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• 1 2021-06-17T15:50:31-07:00 Critical Essay on "Unnatural Habitats," by Astrid Ensslin 22 A critical essay on "Unnatural Habitats,"by Astrid Ensslin plain 2021-08-22T16:24:39-07:00

  "'Into an alien ocean:' The Lore of Kathy Mac’s Unnatural Habitats"
  by Astrid Ensslin

  In her poetic hypertext pastiche, Unnatural Habitats, Canadian writer and scholar Kathleen McConnell, alias Kathy Mac, explores the spatial affordances of Storyspace hypertext both formally and thematically. It engages with the ways in which modernity’s phallogocentric strife for teleological technological progress and masculine dominance has created numerous subjugating, alienating, and potentially fatal spaces for humans and other animals. In my ethnographic research into the lore of early, pre-web hypertext (Ensslin 2020; 2021), I had the opportunity to interview Kathy about some of the processes and ideas underlying her work, as well as to access some of the written correspondence she had at the time with Eastgate’s Chief Scientist, Mark Bernstein, who published her work in The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (issue 1:3) in 1994.
  
  Unnatural Habitats (UH) is an intricately interlinked cycle of poems, divided into 12 individual paths (see fig. 1), the first six of which represent habitats that are physically and physiologically unnatural for humans, like space, the deep sea and the desert. The second tier, comprising four poems, revolves around conceptual unnatural habitats like religious and other types of cultural differences. The two poems in the third tier remix elements of the two top tiers. Strikingly, the individual paths arranged in the form of a visual cycle around the contents space, do not directly map onto twelve independent habitats. For example, the two across the top (“Apollo 13: Reentry” and “Apollo 13: Interface”) quite literally interface and leave the reader looping between them whilst revolving around the same poetic material, the failed Apollo 13 mission in 1970. Similarly, the two paths across the bottom are composed of individual fragments of other paths, thus generating a summative intertextual quilt representing a “blanket made out of pieces”. 
  
  A painting dolphin is the protagonist in the “Signifier, sign, sold” path. Its plight is to be imprisoned “in a pool somewhere on the prairies” whilst not being able to exist in the wild, “alien ocean”. The text’s focus on animal rights is an important addition to the “women and men” whose physically and socially unnatural habitats are exemplified by notions of outer space, air travel (“Alberto Santos Dumont”), “Submarine Patrol”, modern warfare (“Testimonial Kuwait, April 1991”), Islamic marital laws (viewed from a Western, feminist perspective in “Endowered”), and even the virtual spaces mediated by computer screens (“Living vicariously: a basement oblivion”). Thus, whilst the specific unnatural habitats chosen by Mac may seem “eclectic” (Mac’s letter to Mark Bernstein, early June 1993), they jointly contribute to the text’s critique of capitalist exploitation and UH’s significance as an early digital work of literary ecofeminism.
  
  
  Following in the footsteps of visual and concrete poetry, UH exploits the spatial constraints of a lexia window for textual positioning and perceived movement. It places short poetic segments, or stanzas, in various places on the screen, forming either upward or downward movements when read according to the default paths. For example, the “Alberto Santos Dumont” section describes an ascending and subsequently descending movement in the default reading path, thus depicting the take-off and landing of an aeroplane or, on a more abstract level, the rise and fall of Dumont’s health and achievements as an early 20th century aeronautic pioneer. By contrast, the “Submarine Patrol 1915” path describes an overall downward movement, but it also suggests, via Storyspace’s “Navigation” functionality, that readers move to the Dumont pathway after finishing the final lexia, “Sub: border”.
  
  Mac’s primary goal with UH was to explore how the digital medium might help writers subvert analog traditions of beginning, middle, and end, as well as move beyond words on a page: 

  A lot of Unnatural Habitats "is not about the words themselves, but about weaving the lines between the textblocks together in different shapes––the negative spaces of the stories. . . .  I don’t know of any other hypertext that concerned itself with that, and that concern was really only possible with Storyspace." (Interview)

  Mac's emphasis on the spaces and links between individual words and lexias led to a variety of linking structures in and between individual pathways in UH and different visualizations of these structures and their connections to thematic issues of the poems in each segment’s map view. The “Signifier, sign, sold” path, for example, outlines a zigzag pattern to represent the waves engulfing a dolphin in natural waters; “Testimonial Kuwait” displays a star of the American flag; and the “Weftfork” in the third, remix tier describes the movement of shuttle in a loom. 
  
