YEARBOOK 2002Osa2

PART II: SUPPLEMENTS

171 172 ON HERMINUTIA Digital Rhetoric and Network Phenomenology

Talan Memmott

Disclaimer

This (therefore) will not have been [an essay]. – Derrida [sort of…]

What follows is a meander through my hypermedia work and its methods of mediation. This essay, or non-essay, will focus on some of the ideas in network phenomenology that are addressed in my hypermedia work, as well as various hyperrhetorical formations of these ideas. What follows – this non-essay – is organized something like my desk, something like my computer desktop – cluttered, in a perpetual state of disarray, arranged apho- ristically, in clusters and stacks of varying interest without appreciable reason to anyone beyond, perhaps, its primary user, its author, myself. Organized from what precedes it – namely, what can be found on mychine, and within the work I will mention below, the material presented here was initially brought together under the title A Theory of…[?], for an address at the trAce Incubation conference in the summer of 2002. As such, the precursor to this essay, to this non-essay is based in orality and performance, rather than literary text. In my mind – text none-the-less… To a certain extent my talk at the Incubation conference functioned as a rhetorical retrospective of six of my literary hypermedia works – Deliv- ery Machine 01, A Machicolated Body, Reasoned Metagoria, Lexia to Perplexia, Delimited Meshings, and Translucidity1. Each of these works explores and investigates, in hypermediated ficto-critical terms, the

173 ways in which identity is constructed, desire conducted, language altered, and self extended through the network. In regard to the ideas pillaged from the hypermedia works themselves, this non-essay (more so than the talk) is an odd sort of reverse engineering – a displacement of thoughts outside of their natural habitat; the already unnatural habitat of literary hypermedia – a reductive remediation from a heavily mixed semiotics back to the word itself. Though these works fall under the general heading network phenomenology, they are only loosely related one to another. While they share common themes and general intent, the surface subjects and their treatment are diverse. They are dis- tant cyblings, linked yet unlinked, forming a family marked by progressive gen[it]erations of a few key concepts, ideas which are probably most encyclopedically rendered in Lexia to Perplexia.

Metagoria

Met’a-go’ri-a [meta between, with, after, above, beyond + agora an assembly (agoria to speak in public)]

1. Speaking or writing across, above, among, behind, between the lines. 2. To form arguments that are transitional, that cross a line, are out of line, or out of reach. 3. To signify openly, through openings and opportunities, through the gaps, in the gaps, to plug the gaps. 4. To meander and suspect… producing tangents – clues, balls of thread or wax – leading somewhere, or not – and, back again. 5. To signify by way of opening; by way of coupling – passing this from that, this to that… 6. Turning gap to gape – the open mouth or stare, the unfolding message.

Seeking, seeding the next, the exit ~ What is solid, becomes liquid, becomes gas.

174 I began using the term metagoria long before I was involved in hypertext, cybertext, literary hypermedia or any of the electronic literary forms. In fact, I had put the term to use before much experience with computers at all. I first used the term in relationship to theater, video and installation work I was doing in the eighties to describe some of the semiotic and poststructuralist interests behind the work. Though the term proved useful to my work at the time, I think metagoria may actually be more applicable, or its conditions more fully realized in my hypermedia work. Indeed, the term may apply to the rhetoric of hypermedia in general. Literary Hypermedia confuses writing to and with its other by not allowing writing to be just writing… What is literary in the work is subsumed into a mélange of heterogeneous media, incorporated into the soil ~ max- imized, minimized, made elemental, environmental. Eroded. Occluded by the sediment, the sentiment of its own forgetting… Metagorical subjectivity, an indeterminate, continued procession-as-progression (vice versa) of the sign seems implied in the very term hypermedia. Metagorical signification operates on the premise of inference over readability. In the expanded field of textuality that is hypermedia, signification is delimited within itself, occurring across and between sign regimes, modes of inscription and methods of sensory impression. Signs, less recognizable as they are (as they were – static), become understandable only in the *arc, the ‘tween – by sparking something…(else, elseif, or)… Hyperme- dia Authorship operates in a metagorical fashion by positing, positioning the literary as already post-literary – drawing upon sign regimes other than the pure word – placing the literary within a different body, as part of something a larger – as yet undefined. The pure word is forced into a sort of obsoletics in which it cannot function sufficiently on its own. I use the term obsoletics rather than obsolescence because the word does survive, but its value is reduced and brought into relationship with other language technologies – visual, ani- mated, diagrammatic, auditory, etc. Indeed, the literary itself is minimized by the electrate tension between the various sign regimes that make up hypermedia textuality. When we discuss the relationship of text to image in hypermedia works, to a certain extent we may be looking at the language of hypermedia with a sort of nostalgia for the pure word, a nostalgia that reinforces and romanticizes the page. This gesture adds to the obsoletics, expanding the referability of just words within a hypermedia

