"Terminal Hopscotch": Navigating Networked Space in Talan Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia

If the reader is patient enough to make it to the final
episodes of Lexia to Perplexia, digital artist Talan
Memmott’s beautifully intricate piece of electronic literature,
at some point she will encounter a particularly
puzzling image. Richly layered with images of computer
code, checkerboard backdrops, cryptic prose, and a
stick figure drawn in chalk, this snapshot will nevertheless
lack the full frenzy of motion of the actual work, a
palimpsest-like environment that threatens to spin out of
control. The reader will participate in its wild oscillation
by moving her mouse around the screen in an effort to
find a gateway or portal to the next segment. By this time
she will (probably) have learned that this type of active
searching is the only way to proceed through the text.
For her efforts, she will not be rewarded with a new section,
a sense of closure, nor formal dénouement; rather,
her participation here will involve playing what Memmott
has referred to as “terminal hopscotch,” a looping
sequence of animations that unfold ad infinitum, or at
least until the reader will choose to withdraw.
Created for the trAce Online Writing Community’s annual
Conference in 2000, Lexia to Perplexia is comprised
of four sections divided into a series of thicklylayered
web pages, each of which leads to further layers
before linking to a new page. The text is a mixture of
DHTML and Javascript, which, when strung together,
forms a fragmented narrative that is visually complemented
by empty grids, snippets of code, and cluttered
signs of death and mourning. Like many examples of
electronic literature or digital poetry, Lexia to Perplexia
emerges from a variety of artistic traditions: it is a visual
poem, a linguistic experiment, and a piece of executable
code all in one. It is a technological collage performed
on a computer screen, filled with references to various
media forms while settling exclusively on none.
Yet there are many things that Lexia to Perplexia is not.
It is not a linear narrative, yet through a sustained interaction
with the piece, an abstract sort of “story” emerges.
It does not contain a set series of causal sequences, yet
any path through this image-laden text is causally dependent
upon the decisions the user makes in response to its
interface. It is not a story in which a single “main character”
functions as a center of narration, yet the piece is
suggestive of a subjective amalgam, a stitched-together
entity that has joined itself to a network. Nor does the
piece fit entirely within the tradition of the avant-garde
in the visual arts—even as its operative and interactive
features express an unusual sort of seeing, a “networked
perspective,” that resonates with Marcel Duchamp’s attempts
to deter the “retinal shudder” that results from
traditional manners of representation (qtd. in Ades 70).
In her detailed analysis of the work in Writing Machines,
N. Katherine Hayles discusses the manner in which
Memmott creates an anonymous protagonist resigned to
a divided and encoded existence that the computer interface
and distributed network have made inevitable.
Her convincing argument is that in Lexia to Perplexia
“human subjectivity is depicted as intimately entwined
with computer technologies,” and that such an entwinement
is achieved through Memmott’s use of “idiosyncratic
language, a revisioning of classical myths, and a
set of coded images that invite the reader to understand
herself not as a preexisting self with secure boundaries
but as a permeable membrane through which information
flows” (50). Hayles’ analysis not only addresses
the unique character of Memmott’s project, it does so in
such a way as to shed light upon digital art as a whole,
providing ample evidence to support the one of the theses
that underpins Writing Machines: the increasing need
for media-specific analysis.
Yet far from exhausting what can be gleaned from Lexia
to Perplexia, Hayles’ clear and thorough exegesis creates
a new mode of approach. If, for example, it is crucial to
apply a media-specific analysis to works such as Lexia to
Perplexia, then the task remains to consider more fully
one of its most important medial features: the organization
of spatial elements on the level of the interface. In
this paper I depart from earlier modes of interpretation
that focus primarily on linguistic elements (see, for example,
work by Hayles, Dreher, and Raley) by considering
the way Memmott complicates traditional notions of
identity in Lexia to Perplexia through a unique arrangement
of spatial elements that form a networked reading
environment and suggest a distributed subjectivity. Such
an arrangement creates an anxious landscape that offers
no place for repose, one that, at least initially, makes a
refugee of the reader as she “hopscotches” through the
text. Additionally, I propose that Lexia to Perplexia’s
distinct spatial organization results in a form of storytelling
that both challenges and conforms to traditional
narrative structure—and that these spatial elements, dependent
as they are upon the medium of the computer and the technology of the distributed network, engender
new ways of navigating textual space that demand new
literacies to fully experience them.