  The weaving metaphor runs through the entire work, reflecting Mac’s concern with the relationship between text and textile. Mac’s PhD was about textile metaphors in the literature of the Industrial Revolution, and Storyspace allowed her to combine and entextualize formal elements of weaving, such as interlacing, repetition, patterning and cyclicality. Cyclicality is also found in the parallelism between the unidirectional loop of the two Apollo 13 paths and the second tier of the work, where readers cycle unidirectionally between “Living vicariously, “Endowered” and “Quilt.” Although this moves them between seemingly disconnected storyworlds, such as that of a dolphin in a show aquarium; a computer addict in a basement; situations of domestic abuse in Islamic culture; and the repatching of an army uniform into an AIDS quilt, the cycle has internal cohesion afforded by the theme of unnatural lived and textual spaces. The final and bottom section of UH then picks up the theme of text as an interwoven structure. “The texture of falling” begins with a definition of “TEXT” as “woven; also fabric, structure, from ‘texere,’ to weave”, exposing textuality as “Just a blanket made out of pieces.” This path again dissipates into fragments of lexias visited in other sections of the work and ends with the final lexia from “Apollo 13: Reentry,” thus adding a sense of closure to the work. The final lexia in this path (“13-Reentry/Fall”) reiterates the material ambivalence between outer space and represented, textual space, and underscores the liminality of spaces between natural and unnatural habitats, perceived as both “noise” and “silence” (fig. 2). The spatially separated period following the tapering end stanza further materializes and visualizes the end of this path and the text as a whole.
  
  
  In her 1993 correspondence with Bernstein, Mac details the challenges facing her in creating dynamic links and guard fields for UH. Dynamic, unidirectional links are “a distinctive feature of Storyspace . . . that can be activated or deactivated by . . . guard field[s]” (Bernstein 2016: 2). Guard fields are Boolean expressions that change a reader’s path according to lexias they have or haven’t visited before, thus “prov[ing] invaluable for breaking cycles” (ibid), or infinite loops, in a hypertext reading. In an email to Bernstein of early June, 1993, Mac describes her “technical frustrations” in trying to create links between paths:

  This hypertext consists of several discreet paths, and two paths (named ‘mingle’ and ‘gravity’) which cross the other paths at will. My main problem is that some of my text spaces are common to two paths. I haven’t figured out yet how to tell Storyspace that when a reader comes from box A which is on path 1, the default path is path 1, but if the reader comes from box z along path 2, the default path is path 2. I’m hoping that there is some magic way of scripting this in the guard fields, but as yet, the best I can manage is to bring the reading process to a dead halt at the intersecting box, and force the reader to look up the links and choose one.

  This “dead halts” between intersecting paths happen throughout UH. Although they were Mac’s “hardly elegant” (letter to Bernstein, 27 July 1993) response to not being able to modify guard fields as she intended, the dead halts can be considered a key aesthetic feature of the reading experience––one that draws the reader’s attention to the ways in which individual paths are interconnected and form various types of movement––undulating, cyclical, and dissipating. 
  
  Another question Mac sought help with in her 1993 correspondence with Bernstein was in relation to the “Endowered” path, which focuses on Islamic law and the rights of women as set forth in the Quran. Concerned about her status as non-Islamic author critiquing Islamic law, Mac worried that “[t]he path I have taken is somewhat inflammatory, especially considering that I am not a Moslem . . . injustice is injustice. On the other other hand, the situation in the former Yugoslavia is divided along Christian/Moslem lines, and I don’t want to sound like a cultural elitist.” In a later letter, Mac responds to undocumented advice she received from Bernstein shortly afterwards both on “Endowered” and the guard field issue:  

  [T]hank you for your advice re: the Endowered path; you’ve helped me pinpoint the problems that I felt were there, but which I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I had thought that it was too inflammatory, but perhaps the real problem was that it was too boring. . . .  Thanks for your advice about guard fields. I do have a copy of Getting Started with Storyspace, but find that the directions are sometimes a bit obtuse. 

  At the time Kathy worked with us on her public traversal of UH in spring 2021, she had revoked the “Endowered” path completely and excluded it from her public performance of the work.
  
