There is no particular sequence in the way these photograms are linked to each other and the order mentioned above is not made obvious by the text. After several readings, the place of each photogram on the screen can be figured out as it is mentioned above. However, this does not make any difference to the notion of chance as distinct from authored sequence because following the order stated above does not produce a narrative sequence with some sense of completion or closure.

Figure 1: A screen grab of the GUI for Chemical landscapes digital tales.

The design of this work brings together these eight photograms with their ensuing "tale" under the GUI which itself is number four on the list. Such a design incorporates the GUI into the work by making it both the navigation tool and a part of this navigation. By doing that, it makes GUI a "dynamic space" and in this sense it becomes, in Drucker's words, "what we read and how we read combined through engagement" (Drucker 2011, 9).

Since the organization and the borders of each photogram do not follow any specific orders, it is possible to access any of the photograms without going through the others first. The dynamic layering in this work operates in a more literal way because it brings a layer of image and a layer of words together, keeps them together for a short while, and then takes them apart again.

Figure 2: Three stages of the appearance and disappearance of the text on the screen in Chemical landscapes digital tales.

An important feature of Chemical landscapes digital tales is that it tries to distinguish its webpages from lexia. George Landow (1992) defines this term which has been originally been used by Roland Barthes as "blocks of text…in a digital medium." But in works of the first generation of hypertext fiction, lexia was one stable part of the network which was part of the whole narrative of the work of fiction and could be quite short or quite long. However, the lexia here is transformed into an unstable page which exists in absentia; it only appears when it is summoned by the reader and then disappears right before her eyes before she has had enough time to read it (Figure 2).

The time of the reading becomes quite an important feature here and dictates a specific kind of reading to the reader. This puts the readers in a completely different experience of reading from what the early readers of Afternoon had experienced. For them the text was stable and they wanted something more, so they kept clicking until they became bored and stopped reading. Here the reader must be completely attentive to the text to be able to read a little part of it.

What the writer aims to achieve by adding the "reading time" factor to his work is to highlight the graphic surface of Chemical landscapes digital tales and by doing that draws attention to the role of the medium that instantiates his work. By making the part of the text which traditionally provides most access to meaning unstable, or in other words, unavailable for as long as the reader needs or wants to attend to it, the instability here is transferred from the reader's length of attention to the text's length of appearance which opens up a consideration of the way in which all experience is fragmented, imprecise, and remembered in flashes. Therefore, that which we claim to know from it rests on imprecision and incompleteness.

Narrative strategy

Falco, in the introduction to this work, has stated that "[the linguistic components] like the images, are abstract, mentioning an event or scene and inviting readers to imagine the characters and relationships involved." In this way, abstract chemical landscapes parallel the status of language itself. In the same way that an abstract painting is open to various interpretations without any one of them being the final interpretation, the response of each reader to narratives suggested here by the scenes or events mentioned can be different and in this way the work becomes more similar to the works of minimalist painters and writers.

The abstract landscapes, and the words which are meant to parallel their abstraction, intensify the opportunities to construct narrative discourses and stories out of the words and phrases which are presented on the screen for a short time. The narrative here becomes the result of the choosing of words from different parts of the screen and their coming together which may or may not create a context for their collocation. This kind of arrangement is a direct result of the dynamic layering which now occurs at the level of the linguistic section. The group of words written for each photogram is retrieved on the screen through a single click, then the few words which a reader can read in that short span of time along with the accompanying photogram can suggest a narrative or a part of narrative. So the narrative has to be built piecemeal, and it is the reader who has to bring those words together and move them back and forth, or in other words arrange them according to the way she thinks would make more sense, so that a narrative is constructed.

Another aspect of this abstraction at the linguistic level of this work is that it becomes more similar to flash fiction and minimalist works in which the reader has to fill in the gaps. In this sense the narrative becomes a possibility within a work that requires the reader to actively engage with both the medium and the linguistic signs within that medium to create it. As Ciccoricco (2012) has argued, revisiting those pages brings the close reading of a text to the foreground.

