Electronic literature scholar N. Katherine Hayles writes in 2007 that contemporary e-lit authors “explor[ed] . . .the Z-axis as an additional dimension for text display, behavior, and manipulation” (“Electronic Literature: What Is It?”). Hayles describes the work of Ted Warnell, whose TLT vs. LL (2006, strobe/flashing warning) “shifts to a dynamic surface in which rising and sinking motions give the effect of three dimensions as the layered letter forms shift, move, and reposition themselves relative to other letters” (Hayles). I am considering this spatial depth alongside our discussions of screen interfaces and my own work with Rufus Butler Seder’s Gallop! (2007), a book which combines leaf layers to produce an animated effect.

In a comment on Micaela’s post last week, Sierra mentioned otome games – a subgenre of visual novels, which themselves emerge from interactive fiction games. It’s made me think about the conventional display interface of visual novels, which generally overlay narrative text and selectable options over illustrations. While considering how Gallop! produces animation and sequence through interactions between bound layers, I’m realizing that I haven’t attended to the “Z-axis” in screen media like 2D visual novels, animation, or even the computer screen interface itself. The backlit LCD display of my computer also produces animation via interactions between layers of light and crystal. This is a 3D process. Because the computer interface produces media through X, Y, and Z axes, even what appears to be 2D screen media is materially 3D.

We therefore don’t look at a screen, but through its layers. Interactions between layers produce optical effects, much like the Scanimation barrier-grid effect produced in Seder’s Gallop!. N. Katherine Hayles has already explored computer backlighting’s “media-specific” influence on e-lit through texts like “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis” (2000), but I’m only now realizing the implications of the Z-axis to electronic literature. How does an e-lit work engage with the 3D spatiality of its medium?

Amaranth Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen (2005) mediates the 3D spatiality of print books by inviting co-reading between human and computer readers. As the human user physically moves the book’s QR-coded pages in view of a computer reader’s camera, the computer retrieves and displays 3D visuals that are mapped onto the visual feedback. As Dr. Pressman argues in “Reorienting Ourselves toward the Material: Between Page and Screen as Case Study” (2018), Borsuk’s augmented reality book shows that “technology is not only part of the work but also part of the text to be read and compared” (323). Borsuk’s “3D concrete poem[s]” (323) reflect the 3D spatiality of “page and screen” interfaces. Following Dr. Pressman’s example of “the piggy poem” in Borsuk’s project as an allusion to the animal skins used in medieval manuscripts (326), we might consider how animal skins themselves form outer layers over complex interior systems, and how the reduction of these systems to a single, ‘2D’ exterior layer reduces the complexity of their multidimensional, mediated bodies.

From now on, I’ll view media objects as assemblages of layers. This is kind of blowing me out of the water in terms of reframing my approach to e-lit and animation studies. Engaging with the materiality of Gallop! in concordance with Hayles, Borsuk, and Dr. Pressman’s e-lit studies reveals the multidimensionality of media and media activation. The medium cannot be flattened. How might e-lit engage with this spatiality, and with the illusion of flatness, as narrative and material conflicts?