After finishing the first reading of
this hypertext, I was sure
that I wanted to interact with it. ”The Luminous Dome”
captured my attention, at first sight it is not the most attractive one (it
doesn’t use any different kinds of tools, that is true) neither visual (graphics,
photos) nor audial, only text. No attraction whatsoever, I thought,
just an immaculate
background, not even any colours, but its simplicity intrigued me and I
went for it, and re-reading it and again and again. Who is the author? I
wondered, let’s have a look! Stephen
Linhart? An American guy, an eclectic artist,
fine…what does he do? What about his work? I’m very impressed
by his hypnotic
animation, his
creative digital pictures, their strange and
mysterious depiction of nature whose ingredients form an integral part of his
hypertext. I felt myself drifting further away on my
own trip.
I understood after my personal
mental emersion in this work, that everything could be about the relation
between reality and dream, life and death, the phantasmagorical
beauty of the forest,
escaping from reality, walking through the personal path of our own lives. An
interior and exterior adventure, where I could be created as a simple part of a
dream, all colourfully represented inside our mind, a turbulent imagination in
the author’s mind, as much as in mine.
I am going to put my impressions in
order, analysing the time aspect with examples from the text which I believe could help
us to go a bit deeper into this fictional world, so simply mysterious in the
beginning, but with time, life-like in its complexity. Although this is not the
most representative of non-linear hypertext fiction, due to the fact that there
is a set beginning and end, so the text does not evolve with so much, I have
enjoyed the experience of finding things other than the end.
Time is going to be my tool: why
does the author use autumn,
night-time and the present to present his mind?
[Time references] [Analysis
of time] [Conclusion] [Second
Paper]
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Ana Cuenca Montero
acuenmon@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press