7/1/2023 0 Comments Storyspace cambridge![]() ![]() It had been created by a group of hypertext authors and theorists in 1987, years before the rise of the web with its HyperText Markup Language (HTML). The software Jackson used to do her writing was called Storyspace. I felt like I was standing on the coast of a new world.” The potential of this new medium seemed limitless: “I saw from the very first that an infinite number of new possibilities for literature were opening up before us. “I’ve always had a very spatial understanding of text,” she later recalled, and for the idea she’d begun to develop, it felt right to conceive of story as discrete pieces that could be dragged around, connected, and deliberately positioned. Several students and faculty had begun exploring the possibilities of nonlinear hypertext writing, and while Jackson “didn’t have a particularly strong techie bent,” when a graduate course in 1993 or 1994 assigned a final project of creating a hypertext story, she began work on the piece that would evolve into Patchwork Girl. After finishing an art degree at nearby Stanford, she moved across the country for an MFA in creative writing at Brown, which had developed a reputation for an interest in experimental literature. Jackson grew up in Berkeley, California, and worked as a teen at her family’s bookstore. Jackson’s work posits that she was brought back in secret, reborn “under the needle, and under the pen”: sewn back together, but also given life through the electricity of words on screens and flickering digital currents. In the original the female monster is destroyed by her creator in a fit of despair before she can be given life. Patchwork Girl or, A Modern Monster riffed on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, remixing text from the original and other sources alongside a new story about the female counterpart made by Dr. The writer was there to reflect on a work that in the short time since its release had become one of the most celebrated examples of a new kind of literature: the hypertext novel. No, I am the monster herself, and it is Shelley Jackson who is imaginary. ![]() I expect there are some of you who still think I am Shelley Jackson, author of a hypertext about an imaginary monster, the patchwork girl Mary Shelley made after her first-born ran amok. May I say that I find this an extraordinary impertinence, and that if she would like to come forward, we shall soon see who is the author of whom. It seems you have even invited her to speak tonight, under the misapprehension that she exists, that she is something besides a parasite. It has come to my attention that a young woman claiming to be the author of my being has been making appearances under the name of Shelley Jackson. Her speaker bio noted that “she specializes in lies and digressions.” The talk was entitled “ Stitch Bitch ,” and began like this: In her author photo she wore a sleeveless vest, a dense cluster of ear piercings, and an ampersand, tattooed on her upper arm. The talks had begun just after lunch, and now it was coming up on nine o’clock as the final speaker took the stage: a woman in her mid-twenties. On the MIT campus in October 1997, an interdisciplinary symposium called “Transformations of the Book” was taking place, bringing together “classicists, Shakespearean scholars, technological wizards and lovers of all media” to explore how printed books were being challenged and changed by the digital age. ![]() If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself. You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal. Released: October 1995 (Eastgate Systems) By Shelley Jackson (as MARY/SHELLEY, & HERSELF) ![]()
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