Reading process

The reading process of this work is explained at the introduction that Falco, its author has written for it:

My hope is that the reader will recognize the necessity of jumping around in the text, picking up pieces of the tale to read and ignoring other pieces, thereby creating a different experience with each reading. If you think of reading a traditional story as a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an end, then reading a hypertext is like walking through a field: readers begin at any one of several different starting points, wander around as long as they like, and then exit wherever and whenever they choose. (ELO Website)

The metaphor of walking through a field, as the writer mentions, means that there are no pre-designed paths to follow. Also, as we saw above, you do not necessarily need to visit certain pages in order to get the permission to visit other pages which the writer has placed behind some restrictive system such as guard-fields. You can run in any direction and visit anywhere that you want to. Here the work asks to be read through selecting the pieces, and openly claims that the narration of a work of web-fiction can only be served piecemeal, one bit from here, one bit from there, and you always know that your reading is incomplete and you have to create a narrative from those pieces which you have already read.

The time limit adds a temporal dimension to the text which shows that in the same way that narrative moves in time, the act of reading is also time-based. However since the allocated time for each screen is significantly shorter than the time required to read it, Chemical landscapes digital tales works against normalizing the act of reading and providing the reader with the ease of reading a work of fiction. In other words, the reader has to constantly engage with a medium which at the same time reveals the story and then makes it fade away before her very own eyes. Since the reader cannot click anywhere on the sky section of the work, and the story only appears by clicking on the land/landscape section of the screen, the writer is also implying that the stories do not exist in the immaterial realm of the sky (as opposed to the material realm of the land), and it is through engaging with the material medium and the body, that a (potential) story takes place; these stories may be about the skies or the land, but it is the land which can be the originator of the story, not the sky above. While the text is brought up, the background turns into white and in a way it parodies the act of reading a print work (black on white), and its ephemerality in the culture, as Joyce (1995) had said that the book is "momentarily" an "instantiation of the network."

Some experimental authors like Gass have attempted to show that the fictional represented world is not a real world and this world is an artifact designed and made by the author. The narrative strategy of this work does the same thing too. As soon as the reader clicks on the bottom part of the screen, one of the eight narratives emerges and then fades into white and fades away before it allows the reader the chance to fully read it. Therefore, the representation moves toward de-presentation and brings the role of the medium, which is the interference of the machine here, to the foreground.

The non-transparent status of the work is also stressed here. By creating something through an artificial method, and then naming it a landscape, one is actually paralleling the act of creating a fictional world and giving its agent/characters and settings familiar names. It is an effort to create a world which is not the outside world, but has certain similarities to that world, in the same way that those landscapes are not real landscapes, but have similarities to the landscape as such.

Conclusion

Every written narrative at its best represents an abstract (fictional) landscape in the mind of the reader and this is something that the figural covers of most books betray. In works of web-fiction the represented fictional world which has been given shape by the author only takes shape in the mind of the reader through the reader's engagement with the text. The underlying physical organization of this work is a window toward the medium, and this is how it becomes similar to Gass's metaphorical statue. The same opening frame is repeated in the text to foreground the experience of reading and in that way it becomes similar to the looking at a statue. The gaze of reader moves along the photogram, but after a short while, the front page re-inserts itself in the experience of reading. In fact, reading is different here in the way that it involves engaging with the medium rather than seeing through it.

This work comments on and criticizes the way earlier writers of hypertext fiction had divided up their lexia for the readers, imposing a rhythm for reading which as Aarseth (1997) depicts is more restrictive than the rhythm imposed on reading by the print narratives. As it can be seen, dividing chunks of texts written by and for the computer is arbitrary, and there are no hard and fast rules for how many words should be there in a lexia (as opposed to a page of a book which almost contains the same number of words as the other pages), and though some lexias are densely filled with words, others contain fewer words, and there are even some with only one or two letters in works like Afternoon. The normal practice for a reader of a work like Afternoon is that she should read to the end of the lexia and then click on the words which yield. However, Chemical landscapes digital tales eliminates this spatial arrangement and exerts a temporal limitation on the act of reading which allows only a couple of words to be read before it fades out. This feature makes media more visible and makes it a part of the message it is aiming to convey. It also forces the reader to make a mental connection between the photogram on the screen, the words which he has read in his previous reading, and the words which he reads at that specific moment when the text fades in again.