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• 1 2017-11-14T07:09:17-08:00 Bilingualism Allowing Texts to Intermingle 15 plain 2017-12-08T10:55:42-08:00

  These “multiple layers of text that combine computer code and natural language” consist mostly of moving features of sound and interactive images in Pieces of Herself (Hayles).  The majority of the audio comes from the interviews of ten different women that are revealed as you move throughout each scene and touch certain items.  There’s a woman who says she would never even let her children see her naked, another who dyed her hair because she began to notice the emergence of grey, and another woman who admitted to receiving her clothing and jewelry from a male suitor, she acknowledges none of these items are truly who she is or what she may prefer, but she wears them anyway because she likes receiving them and for them to be picked out for her.  As you move through the game you can pick up items to fill your character which relates to how much of an impact our daily life has on who we are and what we become.  In the kitchen we simply  click on a cake on the table to hear Marilyn Monroe’s sexualized happy birthday to the president.  This emphasizes the view of women as sexual beings as they move through their daily life, and upon entering the office you can pick up a playful mask- a pointed finger at the lack of seriousness taken of women who are in the workplace which juxtaposes the previous scene well.  This simple mundane activity of just being able to click items like that cake emphasizes the mundaneness of these occurrences that build into a meaningful collective of societies tightened grip on women. “The machine and the self…conjoin in a union that is at once conceptual, linguistic, and technological,” but this electronic text puts so much more effort into being meaningful and moving, as it also uses technology and language to its advantage (Hayles).  While you listen you can grab and take items for your characters as you choose, making it an interactive and engaging experience.  As we step outside with our mostly filled character now, we see the line, “as if she could ever really get ‘outside’” (Davis).  All of these constraints and ideas that weigh our character down gives us so much less room to explore as we look around this outdoor scene.  It feels as though these societal constraints do not allow us to step outside of our character or from the curb as there are street signs blocking certain ways showing the limits placed on women’s movement throughout the world.  The creator uses these limiting, but also freeing images and audio files to create an understanding of what society pushes women to be.  

          Going along with that, “the hardware and software are active partners in this journey, facilitating and resisting, enabling and limiting, and enacting and subverting” (Hayles).  The creator gets to decide the rooms and the objects that exist in them, and you get to decide what you take along with you before you leave.  Eventually, your character becomes an overwhelming, indistinguishable mess of colors and sounds.  New audio becomes difficult to listen to as the sounds your character already contains become difficult to hear over.  It is suddenly clear that as a woman, you are being pushed to become everything, at every second, and it also becomes evident that feat is impossible as you are trying to discern between the stress-inducing, chaotic mass of new and old sounds filling your character.  This makes the “electronic text... a process rather than an object” (Hayles).  By way of gathering objects and making them part of yourself, or your character, you grow from the chaos and this work becomes more than just a text because you get to become a part of it.  The mess of colors moving throughout your character begin to make you anxious as what you placed inside from the beginning is no longer discernible.  The interaction that comes from the layers of code that makes use of sound and image which combines with audio of the voices of other women’s viewpoints makes the electronic hypertext more real and relatable.  Comparatively, if this was somehow transformed into an informative article consisting of those same interviews and examples it would not be as appealing and it would not make the reader apart of this dialog, which is crucial to getting the true meaning of this piece.  It also allows the piece to have a greater impact on the reader because the character you are choosing to fill is becoming something different because of your choices.