole, carry out tests to make sure it works, supervise publication on the Internet or other formats and serve as co-ordinator and link between the different kinds of authors.

During the process of creation, this multidisciplinary team can choose to make a closed work, in which the potential is there for readers to discover and follow different reading itineraries, but without allowing changes to the artistic message or purpose. In this case, the creative act should not be an example of unstructured, chaotic group work with no-one holding the reins, nor a trivial pursuit destined to use the medium as a showcase for digital pyrotechnics. Indeed, the artistic purpose will be lost if it is left entirely to chance, unless of course the purpose is precisely to leave a work adrift.

In these closed works, where readers are allowed to mould pre-existing material (Murray 1998: 152-53), they may create and interpret, without leaving any direct trace of this on the work of art itself, by virtue of elements which induce passive interaction, modifying the readers’ perceptions and the itinerary through which the work is followed. Understanding the re-creation of discourse—the artistic proposition of ‘hypermedism’—will have more to do with ‘free associations’ as conceived of by Freud and Jung than with any unidirectional imposition established by the author. The last word will thus be left to the reader; the author will abstain from providing a conclusion and will try instead to make the reader think of one for him/herself. Nevertheless, the set of elements provided by the author and his/her team may continue to express a clear intention and message. This is one of the challenges which face the writer of this new rhetoric.

This position is opposed to that maintained by those who claim one of the advantages of the new format is its ability to leave the last word to the reader, thus transcending the closed text of the print medium. This would be an alternative option which the multidisciplinary authorial team could choose: to allow infinite continuation so that the readers construct the work, making it apocryphal and never definitive. Hypermedia authors must confront this dilemma: are they ready to abandon their unfinished works and let readers supplant them, thus renouncing their role as an artist in order to be innovative?

The novel Tierra de extracción [Land of Extraction], of which I am the co-author together with Andreas Meier, is an example of a closed hypermedia work, created by two main authors and various collaborators who joined in the elaboration of parts of the complex mesh which makes up the work. Why a novel? Because the work interweaves a number of plot-lines and because each one of these plots has a different protagonist. Also, because the multimedia novel seeks polyphony not just through the fictional characters, each of whom brings their own cosmogony, but also through the creators who intervene in the artistic process. Thus the narrative levels are multiplied. Music, plastic arts, literature and photography all tell the story, each with its own point of view, each contributing a different vision. The work is polyphonic, therefore, not just because there are different characters with different consciousnesses, but because at the meta-narrative level, there are also creators with different consciousnesses.

With a single artistic purpose and a (loosely) unified narrative thread in mind, we traced several plans of the work to be carried out: one for the literary side of things, another for the music, another for the plastic arts, and another for the mise-en-scène (the programming and design). Each conforms to a series of rules which govern the multimedia package. The novel should have a rhizomatic structure of interlinking chapters, in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I call these kinds of chapter ‘balls of mercury’, as they are like the metallic blobs which spill from a broken thermometer. They can join up with each other again or remain dispersed, without losing their rounded form. The chapters are written in a brief, concise form. They each tell a micro-story in themselves, but at the same time they are fragments of a larger narrative framework which becomes apparent through the reading. Another key aspect of the structure of the hypermedia novel is the puzzle to be figured out. This is a way of challenging readers to reconstruct a coherent story and, at the same time, of generating such tension and intrigue that they feel compelled to explore the work in its totality.

In Tierra de extracción we decided that the written word would represent the first level of rhetoric, the gateway that would allow readers to relate to the other forms of narrative in the novel. Music is another narrative level, in which song lyrics offer a first person point of view and covers an aspect which is reserved only for song: the innermost thoughts of the chapter’s protagonist – their subconscious. There is one song for each protagonist and there are compositions that are divided into two, three or four parts, each one with different arrangements, according to the chapter in which they appear. The words and music were composed by the novel’s author, but each song was given to a different musician (Ojo Fatuo, Jorge Ramírez, Slam Ballet, Culto Oculto, Daniel Armand). They read the chapters and worked on the musical arrangements that they thought were appropriate. Then they recorded them with their own perspective, thus adding another layer of polyphony.

