#7 THE HYPERTRANCE FICTION MATRIX
#7 The HyperTrance Fiction Matrix and other internet things
I've been working with Dr Agnieszka Przybyszewska, a scholar from Lodz, Poland, on an archive of my digital media work. Agnieszka held the prestigious Bekker Scholarship for two years, funded by the Polish government. While her scholarship was due to begin in early 2020, travel suddenly became impossible that spring. Agnieszka delayed the start date of her scholarship for as long as possible, finally joining us in Bath in December 2020 during the depths of the second prolonged pandemic lockdown in England. She arrived with her books and her cat, Manolo, and we began to work together online. It would be several months before we could meet in person and I'll always admire Agnieszka's extreme fortitude during that period - on her own in a strange country working remotely with people she had never actually met in person. Luckily for us all, the world began to re-open in the spring of 2021 and by 2022, Agnieszka's second year in her fellowship, the post-pandemic new-normal had arrived and we were able to work together in person as well as online. Agnieszka became a valued member of our creative tech community in The Studio.
As well as the digital archive, Dr Przybyszeska is also updating and enlarging the collection of my work held by The NEXT at the Electronic Literature Lab, University of Washington Vancouver. And she is writing a monograph on my work which will be published by Bloomsbury Academic next year. She has been helped in this work by a number of people, including my long-term collaborator, Chris Joseph. Rachel Pownall has worked with us to create a series of short intro videos for all the digital works, dating back to my earliest attempt, a tiny hypertext called Branded: Typing Version, the only digital work I ever created by myself, back in 2002. Many of these works had been made obsolete and Agnieszka has worked tirelessly to bring them back to life wherever possible, including the large and hopelessly complex work, The Breathing Wall, which Chris and I created in collaboration with Berlin-based software artist Stefan Schemat.
The Breathing Wall is a work that combined Day Dreams - short interactive stories built by Chris using Flash, the software behind many online works in the 2000s - and Night Dreams which are longer sections built using Stefan's software system, the HyperTrance Fiction Matrix. This system was based on biofeedback; to access the Night Dreams the viewer wore a headset with earphones and a microphone placed beneath the nose. The video-with-audio voiceover stories in these sections responded to the rate of the viewer's breathing, with breath triggering each new section of the story.
We published The Breathing Wall in 2004; it was available on CD-Rom and we sold the work to digital scholars and libraries. It has been obsolete for a number of years now - Flash is no longer supported by browsers, most computers no longer have cd drives and the HyperTrance Fiction Matrix has not been updated for many years. But Agnieszka has persisted, and last week we recorded a video transversal of me breathing my way through the second of the five Night Dreams, using an old laptop with an even older operating system stored on it, offline.
It was a strange experience, revisiting a work I hadn't looked at for twenty years, though of course collaborating with Agnieszka on the archive project has resulted in this kind of blast-from-the-past on a number of occasions. But The Breathing Wall was a special project for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it was a very early example of storytelling that was accessed via the reader's embodied response.
In addition, the story in The Breathing Wall is a story that I've been riffing on for a number of years - a ghost story, a story where the dead struggle to communicate with the living. It's a story that I've developed across various versions of Branded, The Breathing Wall, my smartphone story Breathe, and, currently, my novel-in-progress (which is now called The Recent Dead). And the Night Dreams, well, there's nothing else like them; they are hypnotic and strange and scary.
The archive of my work will be ready for release in the next few months.