User:LoveElectronicLiterature/Tramway (digital story)

Tramway
Tramway, by Alexandra Saemmer is a multimedia hypertext work based on her experiences with her father's death. This work is a notable use of Flash as a transitory medium and the content was designed to degrade as computing power increased. It is written in French.

Critical Reception
Tramway was featured in ALNNT2 Laboratoire de recherche sur les arts et les litteratures numeriques. This work is noted in European Electronic Literature.

Leonardo Flores featured this work in I Love Epoetry. Flores compares the content of the work as a commentary on the fragility of human bodies with the fragility of the work's media as well. The work's timing depends on a computer processor speed, so faster computers render the work illegible. Further the Flash software is now deprecated. As Flores explains, "This mechanism of memory wants to disappear in time, like William Gibson’s “Agrippa,” perhaps because memories fade and make room for peace."

Publication History
Tramway was published in March, 2009 in Issue 2 of bleuOrange as a Flash Art piece. Washington State University's Electronic Literature Lab translated this work into Conifer, a preservation program in 2021. In his keynote for the Electronic Literature Organization conference in 2018, Serge Bouchardon used Tramway as a prime example of artists addressing technological obsolescence by re-writing and re-imagining the artwork again. Bouchardon relates in a book review of this work that that this is an interactive story where the reader's gestures and choices create different pathways and journeys through the text.