All this I saw sleeping

I want to write about stepping stones. That is, Johanna Saunderson’s web-based web All this I saw sleeping has made me want to write about stepping stones. Please hold onto this thought; I will return to it momentarily.

When clicking through the hyperlinks of All this I saw sleeping, the tab title is ‘piers plowman,’ in reference to William Langland’s 14th century alliterative poem of the same name, one of the most celebrated pieces of Middle English literature. In the poem, Langland’s narrator dreams their way through a series of 8 allegorical visions, encountering archetypal characters embodying the virtues of medieval Catholic faith; Truth, Conscience, Reason, Will, others. All this occurs in a ‘fair field full of folk’ ensconced in England’s Malvern Hills, occupying the middle plane between Heaven and Hell. Langland’s is a narrative closer in structure to the Platonic cave than the monomyth, Johanna’s use of which I found refreshing in a moment when the ‘hero’s journey’ has become the de facto arc of near-all contemporary fantasy writing. Their knowledge of Langland’s verse is clearly intimate; apt lines and phrases have been selected from it with care, and its imagery has been beautifully rendered into 3D-animated GIFs, all under the same hexadecimally pale pink sky.


All this I saw sleeping is an intuitive adaptation of Piers Plowman then, lifting some lines wholesale and gently expanding others. Johanna has moved the tale from the Malvern Hills into a web browser-based hypertext; a text made navigable through the use of hyperlinks, in this case created using open-source tool Twine 2.0. In this transfiguration, the feeling of Langland’s visions has been carefully preserved. In fact (and this may make some English Literature scholars blanch), in some respects I felt it enhanced. This is hypertext as an elliptical method, and one fitting for Langland’s implosive poem. In the act of hyperlinks bouncing you from passage to passage, All this I saw sleeping is more mazelike than Piers Plowman; more reticulate, more nonlinear, and doubling back on itself more often. This is what poet Seamus Heaney has called fretwork - ‘work, that is, where fret means to adorn with interlaced work.’ Heaney used this term in reference to Old English alliterative verse such as Langland’s, where a fret is an ornamental Anglo-Saxon wood carving, typically knotty in design. The form of fretwork adopted by Johanna represents the foundational tenets of immersive world/ level design in videogaming (as evidenced wonderfully in the construction of the dungeons in the Legend of Zelda series), and even in the nascent form it takes in Johanna’s work it is clearly felt. The secondary world created by Langland and (re)animated by them is rendered convincing by this quiet resistance to ease of navigation. This is not the immaculately prepared runway of your Facebook timeline looking to seduce, this timeline wills you to get genuinely lost in its interlaced ornament. And Johanna has retained the wider mythology of Piers Plowman. In their narrative’s fleeting contacts with multifarious locations and characters, it brushes Langland’s broader legend(arium) and has the suggestions of a much wider lore; the sort of knotty adornments that inspire fans of such secondary worlds to create and fret over unbelievably extensive wikis (the largest of which is Wookieepedia). And in doubling back to Heaney; the title of the interview from which I lifted the above quote is Stepping Stones. More on those now.

Johanna and Langland are using their works to approach something beyond human understanding. Now is when you can release the thought I asked you to hold at this essay’s opening, and refer back to my epigraph from Christian philosopher, mystic, conceptual mathematician and ‘great spirit’ Simone Weil. Johanna’s sequential webpages and Langland’s numbered visions read not as an empirical exercise but a supernatural approach towards a higher understanding. This was even extolled in a conversation I had with Johanna about the creation of All this I saw sleeping; they described an incremental process of gathering materials and widening horizons, before a sudden intuitive transition to an illogical state of creation, felt more in the body than in the notebook. Here special mention must go to Johanna’s beautiful musical compositions that soundtrack All this I saw sleeping; loose, bitty, chirpy and created quickly in a webtool. They sound like what I am struggling to describe, and crackle with supernatural ‘lightning flashes’ most obviously. Embracing this new mode of working is echoed in Weil’s ‘instants of contemplation, of pure intuition’ and could be described, I think, as leaps of faith. And here are the stepping stones I opened this essay with. All this I saw sleeping is not an academically rigorous argument, it is a lived process of putting one foot in front of the other, in clicking hyperlink after hyperlink, in line after line printing itself in your browser window, in gradually fording the cosmic stream, in approaching god (whatever that may mean to you) one hop/ skip/ jump/ leap/ step at a time.

