Composed in a series of epic shifts - from the initial intensely personal details of the narrator's life; to the accumulation of investigative disclosure of covert social engineering; to an information battleground where artists and writers set forth the impact of an unseen inquisition on their lives and work - Revelations of Secret Surveillance is related in a hybrid of informational accretion and poetic fragmentation developed in thirty years of experimental writing, information art and performance art.

In the mid-eighties, when I designed Narrabase, the interface for Uncle Roger, I was working with a hypertextual database strategy that evolved from the coming together of experiments with non-sequential artists books, of a background which included database programming, and of the growing availability of personal computers. I thought of the work as a pool of information into which the reader would plunge repeatedly, emerging with a cumulative and individual picture. Rather than provide alternate plot turns and endings, I wanted to build up levels of meaning and to show many aspects of the story and characters. I wanted the reader to step into the narrator's mind, to experience the emerging/submerging of her memories.

(It hardly seems necessary to observe that this is a literary device to convey the life of fictional characters, whose thoughts are often described in various ways by their writer creators. It does not imply the condoning of brain invasive technologies that could eavesdrop on human minds, anymore than a writer's recording of a character's movements implies the condoning of stalking.)

About 15 years later, when I created Narrabase IV, the interface for Dorothy Abrona Mccrae in 2000, for a World Wide Web audience, I sought to incorporate audience experience with navigating the dense hypertext structures into which web-based newspapers and portals had evolved. At the same time, I wanted to present a reading experience that encouraged the online reading of fiction, creating a narrative that could be approached either as a diffuse hyperfictional experience, or for those who preferred it, a more sequential reading experience in which the unfolding of the story was of primary importance. In this interface, as in much of my work, including the seminal Uncle Roger, the emphasis is on the lexias -- short, screen based units of text that in my implementation can either stand on their own or be read in combination with other lexias to create a larger whole. Rather than in the body of the narrative, where they sometimes distract from the flow of the words, links that lead to a lexia that includes the highlighted phrase are presented separately on the right and/or the left of the screen.

With some modifications, Revelations of Secret Surveillance uses Narrabase IV, the interface I designed for Dorothy Abrona McCrae, as the basis for the reader's experience of the story. As in all the other web interfaces I have designed, Narrabase IV is an original interface, created with the basic elements of HTML.

I have been working on the Internet since 1986 -- for over 20 years! Unless I have deliberately sought to create a very dense experience, such as in The Roar of Destiny, my interface structures are designed to be intuitively congenial to reader experience while at the same time they incorporate innovative approaches to Internet use.

My work has been one of many seminal factors in the development of web and media interface and content. Not that the web has developed in any one way or influence but rather that it has evolved with the diffuse collaborative creative input of many individuals who have worked on the web since its public inception.