175 work by over-historicizing the page to screen evolution. I don’t necessarily see screen-based hypermedia work as a disruption of the page paradigm, nor do I see literary hypermedia as in competition with the book. Pagination and linear argument are replaced by an invagination of content and context within the programmed application – statements are encoded, folded in upon themselves. The Hypermedia author pre-dicts, inscribes, and scripts the texture and malleability of the application extend- ing textuality to the manners of the work’s users. This seems an important aspect of digital rhetoric and can be manifest in a variety of ways. Some work may allow the user to participate in the actual creation of the content, relying upon user input to complete the writing, while other work may rely upon user decisions to expose what is concealed within the application. This moves narrative in the direction of a narra[c]tive rhetoricity that requires this other for its own de.scription. The authorial pre.dictive encoding of interaction within a work is performed in reverse by the user/reader of the work. Narractivity is the simultaneous deconstruction of the application and reconstruction of its culture. The reconstitution of a metagorical subject…

What then constitutes the document?

The document is not to be found in the object, but performed through its objects. Among the ruins we find bells and whistles, and other mercurial artifacts; half buried fragments of intent, scattered across a field of medi- ating pseudo-substance – evidence of a previous culture. Variable expo- sure to the customs of the application allows for different choragraphic, speculative readings based upon the narractive procession of the user. Through a sort of archaeology of hyper-rhetorical fragments the user discovers the applied, environmental grammatology of an otherly encultur- ated location – unearths the site, the suspect document. The document is more than one; rather, the document is a variable, emergent and recom- binant system of documentia. We will no longer talk about what literary hypermedia is, because it is NOT. It is becoming… The Medium is media/um.

176 Technontology

Where are you when you are online? OR As Microsoft has asked in regards to its MSN service – “Where do you want to go today?”

Where do you expect to go, seated there before the terminal? Who are you then? There?

User!

I am. “I” is no longer enough.

I am – Already cyborg… Attached, therefore I am…

Technontology takes as its subjective base I+device, assumes that technology and being are interlinked – that identity has always relied upon a conductive relationship between subject and device. That is to say, through the devices of technology one extends and reifies the self (which is something like saying we have always been post-human). By now, we know nothing of an unmediated life anyway… And, even of the self we see that identification is device, a technology of recognition, consensual or otherwise. The technontological subject is more project than subject, more subject than object. The projective aspects of technontology as it relates to the formation of identity are made quite obvious through the Internet apparatus. One pro- ceeds through the network, precedes the extension of identity deposited there (elsewhere), to form not a body without organs, but a body with organs elsewhere. The relationship – I to device – is more than casual. The technontological project transforms identity, the subject, by making it a condition of digital rhetoric, a process (a pro-posal) – a condition of

