Untitled - witz cultural

305HYPERTEXT 3.0 Beneath the defining image provided by this screenshot, Hubrich places abrief introduction that erplains several ways in which his web reveals theproblematic nature of conventional understandings of authorship, after whichthe text directs readers to use an immediately following set of thirteen crypticmagenta-and-yellow icons that stretch across the screen. Clicking on thembrings the reader to individual statements about issues of authorship, intellectualproperry, and our assumptions about them. Thus, in addition to thethree statements one can read in the screenshot, one comes upon additionalpassages from Barthes, Emile Benvenistet definition of the self, and MichelFoucault's "What Is an Authorl" as well as questions to the reader aboutHubrich's educational background and a humorous example of the waypeople use the author function in making aesthetic choice and evaluation:I have a friend who hates U2. One day, I wento his house to find him very excited. Hehad just recorded a song from the radio and wanted to play it to me. He said that thiswas the best song he heard for months and that he had to find out which bandrecorded it. What he finally played to me was U2's "The Fly." When I told him that, hefrowned and shut offthe music mumbling something like "That can't be ... soundedmuch better lastime I heard it." He never again mentioned U2 to me. ("U2")Other brief lexias challenge our habit of reading a coherent authorial selfout of a text. In fact, the very first lexia readers are likely to encounter-thatobtained by clicking on the icon at the extreme left-reads: "I paid someoneto do this midterm assignment for me. I really had no time at all to get it done.Therefore, everything you are going to read and what you already read has beenwritten by someone else." Another announces: "I don't know if you care, butyou are misinterpreting this web. I never meant what you think this web isabout." And yet another entitled "Handwriting" takes the form of an imageof what appears to be a handwritten three-paragraph statement, which begins:"This was written by me and Marcel Duchamp. Who do you think holds the authorshipof this paragraphl" Duchamp, "for it is his handwriting," or Hubrich,who wrote the lexial Using a computer font named "Duchamp" based on theartist's handwriting, Hubrich created his lexia in Storyspace and then madean image of it for the HTML translation. With effective playfulness he uses itto question our assumptions about authorship on several levels. As he explainsin his introductory lexia, he has arranged his materials nonhierarchically in a way that makes his text multivocal. "Therefore, the reader is encouragedto make (or read) his own connections and thus is reading hisperception of the arguments rather than my digested version of them."A great many of the other several hundred student prol'ects in Storyspace