Useful Links to Specific Aspects of C.C.N.F.

Important Pages on the Website
(All of these links appear on each page of the website, as well.)

Link to C.C.N.F.

Artist’s Statement About the Project

How to Navigate

Project “Story” Map

Form for Readers to Contribute to the Narrative

Important Blog Posts

Link to the Research Paper

On the Meaning of “Creative Nonfictions”

The Silkscreens that Inspired This Whole Project

Open Circuit Storytelling: Contemporary Creative Nonfictions

“What cultured people want in terms of language (and thought) is to use well-defined, correctly positioned and strictly combined terms, and this is what they call good speech, good thought, and good writing. But they do not realize that they are thereby creating a closed circuit that leaves no room for anything but what was there in the first place…Contrary to what cultured people call good writing, it is by forcing the meaning of words, or else by shifting them; also by derailing coherent thought; it is by injecting gaps, disjointedness, margins, and deviations, that we will produce the soul phenomenon worth seeking: the contribution to thought of outside elements, the excesses of the final product over the original stakes.”

–Jean Dubuffet (Garret 2003)

Dubuffet wasn’t talking about hypertext here, but what he says above about creating an “open circuit,” as Nam June Paik would say, as opposed to a “closed circuit” by introducing “gaps,” “disjointedness,” and “deviations” was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the hypertext narrative “Contemporary Creative Nonfictions,” or C.C.N.F. (Paik 1996, 198.) Traditionally, “ …we are ready to read practically any image or a composite of images as being meaningful, while for a text to be meaningful we require that it obey the laws of grammar,” writes Lev Manovich in his essay “New Media From Borges to HTML.” (Manovich 2003, 17) The medium of hypertext, however, opens up databases of text to narrative possibilities by presenting the reader with a choice of pathways through the material—hypertext opens the traditionally “closed cirtuit” of the written book to infinite linkage, collage, and new and exciting juxtopositions of content.

C.C.N.F. is a work of hypertext fiction based in the aesthetic paradigm of Alexander Galloway’s concept of the first phase of website art, known as Net.Art. This phase lasted from around 1995 through 1999, with a large boom around 1997 (Green 2000). Net.Art represented a wide range of internet art pieces in which structure was explored over software and commercial implications. The first phase of Net.Art was a largely formalist period which explored the physical aspects of the medium. (Galloway 2004, 219)

Similarly, C.C.N.F. is formatted in a manner by which the structure and possibilities of hypertext are explored including creating a database of interlinking narrative strands that also reach out to other sites on the Internet. As Christiane Paul wrote in her text Digital Art, “…the Internet seems to defy a systematic arrangement of its constituent elements. Links make it possible to connect texts and visuals to the contextual network in which they are embedded, and to visualize a network of references that would normally be separated by physical space.” (Paul 2008, 116)

The environment of C.C.N.F. is paired down to simple colors and illustrations, following the style of such hypertext works as “Sunshine 69” by Bobby Rabyd and Oliana Lialina’s “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War.” (Rabyd; Liana) As Christiane Paul wrote on page 114 of her text Digital Art, “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War” of 1996 was “…developed into an archive of variations on the work by other artists. The project points to the possibilities for creation and presentation offered by digital networks, such as the infinite reconfiguration of information in an open system.” This, Paul notes, is a special condition of Digital Art, and Internet art, in particular, as museums can generally neither contain nor tolerate this flexibility and remixing of an artist’s work. (Paul 2008, 114)

“Sunshine69,” “Delirium”, Oliana Lialina’s “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” and other early hypertext narratives use simple elements to create vast pathways of exploration in the fields of Internet Art and Narrative. (Rabyd; Cooper; Liana) Early internet art known as Net.Art was produced between the years of 1995 and 1999 and dealt largely with the network itself. (Galloway 2004, 219) As Alexander R. Galloway wrote in his book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, “…the first and most important theme of Net art is the Internet itself. Net addresses its own medium; it deals with the specific conditions the Internet offers. It explores the possibilities that arise from its taking place within this electronic network and is therefore ‘Net specific.’ Net art plays with the protocols of the Internet, with its technical peculiarities. It puts known or as yet undiscovered errors within the system to its own use.” (Galloway 2004, 216).

