Mark Amerika — Grammatron

1997

Artists: Mark Amerika · Year: 1997 · Medium: Interactive hypertext novel — approximately 2,000 linked web pages · Substrate: HTML; web-native literary fiction · Place: Boulder, Colorado, USA · Institution: Walker Art Center commission; later University of Colorado Boulder Mark Amerika's Grammatron, launched on the web in 1997, is an interactive hypertext novel of approximately 2,000 linked text pages exploring the experiences of a character named Abe Golam — part detective, part mystic, part technologist — across a surreal near-future. The work was among the first serious attempts to produce long-form literary fiction as hypertext on the public web; it was commissioned by Walker Art Center, which gave the project institutional legitimacy and presented it alongside other emerging new-media work. Grammatron is historically important as a bridge between the early hypertext-fiction tradition of the 1980s (Eastgate Systems' Storyspace, Michael Joyce's afternoon) and the subsequent net-art / web-literature tradition. Where earlier hypertext fiction had been distributed on floppy disk via small-press publishers, Grammatron was on the web, free to anyone with a browser, reachable through a URL. This distribution shift changed everything about hypertext fiction's reception — it went from a specialized literary subgenre to a publicly-available web experience. The work itself is dense, digressive, and characteristic of Amerika's aesthetic — a postmodern stew of theory, mysticism, detective fiction, and meta-fictional play. The reading experience is non-linear by design, and the question of whether any reader could ever read all of it is part of the work's proposition. Amerika continues to work. His subsequent projects — PHON:E:ME, Filmtext, Immobilité — have extended the Grammatron experiments into sound, film, and mobile interfaces. He has been a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder for decades. Lore Grammatron went live in 1997, hosted by the Walker Art Center initially. The work was archived by the Electronic Literature Collection and is still accessible in its original form. Amerika's later writing on the piece — particularly his 2007 book META/DATA — reflects on the project as an early attempt to establish conventions for web-native literature. Sources • Grammatron (grammatron.com) • Electronic Literature Collection (Vol. 1, 2006) • Amerika, Mark — META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (MIT Press, 2007)