A Brief Story of a Chance is a text-game and a spatial hypertext. This installation tells the story of the consequences of a chance encounter.

The story consists of three alternative subplots, dependent on the different responses of the main hero in several situations. By choosing to follow one plot, the reader has to give up the other ones. In order to read the text, they has to enter inside the book and follow the paths determined by threads stretched between its parts. Sometimes the threads split into two or three lines, offering the reader an alternative choice.

The story is narrated in the third person singular, in the historical present tense. The nature of the text resembles the style of a film script, and the story is set in one city at a specific moment in time (unity of time and space).

The objective of this work was to connect the content and the form of the story so as to give the reader a physical experience of perceiving the text, to initiate a game, and let them play the part of the protagonist by following his movement and performing his gestures. On the one hand, the plot enforces the reader’s mobility; on the other hand, it creates a textual environment and catches the reader on the web.

Korporacja Ha!art, 2010
Gallery of Art of Częstochowa City 2011

Conversation on A Brief Story of a Chance at the Cultural GPS, Anna Zimoch’s Radio Programme.

Photos by Ilona Łyżwa