C.C.N.F. is, in part, a tribute to Alexi Shulgin’s Form Art Competition (1997) which encouraged people “…to create art out of formal elements, such as radio buttons, scroll bars, and pull-down menus” except C.C.N.F. uses these formal elements to set the stage for non-linear hypertext narrative exploration. (Paul 2008, 113) Additionally, a contemporary “formal” element system is used in addition to the traditional and, still functioning, HTML: CSS (cascading style sheets).

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) along with XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language), the common companion code to HTML 5, is still used today as it was in the 1990s to control the structure and appearance of web pages (Berners-Lee 2003, 795; XHTML 2010) “The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called HTML Tags, first mentioned on the Internet by Berners-Lee in late 1991,” but it was not released onto the web until the mid to late 90s. It is now controlled by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XHTML is a separate language designed as “a reformulation of HTML 4.01” was first published in January of 2000 (HTML 2010; W3C: XHTML 2001)

Today, HTML’s functions have generally been limited to performing only the most basic of organizational structure, leaving appearance attributes, or “presentation semantics,” to be determined by a newer form of code known as Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. Additionally, Java scripts and other coding languages may be incorporated to create the final web page. This combination of elements is known as “Dynamic HTML” or DHTML. (Dynamic HTML 2010)

Although CSS was originally released in December of 1996, it has not seen such wide spread use as it enjoys today until recently. However, CSS in its purest form still contains many errors and bugs which need to be worked out before it becomes as standard as HTML and XHTML. (Cascading Style Sheets 2010)

In most contemporary web design, while HTML is still used for the most basic structure, CSS controls some elements of structural layout as promoting elements which are free from the HTML table and frames-era grid structure of content such as CSS “Float” properties (Coyier 2009). In addition to freeing information from a gridded presentation, CSS also frees up documents to contradictions in code with a specialized system for determining priority. The “cascade” literally means there are multiple levels of “weight” to the information. “In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable.” (Cascading Style Sheets 2010)

Before CSS, most of a page’s appearance was determined by the HTML alone including “…all font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders and sizes…” Even if one were creating an entire site with a cohesive appearance utilizing the same values for each of the appearance attributes, all of this information would have to be entered directly in each HTML file. However, with the use of CSS “…presentation is separated from structure.” (Cascading Style Sheets 2010) What this means is that HTML now only controls the most basic structure of a page—for example, the text itself as symbol, without font or size specifications beyond what is “heading text” (encased in HTML h1, h2, etc. tags) and, in general, only a few other structural elements such as what items are to be in a numbered or “unordered” list, which information is to be hyperlinked and what the destination of the hyperlinks is, and some image file placement.

CSS information may be contained within each file, attached to specific elements or within hidden coding areas of a page. It may also, however, be stored in a separate file that is merely referenced in each HTML document—or it may be expressed simultaneously and even differently in all of these locations. It is these different potential levels of control that define the priority of style known as the cascade. A further innovation of CSS is that multiple external style sheets may be created for a single document, and the choice of which “appearance” code the page should adhere to can even be put in the hands of the user.

For C.C.N.F., in addition to exploring an open form of narrative structure, the open-ended choice of complex appearance factors was also set up as a user/reader controlled variable. Five separate external style sheets exist for C.C.N.F.. The default CSS is entitled “main” for a plain look of grays and white. “Main” is determined to automatically load if it is the reader/user’s first time visiting the page. If, however, one has visited C.C.N.F. before, the browser will remember the last style of choice via a JavaScript function involving browser “cookies,” or packets of information stored and re-accessed by the browser upon subsequent visits. This user-controlled Dynamic HTML environment is known as a “dynamic web page” which, in addition to including uses of HTML, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript, may also include other interactive scripts such as Pearl and PHP. (Dynamic HTML 2010)

The other four styles available in C.C.N.F. besides the default are “skin” for a skin-colored appearance with a background image of eyes; “blackout” an all-black design (the text can be read by typing “Command A” [mac] or “Control A” [non-mac] to “select all” text, thereby making it visible; “whiteout” the inverse of “blackout”; and “story map” in the traditional blue, red, white, and cream of the “Story Map” print series from which this website idea originated. One may also select “no style” to view the plain HTML page structure, links, and text without any CSS styling—meaning it will appear in the browser defaults.

