RA-DIO
In 1993 the first Italian hypertext novel, Ra-Dio, was published on floppy-disk along with a print edition. Lorenzo Miglioli aimed to break traditional schemes of Italian literature exactly as Sex Pistols’ punk renovated musical panoramas in the 70's. Thus, this work has not been corrected on its orthography aspects and it has some obscene and disturbing content, that had their ultimate success in the group of Italian writers named “Cannibali”, founded later on. “RA-DIO, 1993, was thought as a readymade […] Ra-Dio has to be kept closed, in its cellophane, that one is the exhibited work. Literary, construction of fiction and theory-fiction, parallel worlds and often alternative words [...] doesn't try to express the unexpressible. In case, to unexpress the expressible.” The Great Hypertext Swindle, «Neural», 1994
Ra-Dio was the first Italian narrative hypertext. Made by Lorenzo Miglioli (already author of experimental texts for various media, from television, to cinema, to theater), Ra-Dio was published in May 1993 in the Elettrolibri series, a co-edition between the Castelvecchi (Rome) and Synergon publishing houses (Bologna), with the technical contribution of the Milanese group Human Systems.
As evidence of the historical transition period, Ra-Dio was presented in two versions: a paper version, in the form of a booklet with a green cover, and a digital version, in the form of a 1.44 Mb floppy disk (to be precise, the floppies were two: one compatible with DOS and one compatible with Mac. Besides, the floppies were attached to the paper publication). The 90-pages booklet contained some extracts from Ra-Dio and Bit Generation, another short story written by Miglioli, and an interview with Michael Joyce. The latter was the author of the first hypertextual electronic novel ever published, afternoon, a story (1987), as well as the co-creator of Storyspace, the hypertextual writing and reading platform with which both Ra-Dio and afternoon itself were made.
Each floppy disk contained the first Italian translation of Joyce's novel (edited by Alearda Pandolfi, Filippo Soresi and Walter Vannini) and Ra-Dio, naturally, in a largely reworked version compared to the paper version, both because it exploited the potential of electronic medium, and because it interacted with other texts (Bit Generation and other short stories written in co-production with Stefano Raspini and Giuseppe Caliceti, founding members, together with Miglioli, of the literary research group I.E.N. Ipermarket Emilia Nord).
Visionary, caustic, provocative, Ra-Dio is indeed a tale of dystopian science fiction - together with the technowarrior John Cable Cult III we discover that humanity has been extinct for thousands of years and the Earth has become an immense virtual museum - but it is also above all, an artistic intervention born from the awareness of the evolution of literature: Miglioli, in fact, described the digital version as a "ready made" of the new literature in mutation, a virus not to be freed by opening the file that contained it (and, as such, Ra-Dio was exhibited in an avant-garde collective at the Center Pompidou in Paris, in 1995).
Miglioli's artistic-conceptual operation generated an enormous media impact: interest in hypertextual literature exploded in Italy, Ra-Dio sold over twenty thousand copies and its author became a cult author for an entire generation.
The original edition is practically impossible to find, but it is possible to interact with an archival version faithful to the original published in September 2023 on archive.org, thanks to the joint effort of some collectives and institutions involved in preserving and studying the history of technology, culture and digital society: MIAI (Interactive Museum of Computer Archaeology), MusIF (Museum of Functioning Informatics), and LEI (Italian Electronic Literature) group.