When I first conceived of my “puzzle box” idea for this project, I kept in mind George Landow’s assertion that “[…] hypermedia linking automatically produces collaboration” (111). What I wanted to do was show that idea, but to also show how linking demonstrated narration or narrative. I wanted to demonstrate how New Media could take narration to the next level, making it something more than the simple advancement of a plot on paper. But how to achieve this? The idea of a Japanese puzzle box came to me as I was researching Asian poetry in hopes of finding something that would inspire my narrative project.
Puzzle boxes are made of many kinds of wood, something I thought would be a nice metaphor for the way New Media allows variation in narrative structure and formats. They must be manipulated in a sequence in order to unlock themselves. The seqenciality of the project appealed to me, because I thought that I could apply that to the evolution of narration online from simple hypertext (afternoon being a great example of this) and into the realms of sound and visual media. At the same time, my project would remain interactive and the sequence controlled by the reader, closely paralleling the operation of a real puzzle box. With my virtual model now firmly in my mind, I sough to learn how to produce my vision.
I knew I would have to learn Flash, and so I began to study the program. From the outset, I knew my project was going to be challenging based on my skill-set at the time. I envisioned a simple and beautiful box, which would appear on screen in front of the reader. By clicking on a certain section of the box, the piece would slide, just as a real life puzzle-box would do, revealing a component of narration. I began by building the box in Fireworks with the ambition doing a Flash/HTML hybrid presentation. I drew the box itself and then imported a traditional Japanese wood-block print to serve as the “cover.” After slicing and exporting the front, I was able to put together sliding pieces in Flash and attempted to combine them static images in an HTML table. It didn’t work.
My fundamental problem with the hybrid HTML/Flash construction was a sizing and formatting issue. The pieces would not line up as I wanted them to. I tried re-sizing the static graphics and resizing the Flash graphics but it still refused to work. I realized I would have to do the entire thing in Flash, and that was when I began to panic and briefly changed my project. But my new idea was inelegant and I soon decided that I would need to make the puzzle-box idea work.
Piecing it together in Flash, I used extensive layers and invisible buttons in order to accomplish the sliding effect that I wanted. With the sliding issue solved, I could focus on the core of my project, the various narrative elements. I needed to choose a narrative poem that would fit the aesthetic of my site design and serve as the vehicle for the project. I settled on a 16th century Chinese poem that I felt has the spare, resonating imagery I needed to drive my narrative elements. I also liked the idea of opposing an ancient textual narrative against the possibilities of New Media, and I thought the poem would serve elegantly for this purpose. I set about trying to show the different possibilities for narration.
I decide to first simply show a textual narration, with the poem appearing gradually on the screen. To accomplish this, I created various layers in a new scene in Flash that faded in one on top of another. I did not want to reveal the whole poem at once, rather, I wanted it to fall gently upon the reader, in keeping with the minimalist Asian-influenced aesthetic of the site. I then moved on to the voice part of the project, wherein I would read the poem over a blank background. In order to accomplish this I used a program called “TotalRecorder,” a small shareware program. I recorded myself reading the poem using a microphone and compressed the sound into an MP3. Importing the MP3 into a new scene in Flash, I elected to make the “Back to Main Menu” button visible the whole time as opposed to the back button in the text only version. The reason for that being because with sound I didn’t want the viewer to inadvertently listen to the entire narration without a way to escape. I then began to focus on the still-imagery for the visual part of the project.
For the visual component, finding the images was the most difficult part. I wanted them to illustrate the poem, and I felt they needed to match the feeling evoked by the author. Images with modern components were out—no cars, modern buildings or people in modern clothing. I wanted to keep the “natural” beauty described in the poem at the forefront of the reader’s mind. Using some photographs which were taken by a close friend, I supplemented with others that I found online. I then created a slideshow in yet another scene in Flash with the images fading in and fading out in different layers. The difficulty in trying to find images which matched the descriptors in the lines of the poem was significant. For example, trying to find an example of a woodcutter leaning on his staff online was challenging to say the least. Apparently it’s not a common subject of interest in our modern times!
For the final piece of the puzzle box, I wanted to bring together all of the types of narration possible with New Media into a single example. To do this I wanted to combine the three previous pieces I had composed. Sequencing the images, I tried to keep and eye (and ear) towards matching up with my oral cadence. Because each section was done in a different scene, combining all of these elements was elements was more difficult that I expected. Ultimately, I couldn’t keep the sound as in-sync with the images as I would have liked, but considering that before this project I had never worked in Flash, I was happy with the result.
Coming back to Landow, my main point of focus for this project, I can see now that my puzzle box serves not only as a vehicle for playing with narrative, but also as a connective collage. On page 171, Landow writes, in regards to this subject, “These two differences suggest some of the ways in which even a rudimentary form of hypertext reveals the qualities of collage. By permitting one so easily to make connections between texts and between texts and images, the electronic link encourages one to think in terms of connections.” If I think of this class and this project in terms of my own connections, I can say the following things.
It seems to me that one cannot be an author without a narrative structure of some kind within which to function. This holds true of written text, such as the poem used in this project, or hypermedia. As Espen Aarseth writes in Cybertext, “To be an ‘author,’ means to have configurative power over not merely content but also over a work’s genre and form” (164). In this project, I did not write the words of the poem, but I did have control over the genre I selected and the way I chose to interpret the text for my readers. They in turn will have the power to receive the piece as they choose to do so. It is the reconfiguring of the naratological structure that allows the players of the puzzle box the power to re-invent the way they interact with the poem presented to them.
In a genre such as poetry, where there is often a rigid narrative structure that is followed, New Media allows us the freedom to re-invent that narrative for ourselves, be it orally, through audio, or visually, through images or simply by the manipulation of the written word on the screen. By showing all of the narrative elements at once, we are able to see how New Media can render a simple poem, a snapshot in time into a multimodal display of interactivity and creativity. As Robert Coover notes, “Writing students and notoriously conservative creatures. They write stubbornly and hopefully within the tradition of what they have read” (707). It my hope that with this project, I have expanded the way we as writing students can look upon a component of the written world, such as narrative, and perhaps see new channels of expression unlock under the direct manipulation and interactivity with a creative piece such as this project. |