With each linked icon clicked to change style, a new web address or web page is not being accessed, but one is merely changing the “style sheet” which the browser is accessing. The browser reads the HTML file, or the webpage itself, i.e. http://hannahmarchcampbell.com/ccnf/index.html for all of the basic information like what the text says (not its actual font or color–but the text itself as symbol,) what the links are and where they go, where the “head” of the page is (this is where code and CSS links are found.) To take a peek at this structure, go to any web page, click on the “View” menu in the browser, and then scroll down to “Page Source.” Unless access blocked by the site creator, the entire structure will appear as code in a new window though a simple, standard text program such as “text edit” or “notepad.” Both the visible and hidden information of the webpage will appear in this window.

Normally, content in the “head” of an HTML document is not visible on the page in the browser window, but the browser reads the information to determine the appearance of information in the rest of the page, or “body.” The “body” of the page is where the visible content of the page is located (such as text and links to images and other files) and certain basic structural information like h1 and h2 tags for a larger font at the beginning of a section of type. In many pages, including C.C.N.F., all of the font styles, colors, locations of boxes of text, borders on blocks of text, text wrapping, image placement, page background image, etc. are controlled by the “style sheet” and, therefore, can be changed at the will of the viewer/reader by using the aforementioned links “main,” “skin,” “blackout,” etc. Each of these styles is available on every page within the site via colored icons at the top left hand corner of the page. Icons are used for their association with graphic imaging programs, as well as to differentiate the choice of “style” from the choice of narrative, textual path.

All of this coding was performed with the idea of extending what works such as “Sunshine 69” as well as “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” did to present narrative as un-mounted from its linear, time and space-controlled format by extending this same freedom of structure to the appearance of the page. (Rabyd; Oliana) As Vannevar Bush dreamed in his famous essay “As We May Think,” C.C.N.F. attempts to father “from widely separated sources” a variety of materials and “[bind] them together to form a new book.”

In this sense, C.C.N.F. goes beyond random trails through a database and project a larger image through the network of information that is created. (Bush 2003, 45) Although database and narrative are “natural enemies” according to Lev Manovich in his essay “Database as a Symbolic Form,” Manovich also admits that the web may give rise to a new context for narrative. By creating “different interfaces to the same material” such as in David Blair’s video narrative “WaxWeb,” then the reader/user’s choices through the database (including interface choice and pathway) form a narrative pathway. This processes becomes even more interactive with the introduction of hyperlinking into the database—therefore redefining traditional narrative as just one potential pathway in a database of possibilities (Manovich 2001, 5 of 16-6 of 16)

“My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” also functioned on freedom of narrative pathway and appearance. Liana’s piece functioned via hyperlinking content by using HTML “frames” to jump content around the page. However, in “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War,” change in appearance was always tied to a change in content. I.E., when one clicks on a line of hypertext in “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War,” the page appearance may change, but the page content also changes.

CSS allows this concept to be taken further—completely rearranging appearance independent of structure. A major theme of new media is its ability to create an “open system” where readers are also writers. According to Lev Manovich in his article “New Media from Borges to HTML,” post modernism and new media have resurrected a Baroque sensibility of “…communities of readers who were also all writers” with the advent of happenings, performance art, installation art and, more recently “Internet newsgroups and mailing lists.” (Manovich 2003, 23) With the combination of HTML hypertext and CSS styling, readers of WebPages become not only “authors” of their own narrative strand through a database of potential text, but also artists or designers of their own aesthetic experience of the text and hypertext pathways.

C.C.N.F. presents an original 22 chapters with selected quotes from other related authors, which may be explored in any order and direction, as well as a reader input page to continue and expand the story. Each segment of text has multiple links to explore in different directions, double back, jump forward, and even travel to other related sites on the web. Combined with five separate CSS style sheets as well as the option of viewing the information free of the bias of style, a map page for spatial exploration, links within the text as well as in the sidebar, a page made up of overlapping fields of all of the text contained in the website at once (referencing info-graphics in new media as well as the aesthetic of works such as Maciej Wisniewski’s “netomat” 1999-present,) a user input form where they may literally become author of a portion of text, and hidden, hover-areas within many of the pages, C.C.N.F. offers a versatile, reader-controlled environment in which reader is also writer, designer, and overall artist of their own experience through the database environment. (Paul 2008, 119)

Although working with largely original material, the choices for display and pathway in C.C.N.F. mirror “The Unreliable Archivist,” a 1998 piece by Jon Ippolito, Keith Frank, and Janet Cohen which was fitted with four ranges of adjustments including “languages, images, style, layout” and four descriptive categories—“plain, enigmatic, loaded, and preposterous”–to “remix” existing content from any ada’web projects. The information was then collaged on the screen out of its original context and only modified by “…subjective categories determined by the Archivist’s creators.” (Paul 2008, 116-117)

As mentioned earlier, inspired by “Sunshine 69,” C.C.N.F. presents a spatial navigation in addition to hypertextual links. Both websites contain a “map” page through which the reader may navigate the material according to location. While “Sunshine 69” presented a flat, graphic image map, C.C.N.F.uses Google Mapping technology to superimpose the narrative space onto a real location via satellite imagery.

