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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
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Pif, LLC
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PubSphere
Reviewed by Tom Hartman
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PubSphere is a hypertext-only 'zine from Brown. Editor Bill Peña writes, "We accept submissions from all around, and are open to the work being done by up-and-coming writers, artists and musicians looking to foster the growth of New Media as true art." |
PubSphere |
In reality, however, a quick run of the cursor down the list of contributors reveals that this is pretty much a Brown-only party – a sort of private cybernetic playpen for student and faculty members of Brown's Electronic Artists' Movement (B.E.A.M) – and it's tough not to feel like we're crashing it. (Indeed, the 1200-odd clicks on the counter at the bottom of the main page make one wonder just how many non-Brownies have ever laid eyes on pubSphere.)
But what about the hypertexts? Brown is, afterall, one of the leading producers of hypertext theory, thanks largely to folks like Robert Coover and Brown colleague George Landow (author of Hypertext/Theory, one of the most substantial scholarly works on hypertext theory to date).
With all this in mind, one might reasonably expect pubSphere to have a sort of exclusive license on the cutting edge. In actuality, the bulk of the hypertexts here are school projects, and they feel like it. Some are fairly primitive; others are exercises (at best, tentative; at worst, pretentious) in molding a bit of text to fit some theory of Kristeva's or Barthes's (or more precisely, to meet the requirements of English 111).
The best thing about pubSphere is that while some of the hypertexts here are really little more than glorified links pages, there's no denying that they're very good links pages, worth browsing for the historical and bibliographic material the student authors have compiled. Click on Jeff Pack's "Growing Up Digerate", for example (billed as "an autobiography in terms of computers and computer games"), and you've hit the jackpot: critical theory, gender studies, art, economics, information technology, and other links, along with several hypertext bibliographies, all neatly organized (cheers, Jeff).
It boils down to this: if you’re cooking up a term paper on hypertext, or if you want to brush up on a little contemporary critical theory, pubSphere is a pretty good resource. Otherwise, surf on by.
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A graduate of Columbia University and The University of Pennsylvania, life-long New Jerseyan and New York Mets fan, Tom Hartman now lives in Philadelphia where he's an Associate Poetry Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. Over the years his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Photo Review, City Paper (Philadelphia), and Philadelphia Weekly. When he's not writing he spends far too much time hating the Atlanta Braves.