Notable Digital Works — This, the, text

This anthology was created by Julian Dixey in the fall of 2024 explicitly for Russell William’s Digital Poetics course at the American University of Paris. This is the 2500 word intro…

The purpose of this assemblage—collection—anthology is to collect works that I find to be interesting, that could not exist without the internet. The anthology consists of nine total works, by 8 artists, and is separated into three sections: text-traditional, text-abstracting and textless. Through these three sections, I aim to explore different levels of web-based creativity and storytelling/idea-telling.


The text-traditional pieces deal with text in the usual manner, at first glance. They are stories, written out in a text that is mean to be read in a linear order as it appears before the reader on the screen, and thusly the reader understands the story as it unfolds. These works, however, differ from the normal narrative structure through the use of so-called “hyperlinks,” allowing the reader to parse through the story element by element, and also allowing the author to implement multiple storylines within their single narrative. These three stories are all uploaded on a website called borogove.io, which is a place that creators can upload story games they have created for free. There is no regulation, aside from a “tagging” feature that the author can chose to—or to not—include on their post’s “card” which appears, seemingly randomly, in the homepage. There is no search feature, there is no algorithm pushing a given story above others because it has more clicks; it seems even to lack any system for tracking the number of clicks or downloads that a given game has, at least from the perspective of the player/reader. In many senses, this website is more like a an archive than a website. Most websites, especially now, fall somewhere on a scale of “library” to “marketplace”—in terms of how much of your attention the individual elements are presented to you are vying for—, but this website presents itself as a place in which one may look through to their heart’s content, but should not expect any help from an archiver, as they have snuck in at night through the back door.

It should be noted, as well, that due to this site being free to upload and not having much restriction at all, other than it being fairly niche, and thus not very frequented, there are many works presented that are simply very naïve, or contain many mistakes in the writing, or that just don’t fully work. In this archive, I managed to find three works that I feel tell a powerful story with the aid of the tools provided through their being web-based narratives. The first, Seeker’s Island, by S. Chance, edited by Eleanor Goldson, is a short narrative in which the reader is presented with the choices of “going forward” or “going backward.” When the reader opens up the story, they are greeted with the title, the author’s name, and these two hyperlinks. Upon clicking one of the hyperlinks, the reader is taken to the next “page” of the story, the next part of the narrative, and from there they are lead down a path within the universe of the story—as we will see later on, this hyperlinking can give the reader an ultimate freedom of movement not seen before in literature. This story leads the reader to a cabin, in which they meet the Dreamweaver, a woman with black skin and long braids that gathers medicine bottles on shelves and promises the reader their ultimate desires. But is this truly what you need? The text seems to ask. Ultimately, it is a story about recovery, and the reader is faced with choices throughout their playthrough of the narrative.

The second piece, The Visit, places the reader behind the eyes, and the hands, of an older man with dementia. As the reader plays through the story, they are greeted with the choices of an older man with dementia who is preparing for someone to come over… someone he can’t quite remember the identity of. This story innovates upon the established advantages of web-based text from the previous story in two ways. The first, is through the aforementioned movement that web-based fiction allows for. Interestingly, in almost all of the instances of web-based narratives that I encountered in my search, the “options” given to the reader are almost always to do with movement. As if the one thing that was missing from the narrative format of a traditional novel, even one that could be read digitally, was this ability to move. The second innovation that this narrative makes is a limited choice. In limiting the reader’s choices, the author is able to really convey the internal confusion of a person with dementia. There was a moment in the narrative that I, as I read, clicked through, was completely unable to find how to continue, and I at first dismissed it as some error on the part of the creator; but I gave it a chance, and it was not until I got so frustrated from going back and forth and back and forth to meticulously memorise what it was that the character’s wife had said to him (i.e. “remembering”) I wildly moved my mouse around and discovered that there had been a hidden hyperlink at the bottom of the page the whole time that allowed me to continue with the narrative, that allowed me to finally “remember” what it was that the character of the wife had said. In that moment, I was very humbled. This was a very special moment for me, and a moment I do not think could have been possible in any other medium, as the mechanism of the revealing was truly what paralleled with this mood of dementia-afflicted memory.

The third work, I must admit, was created by me. I include it here though, because it was my intention in the project to play with all of these ideas hitherto discussed to the fullest extent in the creation of my narrative game. It is called Florbis Cloob Visits the Writing Lab, and it is much longer than the other two narratives mentioned, containing in all three “chapters.” It is far sillier than the other two, instead opting for an unserious approach to subject matter—though I did manage to throw in a sincere moment of reflection for the main character of the narrative, which is difficult to find but is there within the story—and apart from the other two my main focus of the narrative was parallel storylines. Both The Visit and Seeker’s Island have fairly rudimentary—but no less powerful—variation in the path that their reader may choose to arrive at the ending, whereas Florbis Cloob Visits the Writing Lab is intent on offering as many paths as it can. This is the final aspect of web-based narrative that is unique, I believe, to the medium. The stories can be expanded upon tenfold as the author is allowed to unleash their creativity and create entire realms for the reader to explore to their heart’s content. Perhaps it is futile, as the reader could just as well finish the narrative without ever finding any of the little hidden secrets within the text, but I think that is part of what makes it special. It is somehow rare, then, to encounter these pieces within a text. But web-based textual creation does not even have to be narrative to innovate.