The simple illustrations in C.C.N.F. were modeled after Oliana’s photocopy-esque black and white images in “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War.” Just as the photocopy style was the predominant aesthetic of low-res web imagery at the time of Oliana’s piece, C.C.N.F. utilizes the most simplistic common-place web art aesthetic of the present day: that of Adobe Illustrator “Live Trace” function. Adobe Illustrator “Live Trace” graphics are today what the photocopy aesthetic was in the mid to late 1990s: fast-loading, simplistic, graphic, and stylish.

The overall structure of C.C.N.F. was originally inspired by Jorge Luis Borges story “The Garden of Forking Paths.” “The Garden of Forking Paths” is seen as an important precursor to the possibilities of narrative structure only realized decades later with the advent of hypertext. Even the structure of the World Wide Web itself and, according to Borges, the universe itself, mirrors the layered, multi-directional structure revealed in “The Garden of Forking Paths.” (Manovich 2003, 29; Borges 1999, 119-128) The story itself is about a puzzling narrative within another puzzling narrative–world within a world–in which all possibilities are explored.

“‘The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts’ui Pen. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favoring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.’”

(Borges 1999, 27).

Many early hypertext novels were inspired by Borges’ vision of “all possibilities” existing at once—some even taking the text itself as a jumping off point for hypertext storytelling including Stuart Moulthrop, a Professor of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore and “founding board member of the Electronic Literature Association.” Although he often used software environments rather than the World Wide Web to create hypertext fiction, he first began working in the field in the 1980s…and, in 1987, he created “’Forking Paths’….for an undergraduate writing class as a demonstration of hypertext…” directly appropriating excerpts from Borges’ story. (Stuart Moulthrop)

In conclusion, Contemporary Creative Nonfictions draws from the aesthetic and structure of early hypertext novels as well as the writings of Nam June Paik, Jorge Luis Borges, Lev Manovich and Jean Dubuffet to create an open database through which the user/reader has many choices in terms of narrative pathway and style of content. C.C.N.F. is set in the aesthetic of early Net.Art and focuses on exploiting the formal qualities of HTML, CSS, and Adobe Live-Trace while presenting a hypertext narrative for the reader/user to explore. It is the artist/author’s wish that this type of New Media/Trans-media piece will experience a revival with new technologies for digital reading such as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s Ipad.

References

Berners-Lee, Tim. “The World Wide Web” Section 54. The New Media Reader. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Nick Montfort, eds. The MIT Press, 2003.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Garden of Forking Paths” in Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Penguin Classics, 1999.

Bush, Vannavar, “As We May Think.” The New Media Reader. Tim Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Nick Montfort, eds. The MIT Press, 2003.

“Casscading Style Sheets.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 3 May 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets

Cooper, Douglas. “Delirium.” http://www.dysmedia.com/Words/delirium.html

Coyier, Chris. “All About Floats.” http://css-tricks.com/all-about-floats/ on Css-tricks.com

“Dynamic HTML.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 15 April 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML

Galloway, Alexander R. “Internet Art,” Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2004. pp. 208-233.

Garrett, Marc. “Gate Keeping & Who gets seen?.” 22 September 2003. Rhizome Digest: Highlights from the New Media Art Field. http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/digest/?msg=00082%29

“HTML.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 5 May 2010. Web. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML

Rachel Green “Web Work: A History of Internet Art” Art Forum, May 2000. BNET. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_9_38/ai_65649375/

Manovich, Lev. “Database As A Symbolic Form.” Chpt. 5 of The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Accessed: http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/warner/english197/Schedule_files/Manovich/Database_as_symbolic_form.htm

Manovich, Lev. “New Media from Borges to HTML”. Introduction to The New Media Reader. Tim Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Nick Montfort, eds. The MIT Press, 2003.

