"My Body a Wunderkammer" - Shelley Jackson
Clever and playful. Jackson's hyperlink-driven text reads like a series of narrative Wikipedia essays, in that the links come at random intervals within the context of the specific essay being read, but tie into the essay they link to. Her imagery is strong, personal, relatable, and gratifying. The idea of the body broken down to parts, with each not only having its own story, but tales that interweave with the other parts, just makes sense as a medium. After all, our pieces may have specific design purposes, but still rely on other parts. This piece is charming. As separate essays, each link stands alone well, and as a read-through/click-through whole, each integrates nicely. Any negative critiques I have are related to the coding, not the content, and never mind the hair-splitting about the coding being the content, etc. You know what I mean, and I see the two as distinctly separate. I'm old-fashioned that way.
"Index for X and the Origin of Fires" and "Neckdeep" - Ander Monson
I like the presentation of "Index" as its purported namesake. It disrupts the traditional narrative, but still lets you build a narrative from the individual "listings" that allows you to strike near the point. In this case, it also serves to make the experiences relayed more raw, harsher, since without the traditional predictable narrative it becomes harder to...well, predict...the incidents, and thus inure myself to it. Indices are presented at the end of something, which makes everything before, to which they are referenced, a series of memories, in effect. And memory is notorious in its lack of linear reliability. To relive a trauma, one doesn't generally get lead down a safe narrative path, but is presented with it bluntly, across the mental face, full force. This piece succeeds at conveying that. A pity about the pictures, though. Those are just unpleasantly distracting.
As for "Neckdeep,"...eh. It's a card catalog. Clever. But Monson's favorite subject seems to be himself, and while that's forgivable when presented well, it's less enjoyable when the favorite subject is indulged in with the degree of smug self-satisfaction that radiates from the entries in the clever catalog concept. It's this, without the charm of the inherent satire of the personality portrayed.
"88 Constellations" - David Clark
Constellations are the culturally-accepted patterning of stars around culturally-accepted stories that we tell ourselves to make sense out of a universe which too often seems uncaring, incomprehensible, or downright hostile. A different set of cultural experiences would redraw the lines, but the stories would reduce down to the same few we share across the world, with minor changes to suit the tastes of the teller and the audience. "88 Constellations" is a website patterning stories from a man's life around constellations. The stories of that life are generally accepted, and told to make sense of the life surrounding them, to make that life as comprehensible to us as something uncaring, incomprehensible, or downright hostile can be. Different people encountering the subject of said stories might have told them differently, but they'd break down to the same stories in essence. I like to think that that's what Clark had in mind in his design, which is why the whole thing takes on a slightly wry, knowing tone.
"Pieces of Herself" - Juliet Davis
Obnoxious. Riotously obnoxious. Possibly meant to be? Was that the point? I feel I missed the point. If I wanted to parse content while being assaulted by random audio, especially when it layers to the point of being unlistenable, I'd still be browsing Angelfire and Geocities webpages. With the sound off, maybe I could better discern the "exploration of feminine embodiment and identity" the piece purports to offer, but given the crucial role the sound is apparently supposed to play, that doesn't seem likely to aid my understanding. Maybe this is beyond me because it just isn't my area of interest, beyond the fact of it being a digital object. Any socio-gendered discourse above the level of terms like "privilege" is pretty much beyond me, so the message of societal inscription, yadda yadda, is lost and wasted on me. Which just leaves the evaluation of this as a digital object. See the first word of the paragraph. Maybe a great message, but given the obnoxious medium, I don't feel compelled to hear it.
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