Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales

Chemical Landscapes is a series of photograms by Mary Pinto. The photos suggest landscapes but are created entirely in the dark room, using only chemicals and a flashlight. For this project, I've written a series of "digital tales" suggested by the particular chemical landscape. I hope the relationship of language and narrative to the "tale" parallels the relationship of light and chemicals to the "landscape." The piece begins with a title page that serves as a navigation page. By clicking at various places on the page you're taken to one of the eight chemical landscapes. Once you arrive at a landscape, the digital tale fades in and then out, and you may click on the screen at any point to jump back to the navigation page. I have 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. My hope is that the reader will recognize the necessity of jumping around in the text, picking up pieces of the tale to read and ignoring other pieces, thereby creating a different experience with each reading. If you think of reading a traditional story as a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an end, then reading a hypertext is like walking through a field: readers begin at any one of several different starting points, wander around as long as they like, and then exit wherever and whenever they choose.