177 writing across the various protocols of the network. There is first (and last) what occurs at the terminal, in the immediate, the interface between the user and the device, which is in fact a mere sfumato of the technolog- ical functions behind the screen. Beneath the surface, at and away from the terminal there are thick, hidden strata of inscription – code, scripting etc., a process[ion|ing] of data that allows for this reiteration of I to emerge, to become present, again, at the screen. Where identification suggests that the suspect, the subject be accessible – again and again – to self and other, that the object remain recognizable; network-identity is (per)formed through transmissive agency – the continuous writing, and rewriting of one’s self. We function, conduct ourselves categorically, allegorically, me- tagorically – through diverse signification. We are defined by conductive extension, by our extensibility – the dys- cerning and dissemination of I elsewhere. The production of remediant agents… A twittering, chimeric machine…In movement toward ad.entity, what remains accessible are these projective, transmissive fragments of identity; deposited elsewhere – particles of data dispatched deep into the network, to serve as diplomats for, and architects in the construction of myself elsewhere – defined, processed, delimited by external systems. @body : I lie in wait. I am primarily interested in results. What the network provides, in the immediate, is return – extreme me- diacy, a re:membering of the deposited self to its originator. As the other, even of the other the result is the completion of the technontological circuit. The Device supplies de.vice, proof of the transmission of express desire through the apparatus by way of dis.play; what is returned to the screen. We meet the fetish face to face, an Ap.proximate other… Face to Interface. The self, @body, I+device is both extended and reified by/in the reply.

Cadavatars and Herminutia

The network phenomenology works I listed at the beginning of this non- essay explore the subject matter through a variety of means and material. One of the methods employed in these works is the remediation, and ex- ploitation of classical or ancient subjects. Various mythological agents are appropriated and made to perform as remediants of network attachment and technontology.

178 In Lexia to Perplexia; the Bronze Age sea-trading network centered at Crete, the Minoan Empire that spread throughout the Aegean, island to island – terminal to terminal – is used to indicate the meta-historical tendency to connect here with there, to network – to get in each others space and business – the will to exchange. In Reasoned Metagoria the Knos- sos Labyrinth is used as model for the microprocessor. Knossos was the center of the Minoan Empire and in this work the Labyrinth is referred to as the Daedelos 2000bc MacroProcessor. The will to exchange, to construct networks and conduits is not the only meta-historical tangent traced in these works. In Delimited Meshings, the relationship of User to projected technontological matter is allegorized as the relationship of Dante to Virgil. Virgil is the Virgule – the break, the block, the gateway. The Virgule, the slash introduces the wilderness, the next protocol, guiding the User toward and along a divergent trajectory; toward a breakthrough or expansion – the continued progress of adentity. The double, or doubling agent leads (knows) the way…The close relationship between generic protagonist and facilitating agent is repeated everywhere – from Gilgamesh and Enkidu to the Skipper and Gilligan – and is perhaps a metahistorical referent for extended agency. The technontological subject, I+device is something of a collation of timeless agencies… The Now, to the Never-Ending… The Egyptian Book of the Dead is another important resource utilized throughout the six network phenomenology works. I am not the only Hy- permedia author to recognize the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Osiri- an Mythology as a significant pre-mediation of certain network phenomena. M.D. Coverley’s brilliant The Book of Going Forth by Day2 recognizes and reinforces some of the metahistorical aspects of technontological desire. The Egyptian Book of the Dead’s relevance to network phenomenology is recognizable in its general narrative, and in the acts of its protagonist – the User becomes Osiris. It is interesting to note that Osiris is the Greek translation of the Egyptian Ausar, which is nearly an anagram of A User; but similarities between the acts of Ausar and the acts of A User are not limited to this fanciful bit of etymology. A User and Osiris proceed along similar lines, progressing deeper into a netherworld – the Neterkhert, or net[w]erkhert. Like Osiris, A User participates in a series of cryptic tasks in its passage through to elsewhere. In both cases the body remains static, while a double, or doubles – double, or

