Editor's Note
Sound plays a dominant role
in both Bill Marsh’s “Tools
Built by Anonymous Ancestors” and Lewis LaCook’s “Light
Has No Tongue,” the two new pieces posted in this edition of The
New River. Bill Marsh is an interesting figure in the ever-expanding
world of digital writing. A West Coast writer not to my knowledge connected
in any way with the early Eastgate Systems hypertext theorists and writers,
he’s part of a new group of authors taking hypertext in new directions––and
the use of sound as an integral element in digital writing is clearly
one of those directions. In “Tools . . .” Marsh composes
a series of “poems” by building a site that allows readers
to play with a range of visual and aural images derived from web searches
using only the words “tools built by anonymous ancestors.” Lewis
LaCook, a musician, calls “Light Has No Tongue,” “a
hyperpoem with generative music,” and he thinks of it as a “kind
of haiku” with music that “composes itself based on Western
functional tonality.” Like Marsh, he has published widely in
the growing numbers of online venues while creating works that explores
the
creative possibilities of digital media.
We’ve made a couple of small changes in this edition of The New
River. On the splash page, we’ve added the names of the new authors
under their pictures; and we’ve retitled our “Archives” as “Contents,” which
we hope will encourage readers to explore all of the works posted in
The New River over the past several years.
Ed Falco
May, 2004
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