Lialina, Olia. “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War.” http://www.teleportacia.org/war/war.html

Paik, Nam June, “Cybernated Art (1996),” Art and Electronic Media. Edward A. Shanken, ed. London: Phaidon Press, 2009.

Paul, Christaine. Digital Art, 2nd Ed. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2008.

Rabyd, Bobby. “Sunshine 69” Sonicnet, 1996 http://www.sunshine69.com/noflash.html

Sowden, Paul. NO. 126 “Alternative Style: Working with Alternate Style Sheets”  on A List Apart: Articles. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/alternate/

“Stuart Moulthrop” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 26 November 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Moulthrop

“WC3: XHTML™ 1.0” The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition.) 26 January 2000, revised 1 August 2002. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/

“XHTML.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 24 April 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML

“On the Web, New Conceptual Art”

NPR article by Andrei Codrescu: Listen Here

“Commentator Andrei Codrescu says the real conceptual artists are working on the Web now. He compares what is being done online favorably with the best museum pieces that went up and then were dismantled.”

This short report was very inspirational! I love Codrescu’s commentaries, and even have one linked directly from a Contemporary Creative Nonfictions page where it relates to the narrative: http://hannahmarchcampbell.com/ccnf/5.html

TRANSCRIPT

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

The porn industry is just that, an industry. Few would argue that it’s high art or even art at all. But then again, the boundaries of art have been stretching at a blinding pace in these days of Web 2.0.

Commentator Andrei Codrescu says the Internet has given artists an enormous venue for fresh, inventive work, marking a return to the original idea of conceptual art.

ANDREI CODRESCU: A classic example is Sol Lewitt’s “Wall Drawing #263.” Lewitt only drew the idea and had others do it, and then the work was dismantled after the show. This was a bit of Tom Sawyer’s fence act, but it was followed by three decades of lovely, disposable art, of which only fading pictures or videos remain.

There was a slight contradiction at the heart of this activity, which was that the museums shelled out big bucks for this stuff, and it couldn’t be collected, resold or reproduced.

Well, money is itself a kind of conceptual art. So that’s no big deal, except it made a lot of artists unhappy. Most artists don’t get paid for what they do, and they are lucky if they can persuade a friend to let them show something at a kid’s birthday party.

But all that was before the Internet. Now, everyone who likes to play can make art. On Facebook alone, there are tens of thousands of conceptual artists. I have a Facebook friend called Gene Kelly(ph), for instance, who sends me pictures of himself having lunch with President Obama, yes, that Gene Kelly, the famous actor. He Photoshopped himself inside a diner having lunch with the president. Other photos on his page are from his classic movies. Of course he’s dead, but not as a Facebook artist.

Another notable conceptualist whose name I forget asked to be my Facebook friend and came clean right away by stating that he was not human but only a piece of code that intended to send me every week messages cut up randomly from different texts. Did I reject him? Not at all. On Facebook, I too am a piece of code, although I try to be myself as much as possible, given that only 3,000 people are watching.

Now, there is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won’t get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers. They are to art what painting by numbers was to the high-minded painters of the 1950s. Real artists free of the tedium of money can use now all of society as an idea factory.

SIEGEL: Andrei Codrescu edits Exquisite Corpse, a literary journal online at corpse.org.

Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR’s prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

Screen Shots of C.C.N.F.

Mapping Page via Google Maps

In addition to textually navigating C.C.N.F. in a variety of ways, one may also navigate the narrative spacially via a map I constructed especially for this project on google maps. Try it out below:

View Larger Map

You may also view the map on its page within the website: http://hannahmarchcampbell.com/ccnf/map.html

And feel free to access the C.C.N.F. Map directly through Google: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=105796261072621813468.000484758d8536240eb5d&t=h&z=16

The map itself is of a real life undeveloped neighborhood in Winterville, Georgia where much of the narrative within the website takes place. Specific chapters have been plotted to specific locations with blue “landmark” bubbles.

Reader Input: “Questions?” Form

I added a “Questions?” form to the “Help” page: http://hannahmarchcampbell.com/ccnf/help.html

This service is run through the Twitter-like question service called Formspring.

View questions/answers that have been posted already here: http://www.formspring.me/CCNF. If you have a second, please ask some from the bottom of the help page! Thanks!

Interactive Form Page

Today I created a reader-interactive form page where users/readers of C.C.N.F. may send me their additions to the story so it continues to evolve.