179 doubling agents (Ka, Khu, Kha, Ba in the Book of the Dead) – move about an elsewhere to construct the cadavatar. If the User is Osiris, then the apparatus and its applications play the role of Thoth – the Egyptian Scribe God. Thoth is central to one of the key scenes in the Egyptian Book of the Dead – the weighing of the heart in the Double Hall of Justice. This vignette is a sort of individual last judg- ment, in which the ‘heart’ of the deceased – ex.terminated at the terminal; the potential Osiris, A User is weighed against the heavy protocols of the net[w]erkhert… In Lexia to Perplexia, the vignette is repurposed as a model for network authentication. The User, the potential Osiris – the active originator of the current process @body, is verified against what the foreign system already knows of the User. Current data is weighed against the archive… In the scene Thoth serves as gatekeeper of the application and mysterious blog-master of the projective technontological agent. Thoth plays something of a computational role – documenting and processing the proceedings, tabulating, announcing and archiving the results – as such, (re)writing A User into the elsewhere. Thoth is relevant aside from his specific relationship to Osiris – the facilitator of countless meta-historical tendencies. Classically, he is the inventor of writing and of law, of engineering and navigation, philosophy and war machines. In his association with the Greek Hermes, the Roman Mercury, and the Alexandrian Trismegistus he is the god of travelers; of those that are found in nomadic [li]quiddity… A messenger god and patron of alchemy, of exchange and transformation… The conductor of souls… Of my own work – Thoth plays his blog-master role in Lexia to Per- plexia, in A Machicolated Body he mediates a dinner date, and in Rea- soned Metagoria he is the keeper of secrets, and the developer of sus- pense. The Pilot Program, which will be my next work to deal with issues of network phenomenology, explores the Thoth-Hermes-Mercury hybrid. Utilizing various Greek and Egyptian mythological sources as well as the Corpus Hermeticum, various attributes of Thoth-Hermes-Mercury are deconstructed and remediated, recontextualized to address the agential operations of the technontological subject. Thoth still stands as the timeless inventor of writing, present before inscription – at its inception; before the document – at its inscription – at both ends of the conduit – @ body and n/@body.

180 In the work Thoth is related to Trismegistos, the Hermes of the Alexan- drian Corpus Hermeticum. The name, Trismegistos – Thrice Great – is transformed, remediated and reapplied to read Transmediatos. Nous – the immaterial any/everything, the divine intellect and transcendent goal of the Hermetica – is conflated with the Egyptian NU – a watery mass, the beginning, and the end. Where Trismegistos is in contact with the null.edge (knowledge) of timeless Nous, Transmediatos perpetuates the modern, the monument at and of the moment, the impulse and transmission– as a metahistorical gesture… The classical Greek Hermes is a pivot between two primary agencies – as messenger and conductor of souls. The Pilot Program applies these agents to network phenomenology by transforming the Psychopompos (conductor of souls) into the Technopompos – the conductor of extended selves across the apparatus; and, Diactoros (the messenger) into Digitor- os, the sprite of electronic expenditure, the double-dealing diplomat for local and remote concerns. Where the Technopompos can be related back to Thoth by way of his actions in the Book of the Dead; the Digitoros has much more in common with Mercury, the Roman extension of Hermes. The remediated Thoth-Hermes-Mercury is a potent character, with multiple points of relevance to network phenomenology. At the threshold of the terminal, and beyond, Thoth-Hermes-Mercury leaves marks, Mer- curial artifacts – graffiti, codes, he marks the crossroads thereby performing the plus of I “+” device while plotting and piloting our terminal hopscotch.

Desire and Faciality

Before signing off, I would like to mention a few things concerned with faciality and what occurs at the screen. In my work Delimited Meshings, in a segment titled Narcisystems I state “it is not what I see, but where I see it that carries the seductive force at the terminal.” In this statement I am referring to our orientation to the screen, the computer monitor as it differs from the cinematic screen and that of the television. In an early essay on digital cinema, and in my hypermedia work Reasoned Metagoria I laid out these differences in rather simple terms. Our orientation to the cinematic screen, the public cinema is social and consumptive. The film screen is larger than life and

