Source Database: 
ELD
Source Entry URL: 
Source Entry OAI-PMH Identifier: 
oai:directory.eliterature.org:180
Author(s) of the Source Entry: 
Kristin Veel
Source Entry Language(s): 
English
Description(s): 

"Revelations of Secret Surveillance" weaves family history, fictional narrative and documentary material together in the story of German video artist Gunter and American writer Gwen. Spurred on by the discovery of a poem Gunter’s grandmother wrote in Nürnberg in 1933, they begin to explore past and present covert systems of surveillance and social control. Most of the characters in the narrative are recognizable from Malloy’s other work as is the minimalist visual layout of the epic composition, which is divided into preludes, interludes and cantos. The piece is composed as a hypertext in which the individual lexias work as independent entities. They can either be read sequentially by following the progression of the narrative (pressing the blue bar below the text), or the reading can branch out through the links (placed to the left of the interface). In this way an opaque, poetic universe is created, which questions causal relations as well as the probability of chance occurrences. The composition of the piece thus forms its own layer of reflection on the theme of covert surveillance and control.