[Summary]
A writer and musician, Jean-Paul has offered beautiful hypermedia works
on his website cotres.net since October 1998, while searching how
hyperlinks could expand his writing towards new directions. He wrote in
June 2000: "Surfing the web is like radiating in all directions (I am
interested in something and I click on all the links on a home page) or
like jumping around (from one click to another, as the links appear).
You can do this in the written media, of course. But the difference is
striking. So the internet changed how I write. You don't write the same
way for a website as you do for a script or a play. (...) Since then I
write directly on the screen: I use the print medium only occasionally
(...): [in it] the text is developing page after page (most of the
time), whereas the technique of links allows another relationship to
the time and space of imagination. And, for me, it is above all the
opportunity to put into practice this reading/writing 'cycle', whereas
leafing through a book gives only an idea -- which is vague because the
book is not conceived for that."
***
A writer and musician, Jean-Paul has offered beautiful works of digital
literature, while searching how hyperlinks could expand his writing
towards new directions.
In October 1998, he switched from being a print author to being an
hypermedia author, and created cotres.net (“cotres” could be translated
by “cutters” in English) as a website "telling stories in 3D", either
French-language stories or plurilingual stories.
Jean-Paul also enjoyed the freedom of online self-publishing. He
explained in June 2000: "The internet allows me to do without
intermediaries, such as record companies, publishers and distributors.
Most of all, it allows me to crystallize what I have in my head: the
print medium (desktop publishing, in fact) only allows me to partly do
that. (…) Surfing the web is like radiating in all directions (I am
interested in something and I click on all the links on a home page) or
like jumping around (from one click to another, as the links appear).
You can do this in the written media, of course. But the difference is
striking. So the internet changed how I write. You don't write the same
way for a website as you do for a script or a play. (...)
In fact, it is not the internet which changed how I write, it is the
first Mac that I discovered through the self-learning of HyperCard. I
still remember how astonished I was during the month when I was
learning about buttons, links, surfing by analogies, objects or images.
The idea that a simple click on one area of the screen allowed me to
open a range of piles of cards, and each card could offer new buttons
and each button opened on to a new range, etc. In brief, the learning
of everything on the web that today seems really banal, for me it was a
revelation (it seems Steve Jobs and his team had the same shock when
they discovered the ancestor of the Mac in the laboratories of Rank
Xerox).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account