Introduction

Fast City is a standalone interactive narrative project, authored in Macromedia Flash, that attempts an experimental configuration of the hypermedia reading experience. It presents an array of conflicts and psychological landscapes situated within a technology-obsessed urban space, and is particularly designed to express a cyberpunk sensibility.

As the user navigates around the narrative, various interactive elements function to trigger changes in text display as well as to generate snippets of electronic music and sound samples, thus inviting the user to engage in the narrative as a simultaneous act of reading and digital music improvisation. This resulting experience particularly foregrounds aspects of newly-emerging digital literacy in terms of interactive reading practices, and also serves as a self-referential commentary on these elements.

Fast City was conceptualised as a potential starting point for a series of digital installations based on the ideas explored here; and this documentation thus discusses how it might work as a proof of concept. Many of the ideas proposed within this documentation are primarily a response to prior criticism and research from two key sources: Aristotle's Poetics and George P. Landow's Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology.

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REF:
Halliwell, Stephen. The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary. London: Duckworth, 1987.

Landow, George P.. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.