The next section, text-abstracting, does what it says on the tin, so to speak. These pieces all deal with text in the abstract sense. They are not narrative, but they still manage to be textual. The first, wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, created by the two-person collective JODI, is really unlike anything I had seen before. It is nothing but hyperlinks. The “reader,” or perhaps better said, in NET terms, “surfer,” is greeted by an eye-soar of green text, all of which is clickable, and none of which leads to anything that is any more promising than the last in terms of gleaning any sense of information from it. It is almost like an opposite-internet, on which everything makes no sense at all and nothing seems to want to tell the reader anything. However, I get a distinctly “military secret document” vibe from some of the “pages” found in this piece; they are all secret, and everything is buried behind one further layer of secrecy the deeper the reader digs. The only navigation one can do on this website is by clicking the hyperlinks within the page, and the elements that are themselves links to other, seemingly more secretive pages. If the previous works implemented movement into text, this piece turns text into movement—turns the navigation of the site into a drunken forward fall.

The second piece within this section, Scare Mail, is indeed not itself a piece so much as it is a web extension for gmail. After it was revealed (via WikiLeaks) that the NSA had been tracking through people’s personal and professional emails passed through the internet in private, web-artist Ben Grosser created this extension to purposely inflate the NSA’s list of emails that would be flagged as “dangerous” via the use of algorithms that searched for key words; key words that had since been revealed to the public. The extension adds at the end of each email an algorithmically generated narrative of nonsense, chock-full of key phrases like “the bomb,” “we planned,” “terrorist plot,” “suspicious activity,” and so on. Seemingly, it aims to disrupt the normal text space found within our email, one of the most ubiquitous, perfunctory interactions we have with text on the internet today.

The third piece of the second section, created by John Bois for the football magazine SB Nation is titled 17776, and for its introduction alone I could not possibly have passed it up. It is a more straightforward narrative than the other pieces listed, as it is divided into chapters, and time moves linearly and the narrative always forward, but it introduces itself in such a brilliant fashion. The reader’s initial greeting with the senses of this story is with a calendar, and a single voice. It asks Nine? Can you hear me? The year is ’43, (presumably 1943) and the calendar is yellow. As the reader scrolls down and the pages of the calendar advance forward, dragging you along with them in time, the reader is slowly greeted with the back-and-forth messaging of two entities over some long distance. This page utilises the infinite space of the internet to its advantage, having the reader scroll down for pages upon pages, invoking perfectly the time that passes for the long-distance speakers as they talk back and fourth. At the end of the introduction, and after passing many many many years on the calendar, the reader is greeted with the title 17776, and it is then that they discover that it is indeed the year in which the story takes place. This, to me, is another brilliant moment in web-based art that could not be possible in any other medium. It not only asks, but it requires the reader to actively involve themselves in the story. These works are all exemplars of what the digital space means for art, and how it can be used to innovate in story and idea telling, which is after all (arguably) one of the many “points” to art.


The third and final section of this anthology is dedicated to textless pieces of art—but not traditional ones—pieces that are still able to communicate a deep idea about the world without the use of text. I think it is important to include these pieces, because the internet, especially the art space on the internet, is often dominated by text. True there are online galleries, but there are always explanations. These pieces do not try and offer an explanation, they simply just are. The first piece, by Anthony Antonellis is called simply Floaters, and it invokes an indelible sense of nostalgia with the simple combination of two factors: the Windows XP background, which for many is a symbol of the nostalgic youth of the internet age, and the “floaters” that follow your iris around as it darts from place to place, which in this webpage follow instead, the cursor, which one could claim acts as a kind of “eye” for the web—the sensing organ for the internet. Perhaps this experience is not universal, but I remember when I was young I was often very fascinated by the little “floaters” that would occasionally cross my eye as I stated up at the great blue summer sky. I think that this piece also tries perhaps to draw a connection between these two ideas; that the Windows XP background and the little eye-floaters both invoke the same things. Youth, innocence, naïveté perhaps. As if to highlight how connected we are, us and the internet.

The next two pieces are by the same artist, Simon Freund, who by all accounts seems to be a photographer and artist based somewhere in the German-speaking world that also has delved a bit into online web-art creation, though these pieces are not strictly so. The first piece Mit Oder Ohne or “With or Without,” is a series of flash-and-not-flash-photos taken on an old Polaroid 600, and simply hovering over a given image with the mouse-pointer causes the image to switch from its non-flash state to the flash version. In such simple language, the photos call to a sense that was previously undiscovered; of illumination. In turning on the flash, the worlds depicted are morphed, and their physical space seems to change and shift. This arrangement could not have been achieved to the same affect outside of the web-space, as part of what gives it the desired parallax is the instantaneous change from non-flash to flash when the mouse-pointer hovers over the piece. The next piece, and the final piece of this anthology, is titled Portraits, and it seeks to be archival. It is an ongoing series of photos that Freund does where they wear the clothes of someone randomly selected from the street, or perhaps that they know, or perhaps that come into the studio, and pose for a photo with them. What results is a collection of clothes and photos of one person that though holds a predominance of sameness throughout, given that Freund’s face and body are the prop of every photo, it still manages to illustrate a sense of the “crowd.” The masses, the people, the different and the same. Patterns emerge, trends surface and die, and humanity’s diverse beauty is held captive by one singular photographer, in more than one sense. Throughout the photos, the photographer also seems to imitate the character of each person he “steals” (though I do not ascribe such a negative meaning to it, let me be clear), preserving their essence.

All nine of the works featured here are ineffably webby… to coin a phrase. The web is part and parcel for their function, both artistically and mechanically, and their innovation and artistic might simply could not exist without it.

-Julian Dixey

Text-traditional works

Text-abstracting works

Textless works

And this is where the website ended…

William Russell, Sunderland, 1924