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The Progressive Dinner Party Restored

plate3_carroli

This page is referenced by:

The 39 Works

As aforementioned, The Progressive Dinner Party contains 39 digital works by female artists, which were chosen from Carolyn Guertin's site Assemblage: The Women's Hypertext Gallery. These works can be accessed through their place settings, and are listed below in alphabetical order by title. Also included here are tags describing the work, which include descriptions in the previous page. These tags serve to provide a brief overview regarding the nature of each piece for the reader's convenience.

The majority of the works have been run through the Webrecorder for preservation purposes. Many can still be found in their original states on the web, though the updated version of The Progressive Dinner Party uses the URLS generated by the Webrecorder whenever possible.

Tags
Frames, Tables, Image Rich, Area Maps, GIFs, High Interactivity, JavaScript, Hypertext, Macro Hypertext, Micro Hypertext, Slideshows, Video, Audio, Page Refresh, Linear, Proprietary Software, Collaboration, Flash, Shockwave, Broken and Missing

Agatha Appears
by Olia Lialina
Frames, High Interactivity, Image Rich
Being Human
by Annie Abrahams
Tags: Macro Hypertext
Believe
by Diane Caney
Tags: Macro Hypertext, JavaScript
Blood Puppets: A Premillennium Manifesto
by Mez Breeze
Tags: Tables, Slideshows
Bound and Gagged
by Di Ball
Tags: Page Refresh, GIFs, Video, Audio
Brain Dress B
by Lori Weidenhammer
Tags: JavaScript, Tables, Image Rich, Missing
Charmed Horizon
by Kim Stringfellow
Tags: Tables, JavaScript, Image Rich, Missing
Cutting Edges or A Web of Women
by Ruth Nestvold
Tags: Hypertext
Dark Lethe
by Leonie Winson
Tags: Macro Hypertext, Tables, Collaboration
Distance
by Tina la Porta
Tags: Linear
Empty Velocity
by Angie Eng
Tags: Hypertext, Proprietary Software (Macromedia, QuickTime), Audio, JavaScript
Endless Suburbs
by M. D. Coverley
Tags: Hypertext, Frames, Java Applets
Girl/Birth/Water/Death
by Martha Conway
Tags: Hypertext
Glass Houses
by Jacalyn Lopez Garcia
Tags: Hypertext, Proprietary Software (Adobe PageMill)
Glide
by Diana Slattery
Tags: Shockwave, Flash, Audio, Broken
holes-linings-threads
by Alicia Felberbaum
Tags: Hypertext, Shockwave, JavaScript, Tables
Illusions, Philosophical Toy World
by Zoe Beloff
Tags: Proprietary Software (Adobe GoLive 4), Frames
Kokura
by Mary-Kim Arnold
Tags: Hypertext, Frames, Page Refresh, Collaboration
Light is Silent
by Jennifer Ley
Tags: Micro Hypertext, Frames, Tables
Light/Water
by Christy Sanford
Tags: Hypertext, JavaScript
LiLy Pond: a poststructural gardening thriller
by Jyanni Steffenson
Tags: Micro Hypertext, Page Refresh, Video
Los Dias y Los Noches de las Muertas
by Francesca da Rimini
Tags: Frames, Image Rich, Audio
Mother Millennia
by Carolyn Guyer
Tags: Hypertext, Collaboration
Mountain Rumbles
by Deena Larsen
Tags: Micro Hypertext, Frames
my body: A Wunderkammer
by Shelley Jackson
Tags: Hypertext, Area Maps, Tables
Noon Quilt
by Sue Thomas and Teri Hoskin
Tags: Hypertext, Collaboration, Tables, JavaScript
Pronunciation: 'fut' or: A Tool and its Means
by Claire Dinsmore
Tags: Flash, JavaScript, Area Maps
Rice
by Geniwate
Tags: Hypertext, Shockwave, Tables
Salome went to Soho to See Her Poster in a Show
by JeanNet and Raquel Rivera
Tags: Tables, Image Rich, Missing
Silicon Valley Journal
by Cathy Marshall
Tags: Micro Hypertext
skeleton sky: a millennium poem
by Carolyn Guertin
Tags: Hypertext, Tables
The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot
by Stephanie Strickland
Tags: Hypertext, Frames
The Book after the Book
by Giselle Beiguelman
Tags: Hypertext, Tables, JavaScript, Page Refresh
The Electronic Chronicles
by Adrianne Wortzel
Tags: Hypertext
The Flight of A821: Dearchiving the Proceedings of a Birdsong.
by Marta Werner
Tags: Frames, Missing
The Intruder
by Natalie Bookchin
Tags: Shockwave, Audio, High Interactivity
The Roar of Destiny Emanated from the Refrigerator. I got up to get a beer.
by Judy Malloy
Tags: Hypertext, Page Refresh, Audio
*water always writes in *plural
by Linda Carroli and Josephine Wilson
Tags: Hypertext, Shockwave, Audio
Zones of Recognition
by Lehan Ramsay
Tags: Flash, Missing