Langland’s stones clearly step toward penance in the face of the big-G God of medieval Catholicism, but whom or what is Johanna attaining? In their animation of Langland’s field of folk - the realm of humankind - it becomes the narrative’s subject. This is a folk tale about folk; a tale by and for people passed on by people, made from the bottom-up. In this respect the internet is the perfect contemporary home for Langland’s verse. FACT Liverpool curator Helen Starr recently described a current ‘folk renaissance’ to me occurring in online spaces. Networked culture - social media, memes, messaging et al. - comes from the people, just as folk arts do, and along those lines can be rethought as a folk movement pushing against capitalism, (and in the case of the UK specifically; the Tories, our white supremacism and undyingly imperial ego). All this I saw sleeping felt immediately consistent to me with Starr’s description of this folksy reawakening, both in terms of the material it is adapting and its utilisation of bottom-up online platforming. Johanna’s respect for the people-powered engine of Piers Plowman extends even to their use of animation tools in the creation of the flanking GIFs. Their use of the premade default assets of Maxon’s animation software Cinema 4D repositions them as ‘folk artefacts’ (another term given to me by Starr) - objects in the public domain, belonging to everyone and theoretically usable by anyone. In much the same sense, the aforementioned Twine tool is open-sourced. Star(r)s are aligning.

With the folksy nature of the internet in mind, let’s get technical.

Johanna’s hypertextual stepping stones exist as an HTML (hypertext markup language) file hosted on the free service Neocities, and in this respect are remarkably consistent with Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of the world wide web in the late 1980s. Initially, the internet was little more than a way for users to up- and download ‘read only’ files - like HTMLs - to be browsed at their leisure. It did not allow for the more complex interactions such as commenting, streaming, executing scripts and gathering data that our current Web 2.0 implementation and its HTTPs (hypertext transfer protocols) are rife with. At first glance, Johanna and Langland’s field of folk may seem to be best represented in the mess of liking, commenting, reposting etc. that many of us experience everyday on contemporary social media platforms. However, to take this view is to conveniently forget the capitalised architectures that these practices exclusively exist within, to the delight of their architects. In a 2014 paper, digital culture professor Nupur Choudhury lists some of the ‘limitations’ of the HTML-centric implementation of Web 1.0;

But doesn’t incompatibility with machines and mass data collection privilege folk over the algorithm? And surely as a ‘web master’ Johanna has a personal authorial agency which cannot be experienced by one subservient to the machinations of Instagram (for example)? To me, Johanna has understood that Choudhury’s supposed limitations are not limitations at all, and in fact has overturned them in a way that is wonderfully consistent with the stepping stones toward (small-g) god, folk and truth of All this I saw sleeping and Langland by extension. Berners-Lee wrote that ‘HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book,’ and when adapting an original text as Johanna has I can’t imagine a more appropriate medium to use for this project. I would argue Johanna’s is not a luddite’s approach, but one that looks to the internet’s infancy with a formalist’s appreciation of what we were too quick to leave behind. Or perhaps more accurately, what the internet’s corporate monetisers have been highly effective at slyly convincing us to leave behind, as borne of financial self-interest. I am speaking of open spaces for the hosting and reception of authored content without advertising - outside of the deterministic and homogenising strictures of Web 2.0’s monolithic proprietary platforms such as Facebook, Instagram (also Facebook), WhatsApp (also Facebook), Google, YouTube (also Google), etc. Johanna’s creation is folksy and bottom-up, not capitalist and top-down. For the flash gamers out there, it’s the difference between Miniclip and Newgrounds, the latter’s slogan aptly being Everything, By Everyone. Along these lines, All this I saw sleeping is Something, By Someone.

Neocities’ creator Kyle Drake tweeted shortly before his service’s launch in 2013; ‘I want to make another Geocities [a hotbed of online expression in the Web 1.0 era]. Free web hosting, static HTML only, 10MB limit, anonymous, uncensored.’ Neocities is expressly a bottom-up city of open doors - without billboards or roadsigns - and here the folksy origins of All this I saw sleeping are relevant again. Berners-Lee has often expressed despair over the trajectory the world wide web has taken from its HTML-ey beginnings to what Choudhury envisions as its 3.0 and 4.0 iterations. Johanna is again stepping backwards and forwards here; working in, on, with and through folksy, people-powered spaces. Web 1.0 was a decentralised field. Neocities is a decentralised field. Johanna has reimagined it as a field of folk.

All this I saw sleeping may be proudly read-only, but it is not only read. My interactions with it have been felt, wandered through, clicked around, navigated, orienteered, sailed. It is static in the programming sense alone. Such is the rich and underappreciated form of the hypertext fiction, both online (a favourite example of mine being the work of Everest PipkinSuch [as 2020’s gift game]) and off-, as seen in Julio Cortázar’s dazzling novel Hopscotch. I’ve always thought Cortázar’s title a perfect encapsulation of the medium, in fact the entire choose-your-own-adventure genre relies totally on the visceral fun this format affords the experience of reading. Experiencing All this I saw sleeping is fun - something I think is undervalued in contemporary arts - and feels like doing such a hopscotch. In the nonproprietary field Johanna is sunbathing in, the typical online barrage of vested self-interest fell away and I chose my own adventure. An old web is spun anew. Please try All this I saw sleeping, and choose yours too.

P.S: I hadn’t had a dream for months. A few days ago, I woke up in my native Somerset having spent the night talking to a fish person on the ceiling. All this I saw sleeping is a dream with eyes open, in an open tab, in an open window, in an open field, in a neocity.