Move over, Lara Croft and Kyoko Date, a new virtual vixen is in town. She's the Sorceress of Language in Uncharted Technologies, aka S.L.U.T., the saucy, green-haired star of Holo-X.
Holo-X, a Web-based work of hypertext fiction, employs VRML technology to enhance what was formerly a flat, text-only genre with 3-D interactive graphics -- kind of a digital pop-up book for adults.
Berkeley Interactive Media, a collective of avant-garde poets and novelists who do not have a Web site, and Alt-X Online Publishing unveiled Holo-X on 10 December, calling it the Internet's first "literary three-dimensional storyworld virtual environment."
"We were sick of the click, reload, and link paradigm of traditional hypertext," says Jay Dillemuth, one of the site's six co-authors. "We realized that hypertext literature had to become more immersive to survive."
Using a browser that supports the CosmoPlayer 2.0 plug-in, visitors to the Holo-X site can navigate through a single, 3-D room, where they can click on visual elements. S.L.U.T.'s journal, for example, links to a pop-up window of text revealing the protagonist's promiscuous thoughts.
The nonlinear -- and thus utterly "post-modern," according to Dillemuth -- narrative of this literary work mainly consists of S.L.U.T.'s 20 first-person rants in text form. One- to three-minute stories on such delightful topics as masturbation or smart drugs are activated when users click on the image of her scantily-clad body.
Custom Java scripting (written by self-taught, non-engineer Dillemuth) allows for random selection of prose by a dialogue engine. If strung together and read out loud, the total amount of dialog would amount to the length of two feature films.
Accompanying S.L.U.T.'s words are 50 to 60 tiny gestural movements -- such as the raising of an arm -- built around common key frames and linked semantically to the erotic, stream-of-consciousness narrative.
"We combined the tropes of the porn and computer game industries so we could find a different audience for avant-garde writing," states Dillemuth. Dissatisfied with the experimental poetry world where authors are lucky to sell 1,000 copies of a book, Dillemut figured lots of people would click onto a site that featured a sexbot named S.L.U.T.
Another Holo-X writer, Mark Amerika, the author of the acclaimed hypertext novel Grammatron, says the edginess of S.L.U.T.'s character might be seen as a reference to the contemporary style of the late Kathy Acker's risqué literary fiction, in which frankness and fragmentation are key tenets of narrative. Plus, writing for the Web in itself might prompt writers to be more experimental.
"Composing for the Net makes a writer feel more uninhibited," Amerika said.
"Anything goes in cyberspace. We can be upfront even in ways that Beavis and Butthead couldn't be, because they were limited by not being on the Net. We can push people's buttons and call into question our society's values because this medium more than any other celebrates the first amendment."
