Hypertext Contour, Interactive Cinema, Virtual Reality, and the
Interstitial Arts of Jeffrey Shaw and Grahame Weinbren
This elusive, slippery essay theorizes experience by ultimately equating
it to what Joyce calls contours. It seems that hypertext not only calls
into question aspects of the printed page and social structures that
support it, but also asks questions on a broader scale about living,
experiencing, or "what happens as we go?" It is easy for me to equate
what Joyce is saying about contours in this essay to a landscape
metaphor--again, moving the lived experiences of time to the easily
recallable confines of spaces. But I feel I have missed something in
making such a convenient link.
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"Contours are the sensual whole that we move over: transitory,
evocable, multiple, and generative structures that make up our experience
of interactive arts.... Contours are the shape of what we think we see as
we see it but that we know we have seen only after we move over them, and
new contours of our own shape themselves over what they have left us. They
are, in short, what happens as we go, the essential communication between
the artist who gave way and the viewer who now gives ways to see"
(207).
Perhaps landscape lacks the sense of motion and focus on
interaction--shaping and being shaped by the terrain we traverse--that
Joyce seems to capture with contours.
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