  In the same 1993 correspondence with Bernstein, Kathy also mentions the SuperPaint file (an early graphics editing software developed by Richard Shoup at Xerox PARC) in which the title screen was designed (fig 3). The design is not printed on the folio and has thus been concealed from public and scholarly view. The screen is a collage of pixelated, flowery shapes on the left, set against a woven, cross-hatching texture. Both images were photocopies of scarves, arranged in such a way as to show the contrasts between the curvilinear, spiral shapes of the flowers on the left with the woven pattern on the right. The title text is formatted so as to change from italics to sans serif bold and back. These conceptual and aesthetic clashes echo the theme of the work, foregrounding alienation and experimental textuality. They also reflect the fact that Mac was working with 19th century movable type in a typography course she took at the same time as writing UH.
  
  According to her correspondence with Bernstein, Mac intended to incorporate “more visual bells-and-whistles” in the Storyspace work yet finally gave in to Storyspace’s limited capacity for visual graphics and other non-textual features.

  References

  Bernstein, Mark (2016) “Storyspace 3”, HT '16: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 2016, pp. 201-2016. https://doi.org/10.1145/2914586.2914624.
  
  Ensslin, Astrid (2020), “'Completing the circle'? The curious counter-canonical case of The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (1994-1995)”, in Attention à la marche! Mind the Gap! Thinking Electronic Literature in a Digital Culture, ed. Bertrand Gervais & Sophie Marcotte, Les Presses the l'Écureuil, pp. 511-524.
  
  Ensslin, Astrid (2022) Pre-Web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature, Cambridge: C.U.P.
• 1 2021-08-15T14:30:01-07:00 Critical Essay on "Unnatural Habitats," by Mariusz Pisarski 13 Critical Essay on "Unnatural Habitats," by Mariusz Pisarski plain 2021-08-22T16:23:59-07:00

  "Storyspace Estranged: Kathy Mac’s Unnatural Habitats”
  by Mariusz Pisarski

   

  Authors of hypertext fiction tend to admit that their prose is a form of poetry. Not entirely in a traditional sense, when prose gets closer to poetry through semantic and stylistic means and becomes “poetic prose” or “prose poetry,” but from a more pragmatic perspective of reading and accumulation of meaning on the reader’s side. In this sense, hypertext fiction is poetry because its node-link structure allows for meaningful shifts of argument, pace, point of view, and other narrative and descriptive devices. Mark Bernstein calls the hypertext link a new punctuation mark. But in hierarchy of stylistic and poetic tropes the hypertext link ranks much higher. It deserves a status of the new enjambment. Among authors who embraced Storyspace as a writing tool, the poetic potential of links as enjambments was explored extensively, often to a point of such saturation of poetic effects––which I understand, after Victor Shklovsky, as “estranging objects and complicating form”––that they were able to sustain the work without the use of for another trademark tool of hypertext writing in Storyspace: the Map View. Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story and Kathryn Cramer’s In Small and Large Pieces can be read as poetry due to their skillful, artistic use of hypertext link. Yet they do not allow for alternative, visual navigation on the Map View. Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, on the other hand, represents the second group of works. They author the Storyspace map just as a painter would use canvas. It becomes an alternative, visual mode of representation that contributes the work’s signification process on an equal footing to its linguistic counterpart. In case of Patchwork Girl one could even argue that the series of Jackson’s iconic collages made on Storyspace map outlived the textual content, as far as cultural reception of the work is concerned.
  
  There is a third group of Storyspace hypertexts, and it includes works that aim to utilise poetic potential of both hypertext links and hypertext maps. Among these, Unnatural Habitats by Kathy Mac is the most representative, consistent, and beautiful example. Perhaps not surprisingly, because as a collection of interlinked poems, it represents hypertext poetry in most literal, not only metaphorical, manner. Advertised as “poetry of primitive submarines, crippled spaceships, and basement apartments,” the hypertext of this Canadian poet explores many different ways in which people make their own habitats unnatural, inhabitable, and hostile. After the initial screen, a black and white bitmap illustration, readers are presented with a simple table of contents with 13 different destinations (including the “Directions”). These points of entry are divided into three groups separated by horizontal lines. The top group leads to poems about unnatural habitats in physical realms: space, mission control for space flights, air, underground, war in Kuwait, submarine (“Apollo 13 reentry”, Apollo 13: interface”, “Mining the perfect monument”, “Testimonial: Kuwait, April 1991” ,“Alberto Santos Dumont”, “Submarine patrol 1915”). The middle group represents social habitats deemed unnatural: a virtual reality of a gaming addict in a basement, a domesticated dolphins’ release into open seas, a collaborative quilt practice in memoriam of AIDS victims from the late 1980s, and a poetic reflections on Sharia’s positioning of women in marriage filtered through author’s experience of growing up in Pakistan.
  
