NOV. 4, TUESDAY. THE HAG IS OFF...
...off in the mail, at last. I'll be getting the proof copy in a couple weeks, I think. Then I'll see how it does in the marketplace...and meanwhile, I can resume my work on this website and on my new novel, Evidence of a Lost City.

OCT. 21, TUESDAY. WAITING FOR THE HAG
I've finally finished the DVD for HAG, my movie. I'm now designing the disk illustration and the insert. This is what the disk looks like:

And here is the front and back cover:

 

In a day or two, the whole package goes off to Amazon for publication, and I can return to the work on this website and of course my new movie, Evidence of a Lost City.....D.N. Stuefloten

OCTOBER 18, SATURDAY: THE RE-DESIGN
Artifacts is undergoing one of its periodic re-designs. Which allows me to raise certain questions. There’s an ancient argument—I believe Aristotle first developed this—about form vs. function. In the early days of the internet, when connections were painfully slow, function dominated everything. Add video to a website? or even complicated graphics? Ludicrous—your viewer would have to spend hours waiting for things to load. Now, of course, with high-speed connections, powerful codecs, and applications like Flash, it is eminently feasible to offer motion and sound on every page. A Flash .flv movie can load almost instantly, and play full-screen. As designers, therefore, we have opportunities to play with form and content in ways that were never possible before.

I am primarily a writer, a novelist. Words lined up on a page allowed me to create worlds. But I always thought that words on a page, by their very nature, demanded an art that was non-realist. The form could be called magical realism, surrealism, expressionism, whatever—but if you used words merely to create (however poorly or well) a “reality” that mimicked our own world, our own streets and neighborhoods and friends, then your art—your created world—would always be second-rate. Words cannot actually compete with the touch of a hand on a silken thigh, or the anguish lingering in a broken heart. No matter how well you employed your words, the world on your page was inferior to the world around you. But these words, when employed to create a kind of hyper-reality, a reality that was not possible in our actual, quotidian existence—that was an idea that enthralled me, even as a child. Let me see if I can say this even more clearly. Words which attempt to be no more than a copy of quotidian reality are themselves—quotidian. Ordinary. Unremarkable. It is only when words attempt something greater, something particular to words, something deeper, something more magical, that they perform their necessary function. Words can do things that reality cannot.  And reality is capable of things that words are not. The question, therefore, that the artistic writer must ask himself, is—What can words do, that nothing else can do? What is particular and peculiar to words scrawled on a piece of paper? What opportunities does this offer a writer? That is a question which has engrossed me all my life.

Which brings me back to the web. What can the web do—that only the web can do? that is different from novels and stories? different from paintings? different from music and film and stage? That is the question that I plan to explore in this version of Artifacts.

THE WEB AS CONTAINER
You can hang photos, paintings, sketches on a website, just as you can on the walls of your local art gallery. You can show movies, just like the nearby cineplex. You can listen to music, to poetry, to novels and stories, or even read them on screen if you can tolerate a computer monitor. You can get news and play games, visit virtual worlds, talk to or message friends and enemies--even instantly televise your communication. Try doing all that with your TV or your open book or your chess board, or telephone (though telephones are getting there). A website is capable of an extraordinary range of activities. Here at ArtifactsMagazine you cant play games--yet--but you can browse through some of my stories and novels, see movies, and so on. I'd like to set up a virtual world here some day, so your avatar could wander through the terrain and buildings I created. I can imagine visitors stumbling upon rooms full of old photos. Or pausing to watch through a window as a woman dances, or see a playlet performed, digitally, on a stage. Or find yourself in the middle of a movie--even given a role to play, as in a video game. Or perhaps within a "book" whose different chapters are acted out in different rooms. All this is actually possible now, and you can find aspects scattered around the web. But much of it is still primitive, and requires a technical expertise not available to someone like myself. Soon, however, a program like Flash or Director will make it easy to set up your own 3D world. I can imagine my ArtifactsMagzine as such a world, a small version of Second Life, with better graphics and smoother interactions.

Meanwhile, of course, each "page" of this website is a kind of separate environment: an art gallery, a movie theatre, a library. It's a container for different kinds of work. But how can I make each "environment" more web-specific? Not just a copy of a "real" gallery, or theatre, or library? More--what? Immersive? Intereactive? What?....D.N. Stuefloten

 

Comments? Contact: don@dnstuefloten.com
To see more of HAG, visit: http://hagmovie.com
and for my new novel and movie: http://evidenceofalostcity.com