It was ten years ago today that GRAMMATRON was released. It's a project which New York Times reporter Matthew Mirapaul commented was "grappling with the idea of spirituality in the electronic age."
Okay, so what is GRAMMATRON? It's a "public domain narrative environment" developed by virtual artist Mark Amerika in conjunction with the Brown University Graduate Creative Writing Program and the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Graphics and Visualization Center. It's the first of what he calls his "net art" or new media trilogy. The project consists of over over 1100 text spaces, 2000 links, 40+ minutes of original soundtrack delivered via Real Audio 3.0, unique hyperlink structures by way of specially-coded Javascripts, a virtual gallery featuring scores of animated and still life images, and more storyworld development than any other narrative created exclusively for the Web. A story about cyberspace, Cabala mysticism, digicash paracurrencies and the evolution of virtual sex in a society afraid to go outside and get in touch with its own nature, GRAMMATRON depicts a near-future world where stories are no longer conceived for book production but are instead created for a more immersive networked-narrative environment that, taking place on the Net, calls into question how a narrative is composed, published and distributed in the age of digital dissemination.
Amerika has gone on to write a book META/DATA which chronicles GRAMMATRON as well as his other work. More on the project and Amerika's work can be found here.
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