Creative-Critical Works

This category was among the first that leapt to mind, since Kim and I are both literature people and particularly because we met through my admiration and critical read of her creative-critical work. The general idea here is to point to that category of work commonly referenced as e-literature and usefully chronicled by the Electronic Literature Organization-- digital creative constructions, the most interesting of which frequently comment upon and even deconstruct their own means of articulation, the electronic medium itself (therefore "critical"). For this reason, as metacognitive, self-analytical texts, we will call them "Creative-Critical." Below is a representative sampling (this is, of course, the barest surface scraping of a rich and varied category). Also I should say that this list likely betrays a certain prejudicial inflection arising from my graduate work with Thom Swiss, editor of The Iowa Review Web. I'm dividing these various works into subcategorization based on development platform in order to facilitate subsequent discussions of preservation/collection issues.

Non-web-enabled:
afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce (the original Hypertext, created using Eastgate Software's Storyspace standalone authoring application)
Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (also developed on Storyspace platform)
riverisland by John Cayley (developed using HyperCard standalone app, Mac only)

Web-enabled - using Shockwave Flash and other plugin animation software:
The Minotaur Project by Kim White
Three Proposals for Bottle Imps by William Poundstone
The Dreamlife of Letters by Brian Kim Stefans
Lexia to Perplexia by Talan Memmott

I'd like to add two more examples: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and Tracie Morris' sound poems. The Morris link takes you to a page on Penn Sound, be sure to listen to her poem From Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful which was "exhibited" in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.