39 Works Key | Contributors
"*water always writes in *plural" by Linda Carroli and Josephine Wilson

"This is of course, from the point of view of the woman, an impossible story. " *water always writes in *plural
About the Work
*Water always writes in *plural is a collaborative hypertext created by Linda Carroli and Josephine Wilson. They worked for eight weeks on the project alongside ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology) and the Electronic Writing Research Ensemble. The goal was to produce a cross-disciplinary work that addressed electronic language and writing as invention. In this way, the writers could explore the specific medium of the internet community by engaging in the design and identity of that medium.

Throughout this project, the writers strived to maintain their own distinctive voices and styles. As with the internet, Linda Carroli stated that “collaboration doesn’t necessarily have to result in homogenisation, but rather that there is space for different voices, for partiality.” (ANAT) By maintaining their unique writing styles, it was possible to analyze a topic from a variety of angles. Specifically, this topic explored women’s thoughts about romantic and/or sexual relationships.

As aforementioned, the work is a hypertext collection of narratives that form a cohesive whole. When entering the piece, the user is presented with four different paths from the get-go. Together, these links read as “a woman stands on a street corner waiting for a stranger.” As the user continues to explore, they find that each page treats differently content, presentation, and functionality. While some pages only contain text, some might also include an image, or present multiple hyperlinks to the user, or arrange the content in some unique way, and so on. Despite the lack of uniformity within the work, the theme is strong enough to create a sense of cohesion to the user. After fully exploring the piece, the reader will have been shown many different viewpoints regarding a single topic and gain a better understanding of it. Again, this process mirrors the nature of the internet: a user types in a search query and are presented with many pages to choose from with varying answers.

Linda Carrolli
Linda Carroli enjoys exploring non-linear styles of writing, tending to gravitate towards hypertextual work. She is a postgrad in writing at the University of Queensland. As an essayist, freelance journalist and researcher, she has published in a number of journals including RealTime, Eyeline, and Periphery. She once expressed her fascination with the hypertextual medium in an online chat with the ELO, stating "I think the equation of creation and navigation is really quite interesting ... make[sic] me think all those colonial explorers must have thought they were creating the world as they passed through it." (Chat Transcript ELO, April 21, 2002)

Josephine Wilson
Like Linda, Josephine Wilson is also interested in the potential of writing online and hypertextually. She graduated from Queensland with a Masters in philosophy, and from the University of Western Austrailia with a PhD. She is also known for her lectures in creative writing, performance studies, and the history of art and design. Some of her works include The Geography of Haunted Places (which was performed in Australia and London), and her novel Extinctions which received the Miles Franklin Award, Dorothy Hewett Award, and Colin Roderick Award.

Screenshots
This is the first page users come to. Each group of text is a link to a different page. Readers can begin at any point, though a brief summary of the story is given if they choose the first link.
This is one of the pages within the work. The paragraphs are structured in three columns, with images placed at the top and center.
This page contains a small paragraph of text, with three different links to choose from lining the bottom.
On this page, the paragraphs are placed sporadically across the space.
The text on this page is structured uniformly, with larger text placed above each centered paragraph.

Links to the work
"*water always writes in *plural" has been recorded in Rhizome's webrecorder. Additionally, it has been crawled by the Wayback Machine. A link to Linda Carroli's and Josephine Wilson's plate in The Progressive Dinner Party is also provided below.

View "*water always writes in *plural" in the Webrecorder
View the web archive link
View Plate

Carroli, Linda and Wilson, Josephine. “Intro.” *water always writes in *plural. 1998, http://ensemble.va.com.au/water/intro.html. Accessed 6 July 2019.
“Josephine Wilson”. Wikipedia. Last edited 24 April 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Wilson_(writer). Accessed 6 July 2019.
“Water Writes Always in Plural”. Australian Network for Art and Technology. http://www.anat.org.au/2010/08/water-writes-always-in-plural/. Accessed 6 July 2019.
“Credits.” Ensemble Logic. http://ensemble.va.com.au/water/credits.html. Accessed 6 July 2019.
39 Works Key To present the 39 restored works, a system was devised involving tags and organizing them alphabetically by title. The works themselves can be viewed in alphabetical order in the next page, and the tag descriptions can be found here. These tags serve to provide a brief overview regarding the key features of each piece for the reader's convenience.

