The artist is restricted by the very medium by which he is producing his work in. This remids me of the paradox which underlies the genre of the Slave Narrative. For example, take the Narrative of the life of Oladuah Equaino. Throughout the work, Equaino attempts to valorize African tradition and society, to reclaim it as not barbaric, but rather as more advanced than western society. However, he must portray these feelings in English, the very language of his oppressors. He is trapped by this paradox on numerous occasions; trying to condemn whites and express his admiraion of his fellow African, but only succeeding in disproving his own point by utilizing english as his mode of communication. Derrida faced many of the same hurdles. He is restrained, and somewhat disproved, by the very linearity of his own text, which he is unable to break free from. But with hypertext comes the manifestation of Derrida's ideas. The decentering, the elimination of the author function, and multi-media nature of hypertext breeds different appraoches and modes of thought. This project may have only been able to speak to your emotions through the dramatic visual images, or the added dimesion of the auditory sense. Or maybe it was a mixture of all of these aspects which make hypertext so successful in displaying the shortcommings of the linear text.






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