Edward Falco’s digital text “Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales” remediates the reading/writing experience by using text as a secondary means for telling a story instead of as the primary one. This text contains eight photographs that appear to be landscapes, which the author made in a darkroom by using chemicals and a flashlight. Lying over the photograph is a story, structured to have single lines on the top half of the photograph (in the “sky”) and a full paragraph at the bottom of the photograph.
This text initially interested me because the author says on the description page that he “tried to time the fading in and out of the text so that it is almost impossible to read it all before it fades away.” I found this intriguing because it doesn’t make sense that someone should go through the process of writing something if they do not want people to read it. So why bother?
Pondering this question while contemplating the eight photographs, I eventually realized that it isn’t that the author doesn’t want the viewer to read the words, but rather that he wants his pictures to tell the reader the story instead of just the words, and everyone reads and interprets pictures differently for the simple reasons that no one sees everything in every picture and that the parts of the pictures that resonate with each person are different. The author wants the words that he wrote to supplement the pictures, which look like hazy landscape pictures taken with an out-of-focus camera. The words provide a story, but since the viewer can only read some of the words at once, they can travel through the picture in several different ways depending on what sections of each text they read, whether they return to the same photograph a series of times to finish each text, the order in which they read the sections on each photograph, and the order in which they view the photographs.
sounds like an interesting text, and a good choice for the project. the notion of impermanence seems relevant–and thus birkerts on the question of permanence in his view of reading literature. would you say this text is what hayles calls a ‘technotext’?