dichtung-digital. Hyperfiction, Netzliteratur, Hypermedia, Interfictions

RK: Yes, I couldn't more heartily agree with you. Unfortunately, this is just one of the many misunderstandings in the early - but still influential - hypertext theory. It goes to the same category of errors as putting an equation mark between intertextuality and hyperlinks. Of course, the hypertext theorists are not the only ones to blame, as Foucault's and Barthes' notions of the death of the author have been widely misread, so that they are understood in much more concrete way than actually meant - just like you say, it is a question of the structural power fields and discourses, inside which an author works, never as an independent agent, but always tied to the discursive practices available to her. Now one can be of any opinion if this is an accurate description of the social context in which we are and write our texts, but it should be quite obvious that a mere technique like hypertext hasn't changed these power structures in any way. Thus, Barthes' claim is as true now than it was thirty years ago.

Another thing, then, is that hypertext author has more power over certain structural principles governing her work. Especially the temporal dimension is now controllable (at least potentially) in totally different fashion than with traditional text. I say 'potentially', as so far there are no suitable tools for authors, with which to easily produce temporally structured texts. So even here the author's power is subordinated to her ability (and access) to use specialized software and programming.

And this is exactly the topic we are concentrating at the moment - developing an authoring tool, which would give a whole range of cybertextual mechanisms easily for use to any author, without requiring specialised programming skills.

RS: Last question. Authors of hyperfiction or cybertext often come from the field of writing, whereas authors of digital art usually have a background in performance, visual and conceptual art. However, in the digital realm, where words, images, sound and performance easily mingle, it seems hard to maintain these traditional categories. Hypertext has become hypermedia, the link has married with Shockwave and Flash, and former authors of books like Mark Amerika are included in listings of net art. Does it still make any sense to draw a distinction between digital literature and digital art?

RK: It does make as much sense now, than it has always made. The textual medium has its own characteristics, it is suited better to some tasks than others, and I firmly believe that there are such aspects in textual medium, which simply cannot be reduced to other mediums. But of course it is true that today we have a lot of works, which blend and fuse textual with other media - let's call them hypermedia for the lack of better word. With regards to these works, with each individual work it usually does not make sense to try and classify them according to just one of the several constituent mediums. One of the main problems lies in the extensive use of 'digital' as a definer - expressions like digital literature, or digital art, doesn't really say anything significant about the work at hand, it simply states the blatant fact that this particular work - for one reason or other - is primarily presented in digital form. To go back to literature, there definitely are a lot of new writing forms, which use the textual medium as the dominant one, and whose functions differ in their own ways significantly from traditional literature, but which still quite apparently belong to the historical trajectory of 'literature'. You only need to read the judge's comments about the ELO Poetry Prize winner John Cayley's "Windsound" work to see this, or reviews of digital texts in Dichtung Digital, and so on - the cybertextual aspect of these works is clearly recognised and appreciated, but in unison with their distinctly literary values.

RS: I actually agree. I myself tend to take narration as one of the textual medium's own characteristics; though here we obviously get in trouble with film studies. As regards the ELO award, I refer to the fiction section again, which has shown that the recipe to succeed was telling a story, in hypertextual manier and with images and sound, but still a story. The other final contributions, expect Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl", all are more or less performances with text and remind me on conceptual art. Perhaps it is not a question of how much text is involved (in comparison to images) but to what extent it is employed to serve as text, that means to create a narrative world behind letters rather than serving as icon or picture, stressing its own materiality.

Well, we'll see. Thank both of you for the though- and pointful answers.

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