Abe Golam, legendary info-shaman, cracker of the sorcerer-code and creator of Grammatron and Nanoscript, sat behind his computer, every speck of creative ore long since excavated from his burnt-out brain, wondering how he was going to survive in the electrosphere he had once called home. His glazed donut eyes were spacing out into the vast electric desert looking for more words to transcribe his personal loss of meaning. "I'm Abe Golam, an old man. I drove a sign to the end of the road and then I got lost. Find me.
--Mark Amerika

A Golam is a mindless creature from Prague from traditional Hasidic stories, here Amerika relies on Abe Golam to act as a kind of spontaneous writing machine using HCT, (hypertextual consciousness) a kind of creature, or e-criture.

HTC is not necessarily new, it existed before books, before the scriptures, before the invention of God, it's just that reading a printed book bound HTC to the page and the page has been a way to enslave the reader who, bound by the spine, was conditioning their nervous system (and thus their intuitive ability) to respond to the book's false heirarchy. Artifically restrained paginality can now give way to organically disseminated vaginality as the cyborg-narrator becomes more feminine in character (HTC is a transgendered performer whose feminist rhetoric sees virtual reality as the perfect bind).

As though the French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud had just time traveled into the future to the early days of Net art experimentation, two of the ground-breaking projects on the web today, Jodi and Grammatron, revel in an intoxicated celebration of the senses with a new form of interactive-networked-experiential- transcendental-poetic-theater.

While theater begins with the notion of the suspension of disbelief, interactive art picks up where theater (and film) leaves off with branching, user-driven non-linear narrative. The letting go of authorial control has been the big dilemma in the development of interactive works as an art and/or entertainment medium, games being the exception. Both Jodi and Grammatron energetically ignore the warning signs and head unabashedly into the danger zone of audience interaction / participation. Both works gain enormously from a kind of breathless urgency, abstract use of language, and surreal sensory distortion that might have been inspired by the performance art of Artaud, the poetry of Rimbaud, or even the transformative work of such contemporary digital artists as Laurie Anderson, Char Davies or Perry Hoberman.

Grammatron points the way to a more performative use of the web [and] makes use of both linear and non-linear storytelling in a rich hyperlinked environment with sound and animated graphics.
--rp

This work employs a nice mixture of canned and performative elements, but still seems very flat to me, and borders a bit on self indulgent. The auto text moves so quickly that half the time I can't even get through it, and certainly don't get to reflect at all on it. It's like being force fed and force swallowed, never being able to taste anything or simply chew a little bit. Indigestion. And yet, I still enjoyed it some. I guess I sometimes eat too much cake too.
--ch