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GRAMMATRON
The GRAMMATRON project is a "public domain narrative
environment" developed by virtual artist Mark Amerika in conjunction
with the Brown University Graduate Creative Writing Program
and the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Graphics and Visualization
Center as well as with the support of many individuals without
whom none of this would be possible. The project consists of
over over 1100 text spaces, 2000 links, 40+ minutes of original
soundtrack delivered via Real Audio 3.0, unique hyperlink structures
by way of specially-coded Javascripts, a virtual gallery featuring
scores of animated and still life images, and more storyworld
development than any other narrative created exclusively for
the Web. A story about cyberspace, Cabala mysticism, digicash
paracurrencies and the evolution of virtual sex in a society
afraid to go outside and get in touch with its own nature, GRAMMATRON
depicts a near-future world where stories are no longer conceived
for book production but are instead created for a more immersive
networked-narrative environment that, taking place on the Net,
calls into question how a narrative is composed, published and
distributed in the age of digital dissemination.
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Bio
Amerika was a Creative Writing Fellow and Lecturer on Network Publishing
and Hypertext at Brown University where he developed the GRAMMATRON
project, a multi-media narrative for network-distributed environments.
The opening section to what was supposed to be a novel called GRAMMATRON
was published in the Penguin USA Avant-Pop anthology entitled After
Yesterday's Crash [edited by Larry McCaffery]. By the time this Penguin
USA excerpt was published, Amerika was already well on his way to
creating a storyworld that has since been released on the Internet
and praised by many media sites including The New York Times, MSNBC's
The Site, Reuters International, Die Zeit, Wired, The Village Voice
and Time-Warner's Pathfinder. Exhibitions of GRAMMATRON have taken
place or are forthcoming at the Ars Electronica Festival, the International
Symposium of Electronic Art, SIGGRAPH, the Museums On The Web "Beyond
Interface" show, the Adelaide Arts Festival "FOLDBACK" show in South
Australia, the Virtual Worlds conference in Paris, and the International
Biennial of Film and Architecture in Graz.
GRAMMATRON has
just been selected as one of the first works of Internet art to be
exhibited in the prestigious Whitney Biennial of American Art.
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