A different method was used with images. The narrative material was handed to the plastic artists and the photographers ((Ramón León, Manuel Gallardo, Humberto Mayol, Edgar Galíndez, Pedro Ruiz). With complete freedom, the painters expressed in their works the aspects that most impressed them. The photographers searched among their work for the images that they considered to be linked, in some way, to the texts and music. There are photographs from different countries and situations that complement others which are more directly relevant to the narrative and which are the result of extensive research in two important Venezuelan photographic and press archives (Shell-CIC-UCAB and El Universal).

The individual screens which make up the novel were configured, one at a time, with combinations of these materials. And just as in a theatrical play, an artistic vision was needed for the mise-en-scène, the staging and the direction of the work: Andreas Meier took on this role and each one of the chapters constitutes a small work of Net-Art. As far as the design was concerned, we tried not to impress the user with vacuous technological wizardry, but rather to achieve a simple interface, in order to avoid having to include instructions. The work does not abuse its readers with technical excesses, which is quite common when hypermedia authors attempt to exploit the maximum potential of a piece of software. That would mean giving in to digital pyrotechnics, which would be empty and trivial. What you would have on screen would be an endless and exclusively ornamental circus. The difficult art of writing a story shows how it should be done: if any element of the plot is unnecessary for the dénouement, it should be eliminated. A writer should present readers with a labyrinth which is set out in such a way that those who explore it patiently do not become lost.

Collective Novels

For some years now the creation of ‘collective novels’ has proliferated on the Internet, in which readers may add lines or chapters to the narrative. The publisher Anaya experimented with the idea for two consecutive years. For the first book, No tiene título [Untitled], written between 25 May and 10 June 2001, the editor, Emilio Pascual, imposed the genre of the thriller, with twelve characters, whose names and occupations were given. On this first occasion, the publisher decided that users/readers would be able to see where a new collaborator had participated in the development of the work, which, in the end, consisted of eleven chapters. However, in the reading, contradictions between the various participants are discovered. In this case, the literary pleasure was to be found more in the sensation of creating than in that of reading. Thus the participants—but not the readers—found some compensation for the poor outcome. The following year, more strict rules for participating were imposed. The publisher’s second attempt was entitled La sorpresa de Olivares [Olivares’ Surprise]. The project, written between 31 May and 16 June 2002 and directed by Joaquín Ordoqui, was co-written by fourteen participants and, furthermore, included a team of readers who wrote the final paragraphs ‘with the intention of tying up loose ends and closing sub-plots’ (Ordoqui 2002). Neither of these two novels dealt with hypermedia materials, as they concentrated on the collective creation of written texts via virtual participation.

Earlier in the twentieth century, the Surrealist movement had already experimented with the collective creation of works of art through techniques such as the game ‘exquisite corpse’ in which players would take turns to write—or draw—on a sheet of paper, folding over their contribution before passing the sheet on to the next person. In this type of sequential composition there was no understanding between authors, incoherence had primacy, and there were no aesthetic considerations – this was what the Surrealists sought. A modern version of an ‘exquisite corpse’ has been proposed by the magazine Soho and published as Erotic Novel (n.d.).

For this project the editors invited pre-selected authors to contribute texts. However after five chapters, it became obvious that there were disadvantages to having each author write one link. The different styles and plots composed a book of stories rather than a ‘novel’. What one author proposed, another undid in the following text. This does not mean that individual authorship is necessary to guarantee quality: there must be agreement about the creative purpose, and a co-ordinator should guarantee the achievement of the artistic objectives. Such co-ordination should promote discussion among members and take decisions where there are disagreements. In a literary sense, this will allow the contributions of readers—whether expert or novice—to be edited, encouraged or merged, so that they can be added to the work without diminishing its aesthetic value. Put simply, in order to avoid the complete incoherence of Surrealist ‘exquisite corpses’, collective literary works on the Web need coordination.

If it is true that ‘interactivity reaches its full meaning of active participation in the creative process’ (Ryan 2004: 98), it is only in a collective creative project that, from the start, seeks a commingling of ideas and discourses, that such interactivity can be maximised. The participants must commit themselves to the artistic purpose, and debate it in parallel discussion spaces, for the work itself is not the appropriate place to exchange opinions. These parallel forums allow for the private space which all artists need yet also oblige them to work with other authors on the same subject in a co-ordinated way. The participants, therefore, find themselves in a non-simultaneous debate in the present, which enriches the composition and facilitates the meeting of minds.

