In the earlier mentioned
hypertext Zeit für die Bombe a situation arises in
which the character Iwan opens a suitcase and discovers
something that looks like a bomb. He is tempted to press the
red button. The next sentence turns his temptation into
ours: Don't we all want to press or turn something? The
encouragement "Iwan, just do it" is set up as a link and is
thus actually adressed to the reader. If one clicks a
sentence appears saying that Iwan clicked and the time
remaining until the explosion is shown. The time pops up for
just a moment, since Iwan closes the suitcase immedately. At
the end of this hypertext the bomb kills
Iwan.
The meaning behind this
setup is obvious: The reader kills the story's character.
The sentence "Iwan clicked" makes sure that we do not
identify ourself with Iwan. The reader is, by her click
action, drawn into the story, not as victim but as
perpetrator. This is a shift in the psychological function
of the reading process that Lucretius pointed out 2000 years
ago in the second book of "On the Nature of Things" (Line
1-4 in book two):
How sweet, to watch
from the shore the wind-whipped ocean
Toss someone else's ship in mightly struggle;
Not that the man's distress is cause for mirth -
Your freedom from those troubles is what's sweet.
Now, within digital
literature, the reader not only delights in watching other
peoples' disaster but also causes it, or at least she does
not avoid it even though she could have, by refusing the
offered link. The aim of this passage is to provide a
metareflection on the media and its idea of remote action
without consequences.
There is an allusion to the
shipwreck with audience constellation within the text
itself, when Iwan complains that the reader enjoys his
disaster in cold Moscow from her own warm room. Iwan then
threatens the reader with a hand grenade. Unfortunately, the
author fails to bring the grenade to the reader. This would
have been the other part of interaction: the punishment for
what one does on the computer. The author could have
programmed something which would happen after the reader has
clicked on the link that triggers the bomb. Imagine a
confusion on the screen like a simple fade out function or a
false virus message followed by a system crash that forces
the reader to restart her computer. This would have been an
honorable task for hackers; one could call it crime for
art's sake. (try
again)
This example raises some
other questions about digital literature. The sentence "Und
die Bombe tickte" (And the bomb ticked) shows that the
digital word can not only express but also act.
In this case, it does both,
like in a play where the stage directions are read out loud
during the performance. We may consider it a version of
"kinetic poetry" as known from 
Robert
Kendall's works,
where the graphical choreography of text coordinates meaning
and movement. "The words themselves, as they move and change
on screen, become like actors in a theater piece." However,
with respect to theater, we also may consider our example
redundant, since acters normaly do not say that they are
angry or depressed but express it. It does not need to be
said, as it is already performed. Therefore, a consequence
of the animation seems to be omiting the verb and writing
just: "And the bomb" with a blinking 'bomb'.
We realize that here the
text turns into a sort of double medium, a 'visualisation
without pictures'. The next step would be to substitute the
word 'bomb' by a blinking picture of a bomb. A further step
would be to employ a sound file and have the picture of the
bomb ticking. If we consider this to be too much
visualisation, as a reduction of the word's signification
process to its surface spectacle, we also may object to the
presence of the blinking word as evidence of this
process.
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