Creative Exhibitionism

The 1997 Hyper-X Network Installation is presently showcasing the work of four hypermedia narrative artists, all of whom are actively experimenting with the rather clumsy networked-narrative environment offered by the World Wide Web:

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Mark Amerika's critically-acclaimed GRAMMATRON project consists of over 1100 text spaces, 2000 links, 40 minutes of original sound delivered via RealAudio 3.0, scores of animated and still-life images, specially-coded Javascripts that create heretofore unheard of web-based linking structures, and a companion theory guide that is an upgraded version of his popular Hypertextual Consciousness critifiction.

GRAMMATRON
by Mark Amerika

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Jacques Servin, author of two published books of fiction, Aviary Slag and Mermaids For Attilla, has created an elaborate Java-based hypermedia narrative called Beast(TM) which, according to the artist's statement, approaches "two themes which have dominated my interest for some time as a writer and programmer: the possibilities of hypertext, and the nature of the reality that is being conditioned by the growing banality of technology."

BEAST(TM)
by Jacques Servin

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Bobby Rabyd, lead guitarist for the band Palace, publisher of the popular LSD-50 e-zine and Ivy League Professor of Hypertext Fiction, is the director of the Sunshine 69 web-based time-machine, a multi-media exploration into the "Summer of Hate" back in the Sixties.

SUNSHINE 69
by Bobby Rabyd

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Eugene Thacker is a literary-technologist whose sampled soundtexts have been installed in various locations around the electrosphere. In his artist's statement, Thacker refers to his work-in-progress, Flesh/Threshold/Narrative, as a hypermedia project whose "texts are an attempt to enframe and then perform a series of treatments to the idea of narrative as well as the relatively unexplored space between narrative, citation, and theory, all of which oscillate around the limits of narrative as a body of prose."

FLESH/THRESHOLD/NARRATIVE
by Eugene ThackerThe Hyper-X

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All four works produce what, in the introduction to the Black Ice Degenerative Prose anthology was called "new, unpackageable culture integrations that go against the grain of the efficiency oriented profit system by reintrodcing disruptive forces that the system needs to exclude."

The curators at Hyper-X hope that the following "value-added" links will turn you on to some of the more adventurous work being composed in the electrosphere this year and that it will encourage even more risk-oriented research and development on the Web.

~Network Curators