In the collective novel La huella de Cosmos [The Trace of Cosmos] which I directed between June and December 2005, we differentiated between the space dedicated to the novelistic work written for the reader, and the zone in which participants discussed and offered their ideas. In the discussion forum every proposal was offered up for debate. And it was from this zone that the hypermedia texts which would be published as chapters of the said novel emerged. In this project, the free participation of all the interested parties was combined with the existence of a director who could suggest the development of certain plot-lines and who edited the definitive texts, seeking to give them a unified style and coherence, and without straying from the outlines drawn up by the users of the forum.

In the forum of La huella de Cosmos a tight bond formed between participants who established both alliances and enmities – reading the product of bitter arguments and even of one or two flirtations might yield the plot of another potential novel in which the characters write a book together… But this sense of collective authorship was complicated by the fact that the majority of the members of this literary community opted to sign with nicknames—first names without last names, initials or pseudonyms—thus fighting shy of assuming the responsibility of ‘authorship’. Furthermore, how many of these writers were not more virtual than real? That is, how many pseudonyms could hide the same person, making their interactions in the forum an actual fiction? How many were playing a role rather than acting as they would in person?

The frontier established by traditional authorship is dissolved and redirected, in cases such as the writing of this collective novel, towards metafiction. For, who can assure the readers that I, as director of La huella de Cosmos, have not been all or many of the participants in the forum? Or perhaps I, Doménico Chiappe, do not exist and my name is the signature of a collective or a company… When I proposed this experiment to the sponsors I wanted to avoid the literary anarchy of ‘exquisite corpses’, be they Surrealist or hypermedia in nature, and, instead, imitate, in the forum, the functioning of an individual brain when creating: inspiration, ordering, creation, evaluation, selection and editing. The forum would reveal everything that went into the composition of a definitive work which would be available separately. Thus, readers of the definitive work would not have to be caught up in the creative process unless they wanted to be.

Detecting the strategy chosen by each participant in the forum is not possible. The majority chose not to allow any subsequent contact. But we can speculate that a single participant may have taken on one character in the story and developed it exclusively. Or assumed different personalities, under different nicknames, to set up a game which would be impossible in traditional publishing, but which could be an advantage for the collective literary work, despite the use of anonymity.

Recycling and the Reader as Literary DJ

Hypermedia is nourished by original creations produced specifically for the medium, but also by the recycling of works not suitable for hypermedia in themselves, but which can be transformed with a bit of imagination. Not only original texts and artwork are used. Everything and anything can be used to tell a story, but the organisation of such materials within a literary framework is crucial. This editorial re-ordering of elements is another form of authorship, and readers can participate in this editorial work, too.

We can imagine the reader of the future as a modern DJ. Not the classic disc-jockey who chose records and broadcast them without a pause, but one who now alters recorded commercial music, composing his or her own songs in so doing. The use of programmes for altering sounds allows DJs to compose and perform music without any knowledge of musical theory or any command of instruments. Supported by computer programmes, the literary DJ will assimilate the contents of hypermedia works and redeploy them, taking intertextuality, graphic interface and musical mix to extremes. In so doing, this literary DJ will ‘write’ his or her own book. This can be considered an art form as long as it is an authentic expression with a creative purpose. Not all readers will make their own mixes, just as not all contemporary music fans will become DJs. Only a minority with initiative and the necessary talent will do so.

In art the ideas and ingenuity of predecessors who have fed evolutionary processes have always been re-used. In previous eras works belonged to tradition and no-one claimed authorship. The ancient bards transmitted stories from generation to generation through song but, in contrast to the bards, in the future works will be re-used as if they were recyclable materials, and not even the basic structures will be kept. Readers will create their own works and the pleasure sought in art will be that of self-expression, no longer that of interpretation. The intimacy of artistic enjoyment will be exteriorised and exhibited.

In hypermedia, individual works—those of literary DJs—will be derived from those produced by groups of artists and from old compositions distorted by the new author which may then be mixed with other elements. Ultimately the original ‘texts’ may or may not be identifiable, in the same way as in contemporary musical ‘sampling’ where the tempo, tone and rhythm of an existing composition are changed so as to make the music, style and voices unrecognisable. ‘Authors’ will not need to have any knowledge of literary, musical, artistic or photographic techniques, because all they will need to express themselves will be the ability to use computer software.

