Paths of Memory and Painting is a three-part work of hypertextual narrative poetry that
uses an innovative series of arrays of poetic lexias to take the reader on a journey of recollected
art experience. The reading experience suggests successive text-paintings that
chronicle the changes in a painter's work, beginning with her early work as a landscape painter in the 1940's.
Each of the three parts is built with a series of small lexias, (screens of text that stand by themselves
or can be combined with other lexias)
but the interface to each part is
different. Part one is structured with a complex array of lexias;
Part Two is created as a filmic slide-show of text; Part Three is a text-based
trio sonata.
Told by a distinguished Bay Area Figurative painter, Dorothy Abrona McCrae, the entire story brings
together the narrator's recollections of her life and work.
Part One:
where every luminous landscape
The narrator recollects her
early work as a landscape painter and looks at the lives of artist
adventurers and environmentalists in the California landscape school.
The narrative is displayed in eight parallel lexia tracks,
creating a reading experience that is both complex but seductive in its
counterparted recitative and arioso texts.
I wrote the work with dynamic HTML, (DHTML) creating an
array of frames that are scripted with HTML, CSS, and Meta Refresh tags.
The interface is a variation of the interface I designed for the
opening section of
The Roar of Destiny. (1995-1999)
Rather than (as I have in some other works) offering the reader parallel paths
of text --in which the navigation/exploration between the unseen paths is an integral part
of the work and of the reading experience -- in this work, the words of all the paths
and their relationships to each other, are more clearly visible.
Color and
design contribute to a reading experience
of successive text-paintings that
chronicle the changes in a painter's work. Blue lexias begin in the present, yet are recollections
of the lives and work of California landscape artists; blue-green lexias
begin in 1944; and yellow, black, purple lexias are descriptions of Dorothy's
paintings -- past and present -- of historical artists and writers.
Informed by successive layers of Dorothy's life and art,
where every luminous landscape is composed with interlocking
texts that I/the reader shuffle and reshuffle until the effect is
exactly what is desired.
Part Two:
when the foreground and the background merged
"I am writing this in the 21st century.
If the time shifts are not always obvious,
so it is with my memory of the events..
Layers of memory..
Painting in the hills in 1944..
Dinner with Gus in 1944..
Painting in my studio at Cal in 1946.
or was it 1947?.
Back and forth motion of the paintbrush."
when the foreground and the background merged is the central part of the
work, existing between where every luminous landscape and the closing
trio sonata, paths of memory and painting.
when the foreground and the background merged is composed of three scenes.
The design and interfaces and authoring software I created for
these separate yet related scenes are
somewhat based on the DHTML software and interface I designed for
where every luminous landscape and somewhat based on the software and
interface, I designed for Interlude - Dorothy and Sid. (The Blue Moon
Review, 2001)
In each scene, after the narrative begins, the cadence of the work
is best experienced by waiting for the text to change, but readers are
also welcome to proceed at their own pace by clicking on any of the texts. One way
to experience the work would be for the reader to click through at his or her own pace and then
return to the beginning and watch the text unfold in a more filmic way.
In scene one, the lexias on the left are Dorothy's recollection
of things that influenced her painting in the 1940's; the lexias on the right
are her recollections of her meeting with Gus.
In scene two, a discussion of Douglas Tilden's sculpture,
The Football Players and the early history of football, play on the
right, while Dorothy's memories of the recent past play in the background
on the left.
In scene three, books that -- as they sometimes have in the course of my own writing --
appear in the environment of both Dorothy and Gus, who speak, or do not speak
of what they are reading. Scene three is structured in the same way as scene one.
The whole is a record of an artist's quest to situate her work in her era,
while at the same time exploring art history and maintaining her own vision.
"Working with color and composition in ways different from what I was used to,"
she writes. "The vision of how I could paint -- not yet sure of how to fulfill it."
Part Three:
paths of memory and painting
In Part Three, which has the same title as the whole work, the narrator is sitting in a cafe
in Berkeley in the
present time. While she waits for her husband Sid to return from an expedition
to Berkeley bookstores, she makes quick sketches of the people who walk by the
cafe and remembers the beginnings of the Bay Area Figurative style with
Rehearsal, David Park's painting of the studio 13 Jazz Band and with the work
of World War II veteran Elmer Bischoff. The narrative also includes her recollections
of the parallel development of her own work, her first meeting with Sid,
and details of their love affair.
The third part of the trilogy reflects
the painter/narrator's present -- poetic, romantic,
comfortable with her life and her own vision. And if the reader selects the coda, the concluding
piece allows for a continual return to the spirit of "walking up the trail"
with which the work begins.
The interface for Part Three is an array of three side by side lexia trails that
advance polyphonically. Because of the Early Music influence on the composition
process, the text of the work proceeds at a more rapid tempo than the rest of the
poetry in the Paths trilogy. The work loops until the "coda" is selected,
allowing the reader to eventually read all of the words by continuing to follow
the work. In fact, it is meant to be like a piece of polyphonic music -- a trio
sonata perhaps -- where the reader might hear different things every time he or
she listens to it, until finally the whole work is comprehensible.
The issue of whether or not the reader sees every word in the work is endemic to
hyperfiction because the author cannot know which paths the reader will follow
or whether the reader will read only one or some or all of the hundreds of lexias
that comprise the work. In the case of Paths, a notation method could
be developed that would allow
the lexias to be interfaced in a different way as a guide for the reader, but I
am not sure whether or not this is desirable.
notes
I am grateful to the musicologists and musicians whose programs, recordings,
and books have shown me the possibilities which I experimented in Part Three.
They include musician and
musicologist Davitt Moroney, Professor of Musicology at UC Berkeley,
Catherine Bott and Lucy Skeaping, hosts of The Early Music Show
on BBC Radio 3, and Donald Macleod, host of Composer of the Week on
BBC Radio 3.
Paths of Memory and Painting,
was exhibited in
Language-Driven Installation Art, Electronic Literature
Organization Conference, Brown University, Providence, RI, June 3-6, 2010
and featured at: the Berkeley Center for New Media Roundtable,
UC Berkeley, February, 2010. Part I of Paths of Memory and Painting,
where every luminous landscape,
was short listed for the Prix poesie-media, France, 2009
featured at: The Future of Writing,
UC Irvine, November, 2008;
on Cover to Cover on KPFA radio in Berkeley in Dec 2008;
and at the E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, May, 2009
