riverIsland
Mac users (a society of which I am an OSX-affiliated member) are in luck, because we can experience John Cayley’s new riverIsland, the latest from one of the world’s most interesting electronic writers. Part of what makes riverIsland work is the employment of John’s technique of “transliteral morphing” – which he explains as follows:
If texts are laid out in a regular grid, as a table of letters, one table for the source and one table for the target, to morph transliterally from one text (one table of letters) to another, is to work out, letter-by-letter, how the source letters will become the target ones. Assume your alphabet (including ’space’ and apostrophe, 28 letters in all) is arranged in a special loop where letters considered to be similar in sound are clustered together. The aim is to work out the shortest distance round the loop (clockwise or anti-clockwise) from each source to each target. [From the text file included with the riverIsland download.]
Transliteral morphing is an electronic writing technique that engages the specificity of the computer. (While it would be possible to perform these operations by hand, at the time of reading, it would be a very different experience.) It is a radical departure from the printed page, which is perhaps not the case with all electronic literature. Transliteral morphing doesn’t make people ask, “Is that like a Choose Your Own Adventure book?”
At the same time, transliteral morphing would never have come from traditional work in computer science. Its movements emerge from a simultaneous attention to the sounds of poetry and the specifics of alphabetic characters. Its effects, accomplished via computation, lie in the realm of the literary and visual arts.
And, of course, riverIsland is much more than transliteral morphing. It’s also an amazing text/image space, containing John’s poetic adaptations from Wang Wei’s (701-761) “Wang River Sequence,” and using the Hypercard/QuicktimeVR combination to its fullest.
Here are the download directions from John:
Download the standalone version of riverIsland and its associated files from http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof (this can be done from a PC but the resulting files will be useless unless you can transfer them, intact, to a Macintosh).
The riverIsland application and associated files are packed into the archive ‘riverIsland.sit’, and this text is in ‘riverIsland.txt’.
You can also use Apple’s iDisk facilities (now also configurable for PC although I have no direct experience of this):
- Go to http:/iTools.mac.com – click on iDisk – get yourself an account (worth it: gives you 20 free Mb on a server that can be mounted as if it was a hard disk on your desktop) – open the public folder of ’shadoof’ – copy the material you require to your hard disk.
The download is approximately 15 Mb.