18 - Hypertext and Biculturality in Two Autobiographical Hypermedia Works by Latina Artists Lucia Grossberger Morales and Jacalyn Lopez Garcia

Summary

I first discovered the work of Lucia Grossberger Morales and Jacalyn Lopez Garcia in 2010 in the course of my research on Latin(o) American digital cultural production. Inevitably, I found their work via a Google search whose terms I can only faintly recall – I think I was looking for materials to do with cyberfeminism and/or the discourse of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixing). I could see from what I found – their artists’ websites and links to individual projects – that lots of their work fitted under the rubric of digital art, and some of it also had an autobiographical narrative component. The projects selected for study in this chapter, Grossberger Morales's Sangre Boliviana (1994) and Lopez Garcia's Glass Houses: A Tour of American Assimilation from a Mexican-American Perspective (1997), are really fascinating early incursions into hyperlinked forms of digital art/literature (more precisely, they are hypermedia narratives), intended for distribution and exhibition either via CD-ROM or via the Internet itself.

While “many authors use the terms ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypermedia’ interchangeably” (Schoonmaker), hypermedia refers more specifically to “a method of structuring information in different media” where those different “chunks” of media are “connected in the same way as a hypertext” and its particular “hyperlinking” function that connects different textual “lexia” (OED, qtd in Schoonmaker). Both concepts were coined by Ted Nelson in the 1960s. Today, hypermedia forms the lifeblood of the Internet, though most criticism still tends to discuss “hypertext” as the overarching paradigm, in reference to the Hypertext Markup Language that underpins all such materials. Both hypertext and hypermedia may link materials so as to convey a narrative arc, or at least loose paratactical relationships that the reader/viewer must actively try to decipher (cf. Sorapure).

It is in this exclusively digital sense that I originally set out to explore these works’ “multimedia” nature. Indeed, in purely digital terms, the fact that they combine different media is quite inconsequential. As Jean-Pierre Balpe notes, “Today a large number of artworks are regularly produced with computers and digital tools,” one of the consequences of which is the marked tendency that “these works are multimedia,” combining a wide variety of different textual, graphic, and audiovisual materials. Nonetheless, Balpe goes on to argue that, “more interesting is that today all these perceptive differences are only appearances and that, in fact, in a hypermedia work they all belong to the same system of digital codification” (245).