Grammatron (www.grammatron.com)
by Mark Amerika

"i link, therefore i am." – So says Mark Amerika's newest hypertextual
event, the Grammatron (www.grammatron.com), a frenzied narrative of
images, text and sound that has trumped the hypertext world on beta
release and promises newer, greater versions yet to come.

Abe Golam, described as a legendary "info-shamen" hailing from Cyburbia,
USA, is the hero of this sci-fi/cyberpunk online novel. Filled with
text, image and audio, the Grammatron impresses by its sheer size. The
user guides itself through a world of push(y)-technology eroticism,
intelligent androids and quasi-fascist commercial forces.

Grammatron's interface is standardized to a simply designed, text-based
html page. However, through the structure of the hypertext, Amerika
creates the same types of interfaces and narrative machines that
permeate the story of Grammatron, that is, an intuitive human/data
interface. Each link in the Grammatron somehow feels right. With the
transparent use of back-end javascripts, one experiences the Grammatron
"translating your experience for you as you experienced it"
[http://grammatron.com/gtronbeta/music_001.html]. Narrative passes from
being linear to being non-linear, all the while following the user's
meanderings. Amerika's narrative is less line and more braid.

Grammatron uses realaudio to deliver live audio tracks and the "meta"
html tag for most of its special html effects, giving it a rather sparse
look compared to many current art sites. Recently I had a chance to talk
to Mark Amerika about what guides his choices *not* to use certain
technologies:

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Mark Amerika: My main agenda with GRAMMATRON has been in focusing on the
development of hypermedia narrative scripting for pseudo-virtual
realities or potential storyworlds that are not made-for-WEBTV […] the
project as a whole doesn't rely on on a lot of techno-gimmickry but,
rather, tends to move away from the commercial hipness of so many art
sites.

Basically, when I was constructing the various technology links to the
project, I was always thinking about the average web-surfer who is in
search of possible connections between, say, narrative art and the
visual or performing arts, especially as disseminated over the Net. I
decided that, like in the late 80's and early 90s when I refused to
write my novels for an elitist literary crowd, the last thing I would do
with my work in cyberspace is create hypermedia narrative whose top
priority would be to wow an elitist techno-crowd.

So this decision to work primarily on the scripting and, if anything,
develop a story about the the intrusion of new or multi-media digital
objects into the practice of storytelling, left me with hard choices,
like how much advanced-tech to put into the project? I mean, why even
bother with the opening "Interfacing" section if the core of the
hyperTEXT wasn't going to arrive for 12 minutes! […] I knew that I
could go even more high-tech, say, reach into VRML (for example), but I
decided to wait and possibly integrate more 3-D technology into a
near-future version of GRAMMATRON, assuming the necessary grants come
through.

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Part of Grammatron is a companion theory site called "hypertext
consciousness," which after some surfing struck me as rather
unfulfilling. i really wanted a nice theory wrap-up after a few hours
slaving away in the Grammatron. I stopped reading at that point and just
clicked on links as fast as i could.

After relaying my disappointment to Amerika, I asked him if he was
deliberately obfuscating some sort of critical reading of the Grammatron
(however traditional the form of this critic may be)? or if the
"hypertext consciousness" area served as a type of parasite for the
larger Grammatron, a reflexive addendum seated along side the realaudio
soundtrack(s)?

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Amerika: Well, I'm sorry you were unimpressed with it, but if you enter
the realm of Hypertextextual Consciousness (HTC) looking for a "theory
wrap-up" then you're bound to be disappointed. HTC is always playing
against totalization, against closure: argumentative or rhetorical
closure, narrative closure, production closure. That's its nature: once
you start clicking on links as fast as you can you've entered the realm
of HTC as teleported through a transfer protocol like the WWW.

While I was developing the HTC section with hypertext-theorist George
Landow as my editor, we came to the conclusion that it wasn't theory at
all but fiction, or what Raymond Federman might call "critifiction." So
HTC is a critifiction that's more about the medium itself than some
"high-brow, new media theoretical discourse" seeking some unattainable
truths on, say, technological determinism or, worse, the reconfiguration
of identity in anonymous social space.

Alex Galloway: Elsewhere you've used the phrase "teleportation through
smooth space." do you think web-based hypertext gets at a truly
*intuative* interface for artistic narrative?

Amerika: No. Not web-based hypertext. All of my current research on the
way readers are navigating through the GTRON matrix suggests otherwise.
Maybe there's some computer-mediated storyworld space of the future that
will enable groups of people to build their own narrative environments
in ways that essentially cause the interface to disappear, but I'm not
looking forward to that day. In a way, that's exactly what went wrong
with the novel as an individualized literary form. It's back to this
idea of transparency and developing the kind of communications
technology that's designed to normalize our creative potential, to make
us forget we're there (wherever there is).

Galloway: a vrml option for Grammatron is interesting, especially in the
context of the digital object - that any textual element could be used
as an artistic building block, be it image, world, text, etc. do you
wish you could *integrate* text/image/sound/ better into some sort of
virtual narrative space? if you could get rid of text (i.e. words and
letters) would you?

Amerika: No, I wouldnt get rid of the text – so much of GTRON depends
on text, on the Cabala source-code that suggests letters create words
create consciousness create Man. In many ways GTRON is a virtual remake
of the Golem myth that expresses how life itself is born by way of
marking letters on the body. But of course in GTRON the lead-avatar
figure, Abe Golam, is an electronic disembodiment, and this enabled me
to play around with Jewish mysticism in new ways whether that be through
randomly-generated links or some of the animated inter-faces that
supplement his Digital Being.

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So many elements in Grammatron are the stuff of science fiction: the
idea of a grand unifying code (called the Nanoscript Programme),
intuative interfaces, cyborg hallucinations, the "smooth space."

Ultimately, Grammatron works for us on two levels: first, it offers an
entertaining piece of online fiction; second, (and more importantly) it
works toward making the web a better interface for navigating
information.