Untitled - witz cultural

257RECONFIGURINGNARRATIVEand settings in others. Nonetheless, I'm not sure that differing versions suggestthe same chronological endpoint, since I thought in one that the youngwoman traveled alone and in another she was with her companion. Accordingto Flitman's directions, viewers can change windows by hitting a key combination,but I seemed unable to activate specific windows of my choice. Inthis example the element of randomization proved far more important thanany viewer intervention. I found Hackney Girl visually very interesting, eventhough I never encountered the usual kind ofnarrative in which a characterovercomes an antagonist and reaches a goal, and despite the fact that certainevents, such as packing, playing with the cat, and aniving in Instanbul occurrepeatedly, they form more of a mosaic narrative than an orthodox one. Likeaf.emoon and other enigmatic hypertexts, Hacknq Girl demonstrates thatreaders or viewers can construct a coherent narrative from small chunks thatthey encounter in varying orders.Diego Bonilla's A Space of Time (Figure 30) which comes on a CD-ROM,contains two forms of digital cinema constructed out of some of the samematerials. Stream of Consciousness, like Hackney Girl, takes the form of randomizedor what I would prefer to call multiplied cinema, and a viewingoccupies between fofiy minutes and two hours. Limbo, the second part of ASpace of Time,exemplifies a form of interactive cinema that has much in commonwith an adventure game centered on exploration rather than combat.Using Quicktime VR, Bonilla has created what he describes as "a virhral tourof a century-old building as a narrative device to tell the story." The viewerenters and explores a large, multistoried empty building, using the featuresof Quicktime VR to obtain 360-degree views of each of its parts. Moving one'smouse, the viewer finds hot spots that when clicked on move one forward, soone can climb stairs and explore each room. This portion of Limbo,therefore,provides an example of virtual reality hypertext. The user's mode of movementthrough its spaces feels very much like that used in Myst and Riven,rhemain difference between them being that Bonilla's work employs digital photographyrather than computer graphics.tirabo begins with three brief videos intended to set the scene, after whichthe viewer can explore the building. The most interesting p art of Limbo appeatsin the way it branches to filmic segments taken from Strearn of Consciousness:clicking on a photograph of a young woman on a wall produces a home movieof a young child, presumably the girl in the photograph. Entering a roomon the first floor, one discovers half a dozen television monitors floating inmidair; clicking on any one of them activates a video of an older woman,apparently a real estate agent, talking about the history of the building.