Rayuela (2013) by Santiago Ortiz is, as its name suggests, a tribute to Julio Cortázar's first non-linear novel, one of the most important pre-digital hypertextual creative exercises in the history of literature. In other words, it is a remediation that, through visualization as a resource, facilitates the two readings that Cortázar originally proposed.
Santiago Ortiz presents some lines with all the chapters numbered and that appear when sliding the cursor through the central numbers and online, so that the different reading possibilities are made available to the reader, and in each drop-down chapter, the option to follow the conventional and linear path, or choose the non-linear and hypertextual option. In this way, Ortiz rewrites and reflects on this literary work, its reading process and its writing itself, discovering its patterns and making them visible, in an exercise of replication but also of interpretation. By remediating Rayuela, (Hopscotch) (1963), also citing it, since its own title is used to give the work its name, a navigable visual network is generated, made up of 155 nodes, each of which generally has four connections, with which two previous chapters and the two following chapters.
Thus, through the possibilities of visualization, it is possible to transform the concept of reading or vision, by the one of navigation. This work based on the transposition of the text becomes a digital hypertext in which its hyperlinks allow access to different ways of organizing the diegesis and the data. Ortiz's work transforms, in turn, Cortázar's work into a graphic interface where colors, shapes and movements configure a new one. His work with Cortázar's novel, intends to reveal internal patterns by materializing his fragmentary narrative, thus 'major leaps' in numerical terms, mean 'major leaps' in narrative terms too. Rayuela uses the database and visualization to reflect on a pioneering proto-hypertext as a relational network of narrative units capable of generating both visual and textual structure. This structure is what Ortiz materializes in the electrifying image of colored concentric circles on a black background. An image that becomes part of the original work, impossible to dissociate when thinking of it now as that skein of relationships inherent in the reading by jumps proposed by Cortázar.