Towards Gestural Specificity in Interactive Digital Literary Narratives

摘要

In the domain of digital or electronic literature1, interactive works have already existed for several decades. In an interactive creation, manipulations by the readers are often required so that they can move through the work (for instance in hypertextual narratives). Such manipulations, in these interactive digital creations, are not radically new and there are many examples of literary works which require physical interventions on the part of the reader; for example in Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poemes the reader must construct sonnets from a number of individually printed lines of poetry. Espen Aarseth proposes the term "ergodic literature" to describe this kind of works, arguing that "in ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text" (Aarseth 1997: 1). Yet while some print works do require that the reader provides some physical input, what is somewhat new in interactive digital works is the fact that it is the text itself, and not only the physical medium, which acquires a dimension of manipulation. A digital text, as well as being a text provided for reading, can also afford an opportunity for manipulation. This dimension of the manipulation of the text, but also the whole range of semiotic forms (text, image, sound, video), opens a large field of possibilities in interactive digital creations. But to what extent can one speak of a gesturality specific to the Digital? We will focus on two interactive digital narratives among our own creations to try to answer this question.