| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北藝術大學 === 科技藝術研究所碩士班 === 95 === This thesis is about the web-based hypertext work, Space of Flow. Inspired by the concepts of wiki, I meant to create a hypertext work that’s different from the conventional models where readers were only given the choice of reading paths without the privileges of participating in active editing.
With the development of the Internet, some artists created works of hypertext narratives to overthrow traditional linear narrative structure. However, after reading more and more hypertext works, I have discovered that most of them are presented in a way that only allows the reader to choose reading paths through the links provided. Even though the texts are presented to the readers through a number of reading paths, which may seem like the texts were made open to the readers, this freedom is in fact nothing more than “limited freedom”, which is pre-determined by the author. In other words, these texts are not exactly "open texts". This is similar to my personal experience: I have created some interactive works in the past with the same misconception, since the amount of interaction that is possible was already pre-determined by me as the author, i.e., the audience is not actually interacting with the creations. Corresponding to this, Space of Flow will not only allow readers to select their own reading paths, but also to edit the texts in order to create their preferred reading path. It is my hope that by making the hypertext truly open to the readers, the boundary between reader, author and the work will become blurred. This makes the work different from traditional works of linear narratives in the past. This work attempts to challenge the undisputed authority of the author.
In Space of Flow, the fiction (or storyline) also includes people’s actual online behaviors, such as online auctions, thus making a composition of the real world and the virtual world. In addition, non-textual elements such as sounds, images, Flash animations and etc. will be interweaved into the work so that the texts will return to the role of a basic reading unit - "lexia," a term used by Roland Barthes in his theory of "the ideal text". With the intertextuality of these "lexia", I expect to embody Eric McLuhan''s notion of "acoustic space". By utilizing the feature of participation by many in editing, I hope to perceive the "style” of being able to identify an identity under the anonymity of Internet, and to see how users collage their stories, and at the same time, collage their own images.
Technically, Space of Flow was presented through a Flash interface, together with XML and a database written in PHP. All of the text appearing in Space of Flow will be made available to the reader for browsing and real-time online editing. The edited content will be stored in a database server on the Internet, thus making this work unable to exist without the Internet. With this approach, I created a real Net Artwork that will not be able to exist anywhere else apart from the Internet.
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