  When reading the “habitats,” each comprised of up to a dozen of lexias, our progress is accompanied by its alternative spatial representation on the Storyspace Map, and––most importantly––by the visual, spatio-temporal enactment of such progression. In other words, it is not only the visual arrangements of lexias on the map that contributes to our understanding of or our immersion in the habitat in question, but also a series of animated frames marked on a map as readers goes through the poem. The units of such stop-motion animation within the broader frame of Storyspace workspace are lexias that are currently in focus, with their content displayed in text windows, and with their position within the current habitat, and their connections, visualised on the map. By activating default links between lexias, readers experience the linguistic realm of traditional verse, the visual realm of concrete poetry that accompanies it, and also replay and enact semantic and visual tropes along animated paths orchestrated by the author. What connects these three realms––linguistic, visual, physical––is a unifying image, a form of local, conceptual metaphor, which expresses the main theme of the poem (or part of it, metonymically) on all levels.  

  
  
  For example, in “Submarine patrol 1915,” one of the shortest poems in the collection, composed of just four lexias, when reading about a submarine crew descending from the surface into the greater depths of the Sea of Marmara, the text itself is displayed in a descending fashion: It starts from the top of the window in the first lexia, and ends at the bottom in the fourth text window. Yet it is the reader who puts the text of the submarine poem into a downward motion by activating the default sequence. In “Alberto Santos Dumont,” a poem dedicated to the Brazilian aviation pioneer and inventor, readers are invited to recreate a pattern of a flight, in “Dolphin”––the sea mammals’ jump over the water––and in “Quilt”––a quilting pattern. Such re-enactment of a visual metaphor related to the main theme of a poem happens either on Storyspace Map, in text window, or within a wider Storyspace canvas delimited by the borders of our computer screen. In this last case, part of the story (the poem’s central motif) is told visually by arrangement of different shapes and sizes of text windows. In case of “Quilt”, the reading proceeds on alternating small and large square windows. By changing their positions on the screen, windows unveil a cross-like pattern. Additionally, thanks to semantic, visual, and symbolic proximity of lines, links, and threads, the central motif of the “Quilt” group echoes across various levels even more prominently: The reader’s eye follows active (currently read) lexias on the map as they criss-cross the arrangement of text containers along black lines representing both the actual hypertext connections and the referenced threads of the quilt: all set in motion by readers following the default, authorial sequence. In the same fashion, one can guess, following the trajectory of active nodes on the “Oriental” group’s visual layout might allude to the act of tying a headscarf. In this way––by visual and kinetic means––Storyspace map serves as an abstraction of selected figurative elements of the poem in question.
  
  The third and the last group of visual, concrete, and animated poetry in Unnatural Habitats consists of “Weftwork” and “Warping board,” two unique designs in which a poem is composed out of fragments of other habitats. These remixes, not random or free-form, but carefully orchestrated by the author, challenge our own ability of making connections between disparate images and ideas. Although the mechanics and poetics of the main poems are still at play and just as before one traces important visual clues with each passage, the main quilting work this time happens in the mind of the reader who is challenged to make her last hermeneutic effort of establishing connections between the parts and the whole, software and writing, poetry and life.
  
  In one of his last theoretical statements, made on a conference in Poland just a year before his death, Umberto Eco reminded future generations of critics that we can speak of semiotics whenever we can translate one order of sings into another, compare existing language to some new one. Unnatural Habitats, published in 1994, solidifies and summarizes the rudimentary, but beautiful language of Storyspace environment, the language that comes to light when poetry is “translated” into the node-link structures of hypertext, and projected onto visual maps of nodes and connections between them. The grammar of this language is comprised of units that were still foreign to the language of poetry at the time of writing and publishing of Mac’s work: shapes, sizes, and positioning of text windows on the screen; a rudimentary font and colour palette; lines and rectangles on the Storyspace map––their visual arrangement and proximity; link names and node titles’s highlighting. These elements themselves populate a habitat that was once unnatural to poets and which authors such as Kathy Mac made habitable for all future readers. At the same time, by successfully proving artistic use of new grammar of hypertext software, the Canadian author adaptability of poetry in new habitats as something universal.