Tag Summaries

Area Maps
Area maps are used to create images with clickable areas. They are usually presented as a <map> tag towards the end of an <img> tag, followed by a list of screen coordinates. Though rarer, area maps is included as a tag because of the unique functionality it introduces, allowing users to hover over various spots on an image to access different hyperlinks.

Audio
This is for works that include auditory components.

Broken or Missing works
Unfortunately, not all of the local files for the works within The Progressive Dinner Party could be obtained. This was either because the work no longer existed (such as Slattery’s Glide) or because contact could not be made with the author for missing files. When possible, an external link to the most complete version of the work was provided in the website.

Collaboration
This tag is applied to works that were produced by multiple artists.

Flash
Works that used Adobe Flash to produce animations or sounds were given this tag. Unfortunately, all support for Adobe Flash in modern web browsers will be dropped in December 2020; thus it was imperative that these works were restored within the Webrecorder to ensure their survival.

Frames
Frame sets are used in HTML to divide the screen into sections, or "frames", that coexist while simultaneously remaining separate from each other. These are works that use frames as main components for separating menus, images, buttons, and more.

GIFs
GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format) are still or animated images used by works to introduce animations with technology other than software such as Adobe Flash or Shockwave.

High Level Interactivity
On occasion, a work will demand greater participation on the users part than average to experience the work.

Hypertext
This tag specifies works that focus on hyperlinking text as a way of communicating messages.

Image-rich
Though many of the works featured in The Progressive Dinner Party include images, some of them cannot be easily navigated without them. Such works may be using images as the main way of presenting the piece. Others may include images to provide critical visual cues, such as written cues (like Home, Back and Next), or non-written cues (like arrows and other icons.)

JavaScript
Along with using the web coding languages HTML and CSS, JavaScript was oftentimes used to add more interesting functionality to a work.

Linear
For works that are presented in a linear fashion.

Macro Hypertext
This includes hypertexts that are unusually large, usually as a result of collaboration from one or more artists.

Page Refresh
Refreshing the page to redirect users to another is a fairly common practice among these web artists.

Proprietary Software
Many of the works relied on software produced by companies. Though Adobe Flash and Shockwave are considered proprietary, they were unique and used often enough to justify separate tags.

Slideshows
Artists on the web have many different methods of presentation at their disposal, which includes featuring their work as a slideshow.

Tables
This tag is given to works that utilize tables in an important way, such as for images or overlaying content.

Video
This is for works that include video components.

Shockwave
This tag is applied to works utilizing Adobe Shockwave. Though support for Shockwave was dropped in April 2019, Shockwave plugins are still available for certain browsers. Thus, it was imperative that these works were restored with the Webrecorder to ensure their survival.
The Website | The 39 Works
Shockwave and Flash As of 2019, Adobe discontinued its support for Shockwave, while support for Flash will end in 2020. This means that any digital works that used these software programs will soon become obsolete. There are at least eight works within The Progressive Dinner Party that utilize these software programs, and though the Flash works could be easily viewed the Shockwave files would not play in most modern browsers. Fortunately, the Pale Moon web browser offers a downloadable Shockwave extension that allows files such as these to be viewed. At present, the Webrecorder can emulate browsers that support Flash but has yet to support Shockwave, but can record these files nonetheless. Thus, these works require browsers that support Shockwave in order to view them.

The Flash and Shockwave works are generally visual in nature, though some works use the software to play background music (such as *water always writes in *plural by Linda Carroli and Josephine Wilson.) Many of them are also highly interactive, such as The Intruder and Illusions, Philosophical Toy World. Still, the majority of them simply played videos or included moving imagery.

Animations created in CSS were not common until around the 2010s, so Flash and Shockwave were used to fill this niche during the explosion of the World Wide Web. But because Flash and Shockwave were so similar, the two competed for dominance (with Flash eventually winning.) Flash was released in 1996 as FurtureSplash by FutureWave Software, but was soon purchased by Macromedia and renamed Macromedia Flash. Macromedia also owned Director at this time, a software authoring system used for creating interactive CD-ROMs that predated the web. However, before it had purchased Flash Macromedia began outputting Director Files as Shockwave for the web, which meant Flash and Shockwave were fighting for the same audience drawn to interactive media. Eventually, Flash’s ability to play content quickly and its ease of use gave it an edge over Shockwave, despite the software program offering more robust features than Flash did. During this period of success Macromedia sold its products to Adobe, who in 2013 announced it was dropping support of Director, Shockwave in 2019, and Flash by the end of 2020.

Below are the works containing Flash and/or Shockwave files.
*water always writes in plural * by Linda Carroli and Josephine Wilson
The Intruder by Natalie Bookchin
Illusions, Philosophical Toy World by Zoe Beloff
Rice by geniwate
holes-linings-threads by Alicia Felberbaum
Pronunciation: 'fut' or: A Tool and its Means by Claire Dinsmore