Short Story

From Rhizome Artbase
Thomson & Craighead (Alison Craighead, Jon Thomson)
1995
Description

Short Story is the first online artwork made by Thomson & Craighead. An experiment in hypertext, it also uses still images, which, at the time of its creation, had only just become universally supported by commercial web browsers. Clicking on either text or image moves the user between parallel narrative threads made up of mixed-up extracts taken from an old edition of the St. John’s Ambulance first aid manual and the screenplay of Reservoir Dogs.

Rhizome staff
2021

"Short Story" is the very first online artwork made by Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead back in 1995. It is an experiment in hypertext, but also uses still images, which had only recently become supported universally by web browsers. "Short Story" looked at how making optional links between things might change a narrative thread - unfix it, if you like. It offered a way of navigating between mixed-up extracts taken from an old edition of the St. John’s Ambulance first aid manual and the screenplay of Reservoir Dogs, but in a rudimentary and limited way. In effect you could simply jump between one of two parallel threads, either by clicking a text link or on the picture on any given page. You have to remember that back then the web was just beginning to be widely used having only come into the public eye a few years earlier. We were all just getting used to it.

Thomson & Craighead (Alison Craighead, Jon Thomson)
24 March 2008
Metadata
Variant History
outside link
1995
Thomson & Craighead (Alison Craighead, Jon Thomson)
static files
24 March 2008
cloning
Rhizome staff