The Last Garden

disk supplementto Pe+ations 1, No. 2.A2.0version of the Hah is slated for publication in Eastgate Press’sforthcominghypertextquarterly. 2. RichardGem,“MahasukhaHalo,”Low@ 17,n.p. 3. Stolyspace is a writingenvironmentpublishedby EastgateSystem. 4. Guy Davenport, “NarrativeTone and Form”in The Gwgraphyo f theImagination(San Francisco: North PointPress, 1981) p. 317. 5. MichaelJoyce,personal communication(1992) QUIBBLING: A HYPERFICTION Carolyn Guyer, 807 First St.,Jackson, MI 49203,U.S.A. E-mail: To write about Quibbling [l] seems almost contraryto its conceptualwarp. It’s hardly about anything itself,being more like the gossip,family discussions, letters,passing fanciesand daydreams that we tell ourselvesevery day in order to make sense of things. These are not exactlylike myths or fairy tales or literary fiction. They are instead the quotidian stream. In this sense, then, Quibbling is a work that tries not to be literary. It’s somewhat unsuccessful in that, but then, it’sart. As ever,we’re in a transitional age, and given that as the pan-generational condition,we’re forever seekingways to understand our own unique to and fro. We can’t,however,claim ours has specificallyto do with technology. It alwayshas to do with technology, whether it’sinventinga way to hold fire,write speech, or send e-mail.We’re always changing according to the changes we make, and artists concern themselvesmore with that flux than with any kind of conclusions. It is in that rhythmic sense of ebb and flow,of multidirectional change, of events that disappear before they’re quite intelligible but somehow come to mean something, that Quibblingwas made. In hindsight, I can see why water and its properties became one of the pervasive, propelling metaphors in the work. Alake with many coves is how I saw it. The coves being where we focus, where individualsexist, where things are at least partly comprehensible; the lake being none of that, but, naturally, more than the sum of the coves, or more than what connects them. As a metaphor, the lake and coves stand not just for the form of this hyperfiction, but hypertictions generally,and yes, (sorry)for life itself.The thing about hypertictions is that, for art, they tend to be extremely life-like.They move and shift, allowingeverything,and so allow only that we find our own perspective .They are so multiple they revealwhat is individual,ourselves, readers of our own story. ing what a load of artsycrap, thenjust especiallyfor them I’llsay it’sabout how women and men are together, it tends slightlytoward the salacious,it’s broadly feminist or, one could say it’s the story of someone’slifejust before the beginning or a little after the end. So, if anyone got this far and is thinkNote 1. Quibblingisa hyperfiction for Macintosh Computers that is forthcomingfrom Eastgate Systems. A CERTAIN UNCERTAINTY Lynn Pocock-Williams, Huemmer Terrace, Clifton, NJ 07013, U.S.A. A Certain Uncertainty (June1991) is a continuation of my exploration of the integration of sound and image. My artwork usuallyaddressesmusic concepts, the emotional content of music, or a combination of the two, and I work primarily with time-variant imagerycoupled with music. Incorporating the elements of time, change, and motion allows my images to exist most closely with their music counterparts. In the past, severalof my videoswere automaticallygenerated using artificial intelligence techniques.That is, I developed a computer environment that read in music data, analyzed the music, and then generated animations that correlate to the music. These videos were abstract and I created them according to a system. My recent videos, on the other hand, are created according to intuition, and the imagery reflects the world around us. The method by which I composed the videos focuseson the connections between the qualities of the sounds and visuals. One of these recent videos,A Certain Uncertainty, is a 3:40 minute experimental music video featuring The New York Guitar Project, an acoustic guitar group. The video takes its name from the music that accompanies it, which was written by Reinaldo Perez and R. StuartWilliams. Shot during an intensiverehearsal weekend, the images present The New York Guitar Project at work. In the video, the musicians are presented on two overlappingvisual plane-ne...