trAce and Alt-X are pleased to announce the winners of the first
trAce/Alt-X International Hypertext Competition. Full details at:
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/hypertext/

The prize of One Thousand English Pounds is shared between two websites:

Rice
http://www.idaspoetics.com.au/rice/riceheading.html
by Jenny Weight (Australia)

The Unknown
http://www.soa.uc.edu/user/unknown/trip.htm
by William Gillespie; Scott Rettberg; Dirk Stratton (USA)

Three sites received Honourable Mentions:

kokura
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/English/Writing/kokura/
Mary-Kim Arnold (USA)

* * * *
http://www.atavar.com/atavar/
Michael Atavar (UK)

*water always writes in *plural
http://ensemble.va.com.au/water/
Linda Carroli and Josephine Wilson (Australia)

+ + +

Timescale
The competition was launched in Summer 1998 and closed on December 31 1998.
The decision was announced in April 1999.
The competition will re-open in Summer 1999.

+Judging+
The judging was overseen by Mark Amerika of Alt-X with support from Sue
Thomas at trAce. First, the 152 entries were scrutinised by an
international panel of filterers who between them produced a shortlist
of 10, and then the final decision was made by eminent hypertext
specialist Robert Coover of Brown University.

Robert Coover called 'Rice' "a spectacularly beautiful visual and aural
experience, moving from sixteen images which constitute a kind of table
of contents into sixteen very different poetic approaches to the Vietnam
story." And he described 'The Unknown' as "genuinely multisequential and
massively rich in story material, following the imagined adventures of
three supposedly rich and famous collaborative writers on a mock book
tour all over the world."

Mark Amerika, Director of the Alt-X Online Network (www.altx.com), said
"The sheer volume of interest in our trAce/Alt-X contest, as well as the
quality of the work being submitted, has convinced me that a new form of
narrative art is emerging in cyberspace, one that equally borrows from
the literary, performing, conceptual and visual arts, but that is also
experimenting with the Net as a unique medium with its own compositional
potential."

Sue Thomas, Director of trAce, added "trAce is delighted to be working
with Alt-X in establishing what will surely form the touchstone for
web-based writing. The winning sites prove the existence of a new breed
of artist, one who combines science and art to the highest advantage.
It's thrilling to see just what can happen when writers become
programmers and vice-versa, and it's also no surprise that one of the
joint winners was a collaborative effort. The web is an excellent tool
for bringing artists together."