We are not facing the disappearance of the author as a consequence of potential changes in publishing markets. We are facing a redefinition of authorship. There will be a new concept of authorship because there will also be a new concept of readership, which will multiply authors. Just as the Internet has ushered in a new era of reading, it has done the same with writing. There has probably never been so much written and in such varied ways as now: e-mails, diaries and blogs, personal and corporate websites, communications media with infinite publishing capacity, news commentaries, attempts to write literature, ramblings and rantings, and—why not?—traditional quality literature published by virtual publishers and communities. The role of the new reader had already been glimpsed by Calvino in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller [1979] when he spoke of a woman ‘who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist’ (Calvino 1982: 61). Readers construct the book which before they could only imagine when their minds wandered from the pages which lay before them.

When programming languages are finally taught in school in the same way as mathematics, the majority of readers will be able to take on a fully active role and develop the maximum expression of interactivity, that of creator. This reader of the future, who constructs an almost completely different work out of the work in hand, is very different from ‘creators’ such as Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ [Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote]. Menard is described as ‘[not wanting] to compose another Quixote – which is easy – but the Quixote itself’ (Borges 2000: 65). It goes without saying that Menard never envisaged a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable ambition was to produce pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. But Borges’ was a parody of literary creation rather than a vision of the future and readers in years to come will not be like this reader-copyist, since without any concern for issues of copyright, they will mould the huge diversity of material at their disposal to re-make works to their own taste.

The mysterious processes which produce good art can occur in these derivative works of hypermedia just as much as they can in ‘original’ works of art. How can a work evoke the same feelings from one end of the earth to another, from one century to another, and have, at the same time, as many individual interpretations as there are readers? How can its quality overcome, in the end, the workings of the market which captures direct and indirect audiences? How can we enjoy a text without needing to understand the personal complexities of the author? The work of art is like a magical potion whose effects vary according to who drinks it; a potion which, in a few cases, will survive its circumstances and its epoch to continue to cast its spell on those who imbibe it. Hypermedia novels, collective works and the recycled mixes of literary DJs all have the potential to cast their spell-or their net-over an increasingly diverse reading public.

Bibliography

Borges, Jorge Luis. 2000. ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, trans. by James E. Irby, in Labyrinths, ed. by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, preface by André Maurois. Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 62-71.

Calvino, Italo. 1982. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, trans. by William Weaver (London: Picador).

Chiappe, Doménico, dir. 2005–. La huella de Cosmos. http://www.e-novelacolectiva.com Accessed 20 April 2006.

Lévy, Pierre.1998. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, trans. by Robert Bononno (New York: Plenum).

Murray, Janet H. 1998. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Ordoqui, Joaquín. 2002. La Sorpresa de Olivares. http://www.anaya.es/cgi-bin/novela_colectiva/novela_interactiva.pl?ruta=blanco#Accessed 5 March 2003.

Pascual, Emilio, dir. 2001. No tiene título. http://www.anaya.es/cgi-bin/novela_colectiva/novela_interactiva.pl?ruta=blanco#Accessed 5 March 2003.

Quiroz, F, et al.. ‘Novela erótica’, Revista Soho. http://soho2.terra.com.co/soho/articuloView.jsp?id=3195 Accessed 29 July 2005.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1999. Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana UP).

Waldberg, Patrick. 1965. Surrealism (London: Thames and Hudson).

In this kind of project the community that participates is defined by its common language—in this case, Spanish—and any Spanish speaker is allowed to participate. Thus geographical frontiers are dissolved thanks to virtuality. Although these two projects were launched in Spain, the participants—as I discovered when I directed the collective work La huella de Cosmos—came from Latin America as well as Spain.

See André Breton’s Le Cadavre exquis: Son exaltation of 1948, in English translation in Waldberg 1965: 93-95.

See Paul Fallon’s account of Rafa Saavedra’s work elsewhere in this volume for an ‘actual’ example of a literary DJ. The suggestion in this chapter, however, relates to the ‘virtual’ potential of literary DJ-ing, to use Pierre Lévy’s terminology (Lévy 1998).