Surfing the web is very common to see “This Page is Under Construction” or “This Site is Under Construction.” I had seen that hundreds of times, in different images, colors and even languages. Interestingly, it took me to start working on this project to understand more in depth those signifiers. I was amazed when I realized that the first steps for this project were drawing boxes on paper and tracing lines that connected them in a specific way. The boxes were the rooms in which some text would be placed, the lines were the corridors that interconnected those rooms.
I was constructing. Constructing space, more than writing a story or narrating something. I was building textual rooms. This technology of writing, which is the theme of the whole project, demands that at some moments the author stop being simply an author and start being an architect. It requires thinking in terms of space, like geography or architecture, more than in terms of words or text, as in literature or narration. It was strange and fascinating to be thinking in those spacial terms: “this room connects to this one, from X it is possible to go to Y and Z but never to N”. At that moment I understood why the pages are under construction and not “under writing.” Hypertext demands a constructor as well as, and maybe more than, an author. Demands space as well as text. One of the beauties and the breakthroughs of this technology is that it achieves a threedimensionality of the textual in the triad form-content-space.
As a technology, hypertext requires some special skills. I learned HTML to make this project possible. Being a HTML newbie limited the vast possibilities of this technology to only a interconnecting text files and using a few images. I consider that a very limited example of the multi-sensorial capabilities of the hypertext. But, I will keep on learning...
The project consist of 30 HTML files (*.htm) interconnected among them in a way which provides for multiple reading paths. It is closed network, i.e., there is no link to any outside document. Although I am writing about a specific theme, the links provide for a non linear form of writing and some links are more autonomous than others. It is expected that the reader (which here is also a writer) hop back and forth between those files to produce some reading of what it is presented. There is not a correct way of producing the reading (reading-writing), nor an expectation that the reader will visit all the files. There is neither a specific end. The reader (reader-writer) determines where it is the pragmatic end. This project is not finished and I do not expect that some day it will. This zone is always under (DE)construction.
About the Question of Narrative