New Media and Time

Readers unfamiliar with new media writing typically find their initial reading experiences baffling. They conceive of reading as a linear act: they need to know where a story begins and where it ends, and they absolutely want to know when they've consumed the whole narrative. New media work—writing designed to be read on screen and navigated via links—requires readers to adjust those assumptions and expectations. If reading a traditional narrative can be thought of as a journey along a path with a clearly marked beginning and end, then reading a new media work is like a journey through a field where there are several possible entrances and exits. Readers are asked to immerse themselves in images, language, and sound, to pursue meaning where they find it, and to exit when they will—and they are invited to return to the writing whenever they choose, with the promise that it will always be different and there may be whole areas to be explored that were missed in previous readings.

Still in its infancy, new media writing is rich with various approaches and experiments. From Jason Nelson's game-like constructions, to Stephanie Strickland's poetics, to the more narrative compositions of Stuart Moulthrop, writers are working within the forever-changing worlds of computer software and hardware to explore the storytelling possibilities of new media. In TOC, Stephen Farrell (creative direction and design), Christian Jara (DVD authoring, programming, sound engineering, animation and narration), Matt Lavoy (animation), and several others, (including, prominently, video artist Zoe Beloff and musicians Chris Pielak and Paul Johnson) work with author Steve Tomasula to weave a complex multi-media reading/viewing/listening experience that is, ultimately, an elegant meditation on the nature of time. (And thus the title, TOC, as in what follows TIC.)

Readings of TOC begin (after slipping the DVD into your computer and installing the program) with the image of a cluster of stars floating in a vast blackness of space. In a moment, to the accompaniment of music, an epigraph from Saint Augustine emerges across the screen: "What then is time. If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I know not." When the epigraph fades, a voice emerges and begins the introductory narration, which is the story of Ephemera, her sons Chronos and Logos, and the war between them. During the narration, a series of fascinatingly shifting images resolves, eventually, to TOC's navigation screen, which pictures a pair of boxes—one of sand, titled Chronos, and one of water, titled Logos—a bell jar, a stylus, and a pebble. Dropping the pebble into the Chronos box leads the reader to a half-hour audio narrative/animation that can be viewed all the way through, or stopped at any point, allowing the reader to return to the navigation screen. It is also possible, by using an index marker, to move around within the animation. Dropping the pebble into the Logos box leads to a series of stories read on scrolls within the bell jar; to a series of animations, played, again, within the bell jar; or to an island divided into sunrise, noon, and sunset, and surrounded by moons, which, when clicked on, lead to images and to stories about the people of the island. From the navigation screen, it is also possible at any time to go directly to the island, or back to the introductory narration.

The three principal paths through the story—Chronos, Logos, and The Island—all travel through a sequence of related parables that explore temporality.

In the thirty minute Chronos animation, various narrators weave a mix of essay-like exposition, theoretical and philosophical inquiry, and traditional narrative around the central story of a remarkably erudite Vogue model who engages in a sexual relationship with her twin brother, while deciding whether or not to pull the plug on her husband, who is in a coma. The sensational elements of the tale are conflated with loftier theoretical disquisitions on time and...