The Wave

"Digital writing rarely appears in such a way that demands the reader remain within a sequential order of screens. Hypertext relies on surprising associations and non-linear linking to keep the reader’s interest. There are several pieces in this issue that bridge the distinctions of new media writing and digital art. For instance, Jody Zellen's 'All the News That’s Fit to Print,' uses text from The New York Times to create a beautiful and effective piece of interactive art. Zellen’s work incorporates a type of found poetry consisting of juxtaposed headlines which the reader can keep clicking to create new lines. This is work that is both visually satisfying and pertinent. The reader is able to create her or his own meanings with each new page. In a similar way, Heather Raikes' 'The Wave,' uses choreography and visually stimulating links along with original text to create the world of the piece." -- From The New River Journal, Fall 2007

"Introduction by Heather Raikes

The Wave Electronic Illuminated Hypertext is a multisensory etext derived from a series of new media performances. The work explores and articulates a collection of meditations on myth, metaphor, and digital embodiment.

An interactive assemblage of images, videodance, sound, animation, iconography, and text, The Wave creates an electronic architecture of hyper-dimensional poetic language. This electronic architecture expands and redefines the dramatic text as a fluid, animated, interactive infrastructure that exists in a liminal hyperspace between text and performance. The work expands and redefines the dance as dynamic, sensate, experiential process of inner transformation integrating the mind, body, and senses in metaphorical movement.

Cumulatively, The Wave is an original 'posthuman myth' derivative of Joseph Campbell's monomyth. The dancing body of a woman warrior embodies the fundamental metaphor. She encounters gods, goddesses, enigmas and archetypes, all of which are reflections of herself in virtual space. Her psyche is reflected, refracted, expanded, and transformed into vertical, virtual dimensions. She becomes a meta-body: an elusive, shape-shifting equation of light, intelligence, rupture, and complexity.

'The body is not just repositioned by new technologies but supplemented, extended, and remade into a material-information entity whose boundaries are continuously constructed and reconstructed in its interactions with instruments whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge.' – Adalaide Morris, New Media Poetics

Finally, The Wave is an electronic exploration of the format of the illuminated manuscript, most commonly associated with poet/artist William Blake. In traditional illuminated manuscripts, gold ink was used to represent the 'light of God' illuminating the text. In this work, the light is electronic and represents the force of contemporary mythic experience through the exponentially expanding apertures of the digital." -- From 'The Wave', Introduction by Heather Raikes