Credits go to Chris Coyier for the basic design of the form in his tutorial article “A Nice and Simple Contact Form.”

You can view the “Contributions” Page here: http://hannahmarchcampbell.com/ccnf/contribute.html

Sneak Peek

Besides a few tweeks, I’ve completed my page template. You can view it here: http://hannahmarchcampbell.com/ccnf/ I have also created 5 different CSS style sheets which my be accessed by clicking on the links at the top.  I will replace these text links in the final version with small icons.

My 5 styles are named “main” for a plain look of grays and white; “skin” for a skin-colored appearance with a background image of eyes; “blackout” an all-black design (the text can be read by typing “Command A” [mac] or “Control A” [non-mac] to “select all” text, thereby making it visible; “whiteout” the inverse of “blackout”; and “story map” in the traditional blue, red, white, and cream of the “Story Map” print series from which this website idea originated.  You may also select “no style” to view the plain HTML page structure, links, and text without any CSS styling.

With each link you click to change style, note that you are not going to a new web address or web page–you are merely changing the “style sheet” which the browser is accessing. The browser reads the HTML file, or the webpage itself, i.e. http://hannahmarchcampbell.com/ccnf/index.html for all of the basic information like what the text says (not its actual font or color–but the text itself as symbol,) what the links are and where they go, where the “head” of the page is (this is where code and CSS links are found.)

Things in the “head” of an HTML document are not visible on the page but the browser reads the information there vs. the “body” of the page (this is where the visible content of the page is located), and certain basic structural information like h1 and h2 tags for a larger font at the beginning of a section of type. All of the font styles, colors, locations of boxes of text, borders on blocks of text, text wrapping, image placement, page background image, etc. are controlled by the “style sheet” and, therefore, can be changed at the will of the viewer/reader by using the aforementioned links “main,” “skin,” “blackout,” etc.

Each of these styles will be available on every page within the site. There will be 20-22 separate “story” pages as well as a “help” page explaining navigation, an “about” page explaining the project and its goals, a link to this blog, and possibly a “map” page for an alternate navigation system.

“Net.Art” Aesthetic, CSS, & Inspirational Hypertext Narratives

As a project for an Art History class, C.C.N.F. is, necessarily, speaking to a past web aesthetic. Specifically, the aesthetic of early narrative websites might include: simple text, icons, and small images (for the lower bandwidth access of the past) rather than Flash animations and “slick” menus. Consider such examples as Sunshine69, Delirium, and Oliana Lialina’s “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War.”

As Christiane Paul wrote on page 114 of her text Digital Art, “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War” of 1996 was “…developed into an archive of variations on the work by other artists. The project points to the possibilities for creation and presentation offered by digital networks, such as the infinite reconfiguration of information in an open system.” This, Paul notes, is a special condition of Digital Art, and WWW art, in particular, as museums can generally neither contain nor tolerate this flexibility and remixing of an artist’s work.

Inspired by Lialina and in order to make my text accessible for the same sort of remixing, I will offer a downloadable text document containing all of the original writings if anyone wishes to remix it into a new presentation!

C.C.N.F. is, in part, a tribute to Alexi Shulgin’s Form Art Competition (1997) which encouraged people “…to create art out of formal elements, such as radio buttons, scrollbars, and pull-down menus.” (Digital Art, Christiane Paul, p. 113) except that I am adding narrative and using a more contemporary “formal” element system than HTML: CSS (cascading style sheets), as I have discussed in previous posts (See: Alternate Style Sheets” and “HTML & CSS: Structure and Appearance“).

I am inspired by the aforementioned works Sunshine69, Delirium, and Oliana Lialina’s “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” and their use of simple elements to create vast pathways of exploration in the fields of Internet Art and Narrative.

Early internet art was produced between the years of 1995 and 1999 and dealt largely with the network itself. (Galloway 219)  As Alexander R. Galloway wrote in his book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization,  “…the first and most important theme of Net art is the Internet itself.  Net addresses its own medium; it deals with the specific conditions the Internet offers.  It explores the possibilities that arise from its taking place within this electronic network and is therefore ‘Net specific.’ Net art plays with the protocols of the Internet, with its technical peculiarities. It puts known or as yet undiscovered errors within the system to its own use.” (Galloway 216).
(Alexander R. Galloway, “Internet Art,” in Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2004, pp. 208-233)