Each set of text uses a list of keywords (words or phrases drawn randomly from a variety of sources) in a fixed order
There are also 7 headlines -- sentences made from combining a word from each list into a sentence -- which are displayed in the "Zipper" animation (see above).
The original Erewhon is presented in a Flash-based interface (large size for projection) in which the texts are "interrupted" by related images
News from Erewhon, in its initial incarnation is an example of Web Art 1.0 with a slight leaning towards 1.1 because we exploit Google Image search: We display our text with our design. In Erewhon 2.0, we propose to do what older websites have had to do: upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0 whilst preserving the essence of Erewhonicity and without alienating users. Thus, instead of a single URL in a web journal, there will now be a profusion of Erewhon web installations hosted by us and by others as well as coffee mugs, calendars, phone apps, toothpaste, chapbooks, comic books, software, underwear. . .
Our first public incarnation of Erewhon 2.0 is the Erewhon Flexagon, an artist's book printed on a flexagon featuring 8 newly recombined texts from the original keywords in which each text incorporates all the keywords from a keyword set (the flexagon texts are mathematically "dual" to the headlines in the original News from Erewhon, in which each headline was made from one rext from each set). The artist's book reveals the text through successive unfoldings. It is available for sale for $5.
Our first e-literature component of Erewhon 2.0 is A Nice Glass of Rum, by Martha Deed, a commentary about her text from the original Erewhon text of the same name. The piece is structured as a network of nodes, each containing text and an image. It is displayed using an adaptation of a Flash interface first built by Niss using Actionscript 2.0 for Reframing Cheektowaga. The actual content of the piece is stored outside the program in an XML file along with a collection of images. This should have made it easy to replace the Cheektowaga content with the Erewhon content, but in fact the process was difficult and unpleasant. Processing XML in Actionscript 2.0 is quite painful, as this code shows. (Web pages showing code were created with http://textsnip.com/.)
As you can see, it is hard to read and write in this format, so Niss created Makezoom, a helper tool in Flash Actionscript 3.0 to provide the correct syntax for nodes. Makezoom consists of two small Actionscript 3.0 class files: Makezoom.as and ButtonPanel.as
She plans to expland this into a complete tool for authoring pieces in this format, i.e. a network of nodes in which each node has a text or image or both (perhaps other media eventually), plus links to other nodes. There are many tools (for example bubbl.us) for drawing "mindmaps" that allow users to create the network structure, but the nodes themselves usually do not store texts. Also, the resulting maps have no navigation features.
Using the Makezoom tool for coding nodes and also extensive debugging and coding by hand during development, Niss made From Buffalo to Erewhon, a hypertext connecting her personal history in Buffalo with the ideas behind News from Erewhon.
Niss brought the techniques of Oulipo to Erewhon by making a version of her first Erewhon text, Etat's d'Ame d'une Femme Ordinaire which does not use the letter 'e'