pathways, make the links visible. But if you want to make the choices
more unpredictable, introduce hidden links which the reader has to
search for.
Also experiment with colour, font size and spacing of the hypertext in
such a way as to create the most striking impression. Think of the words
as visual objects, and keep your readers visually stimulated.
THE ABC OF ANIMATION
Animation is one of the most radical ways in which new technologies can
change the way you write. On the page there are no such kinetic possibilities.
There are a number of different animation programs you can use, but at
the time of writing Flash is one of the most accessible and useful.
Each stage of a Flash animation is called a scene, and several scenes can
be gathered together into a movie. Each scene consists of a timeline, which
enables you to move words from one part of the screen to another.
Through animation, words can be moved around the screen, split apart
and reconfigured. Words, letters or sentences can transform or morph into
others. Varying speeds can be used (though a very fast speed can challenge
readability). Words may go off the screen and then reappear: in this sense
the screen does not act as a reliable/rigid frame in the way that the page
does. This allows the meaning to become very fluid, so that a phrase, sen-
tence or word can constantly be changing its configuration. It can also
indicate the process of forming meanings.
One of the classics of new media word animation is Brian Kim Stefans’s
The Dreamlife of Letters (republished) on The Writing Experiment website.
This piece is based on elements of an online roundtable discussion on lit-
erature and sexuality (and this background to the piece is explained at the
beginning of the piece itself ). Each section of the poem hinges on words
which begin with a successive letter of the alphabet. Words and letters
move around and off the edge of the screen, sometimes with such speed
that they evade normal reading habits. They also invert, rotate, and trans-
form. Letters and words appear on the screen and gradually build into
linguistic and semantic formations. Words constantly break into segments,
and sometimes reassemble in other linguistic formations and as sculptural
patterns. Many of these transforming and re-forming words relate to ideas
about identity, sexuality, writing and the body. They point to the idea
that sexuality and language are both extremely fluid and are constantly
‘morphing’. That is, neither language nor sexuality are fixed entities. For
example, in the prologue to the piece, the words ‘fix-gendered’ and ‘hand-
some’ are turned upside down. And later in the piece the verbal list
244 The Writing Experiment