Putting into action the ideas in this chapter will entail a degree of basic
skill in writing web pages, but this expertise does not need to be extensive.
Ideally, you will need to learn a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
interface such as Dreamweaver, which largely writes html (hypertext mark-
up language) for you, and an animation program such as Flash, but there
are other alternatives. The point of this chapter is not to show you how to
use the technology, but give you some idea of directions in which you
might take such work (including simple strategies which should not involve
too much technological expertise). New media writing (sometimes known
as digital writing, cyberwriting, cyberpoetry, hypertext, hypermedia and so
on) is a new field, and is quickly evolving as new technologies and
approaches develop. What seems trendy and adventurous one year may
seem old-fashioned the next.
Many websites showcase new media work. These include Cauldron and
Net , (Cauldron and Net Ongoing), Poems That Go (Poems That Go
Ongoing), Beehive (Beehive Ongoing) , infLect (infLect Ongoing), UbuWeb
(UbuWeb Ongoing) and Alt-X (Alt-X Ongoing). These sites mostly have
extensive archives which you can look through. The Electronic Literature
Organisation’s directory (Electronic Literature Organisation Ongoing)
will also help you to find interesting work. Digital Poetics is a useful book
about this developing field (Glazier 2002) and The New Media Reader
(Wardip-Fruin & Montfort 2003) will also give you much relevant
background.
Throughout this chapter are references to a number of very good
examples of new media work on the Allen & Unwin website at
http://www.allenandunwin.com/writingexp. These works are referred to during
this chapter and listed at the end of it.
exercises
- Create a hypertext.
- Create:
a) an animated text within a single scene
b) an animated ‘movie’. - Create a text piece using split screens, frames or layers.
- Write a piece which incorporates computer code in the text.
Use this as a way of considering the effects of computerisation
on contemporary culture. - Create a hypermedia piece.
238 The Writing Experiment