This paper theorizes about how time and space are treated in digital narrative. In Mike Figgis's Time Code and Lynn Hershman Leeson's Conceiving Ada digital technology enables new ways of representing and experiencing the connections between the present, the past, and the future. In both medium and story, these digital narratives divert the reader/viewer/participant form the traditional ways of making meaning - or at least sense - of narrative. In ways similar to yet distinct from interactive media from digital art to games, these texts work at the interstices of the phenomenology of everyday life and the conventions of traditional narrative.

In Time Code, Figgis splits the screen into four equal segments; in each quadrant, the simultaneous real-time narratives unfold and intersect, with the changing sound mix as one guide to choosing points of focus on the screen. As the viewer learns to negotiate the quadrants, subjectivities, and levels of the film, the experience of time is not compressed (as it is in Classical Hollywood cinema) but fragmented and inverted.

Whereas Time Code takes place in an all-encompassing present, and the viewer must organize the diversions and inversions of time and space on the screen, Conceiving Ada offers cyberspace as a point of contact between the past and the present. Part biography of Ada Lovelace, part contemporary feminist bildung about the conflicts between work and personal life, Conceiving Ada plays on the biological and technological meanings of "conceiving" to divert the past into the present and to invert the flow of information from the present into the past. By transcending time and space, Leeson's heroines invert the patriarchal paradigms, including those of time and space, that Leeson suggests oppressed Ada Lovelace.

My presentation will explore these texts in terms of narrative theory and the phenomenology of time and space in everyday life. These ideas are ones I have been developing recently in my new media work and in developing a course in Digital Narrative.