181 serves as something of a mythmaker. Narratives and images are con- sumed collectively without variability, and though filmgoers may have dif- fering perceptions of a particular film the images themselves are consistent. The television screen serves its viewers in a much more familial sense. Families and friends gather around this cool-blue hearth in their homes, in private yet social spaces. The experience is still consumptive but more selective than cinema, and the collected viewers are generally familiar with one another. At the terminal, our orientation to the computer monitor is privatized and much more intimate than either of these former points of media consumption. This is true even in busy office situations, computer labs, or Internet cafés. Generally, user and monitor are positioned at a distance from each other that is about the same as two people engaged in fairly intimate conversation. This proximity affects how we relate to the display and what we expect to be returned to the screen through our interaction with the computer. The intimate proximity of the screen establishes a convincing faciality for the monitor that does not occur for the cinematic or television screens. The faciality of the screen is further reinforced by the tactile interactions of mouse and keyboard that lead to a somewhat responsive display. These gestures operate like caresses, and what is displayed on the screen becomes the result of express desire – like light is the result of flipping a switch. The complex operations behind the screen, the actual conduction is of little concern – unrealized in its effect. We recognize this other at the screen, and our influence upon it without regard to how the output is reasoned or constructed. To a certain extent, rather than transparency, we should perhaps be talking about the extreme opacity of the apparatus – its transParental rather than transparent qualities. This sort of feedback – user input returned to the screen – establishes an [Ap]proximate Other that is in fact a conconation of the primary Nar- cisystemic desires of the user as performed through the network. Indeed, what is displayed on the screen is the temporary reification of the technontological subject. At the screen, the face, the interface we encounter not the fetish; but surrogate fetish, a small, simulacratic approximation of the original object, as imagined, desired by the originator of the impulse – the attached user. The severe faciality, and the super-imposition of an [Ap]proximate Other to this abstraction of express desire allows us to look beyond the shortcoming of the (suspect) object on the screen. To this

182 extent, it is not what is made visible that is key but that it is made visible, that through the network desire finds such a convenient circuit. The screen may be alluring, but the basis of this allure is not really in the displayed objects, but in desire’s conductivity. The display is a short-circuiting of the actual transmission of desire through the device of its de.vice. I recognize the contradiction in stating that conductivity is of little concern to the user, yet is the manufacturer of the screen’s allure. In fact, it is this oscillation, this contradiction that permits our seduction and subsump- tion by the possibilities of a media rich network. One could say that this is entirely apropos of desire even outside of network phenomenology – another metahistorical tendency – and that the conditions and expressions, the devices of want are always something of a fiction. As is this non- essay.

All of these works are linked from: http://memmott.org/talan http://califia.hispeed.com/Egypt

183 BIOPOETRY

Eduardo Kac

Since the 1980s poetry has effectively moved away from the printed page. From the early days of the minitel to the personal computer as a writing and reading environment, we have witnessed the development of new poetic languages. Video, holography and the web have further expanded the possibilities and the reach of this new poetry. Now, in a world of clones, chimeras, and transgenic organisms, it is time to consider new directions for poetry in vivo. Below I propose the use of biotechnology and living organisms as a new realm of verbal expression. 1) Microbot performance: Write and perform with a microrobot in the language of the bees, for a bee audience, in a semi-functional, semi-fictional dance. 2) Atomic and molecular writing: position atoms precisely and create molecules to spell words. Give these molecular words expression in plants and let them grow new words through mutation. Observe and smell the molecular grammatology of the resulting flowers. 3) Marine mammal dialogical interaction: compose sound text by manipulating recorded parameters of pitch and frequency of dolphin communication, for a dolphin audience. Observe how a whale audience responds and vice-versa. 4) Transgenic poetry: synthesize DNA according to invented codes to write words and sentences using combinations of aminoacids. Incorporate these DNA words and sentences into the genome of living organisms, which then pass them on to their offspring, combining with words of other organisms. Through mutation, natural loss and exchange of DNA material new words and sentences will emerge. Read them back via DNA se- quencing. 5) Amoebal scripting: Hand write in a medium such as agar using amoebal colonies as the inscription substance and observe their growth,

184 movement, and interaction until the text changes or disappears. Observe amoebal scripting at the microscopic and the macroscopic scales simultaneously. 6) Luciferase signaling: create bard fireflies by manipulating the genes that code for bioluminescence, enabling them to use their light for whimsi- cal (creative) displays, in addition to the standard natural uses (e.g., scar- ing off predators and attracting mates or smaller creatures to devour). 7) Dynamic biochromatic composition: use the chromatic language of the squid to create fantastic colorful displays that communicate ideas drawn from the squid Umwelt but suggesting other possible experiences. 8) Avian literature: teach an African Gray parrot not simply to read and speak, and manipulate symbols, but to compose and perform literary pieces. 9) Bacterial poetics: two identical colonies of bacteria share a petri dish. One colony has encoded in a plasmid a poem X, while the other has a poem Y. As they compete for the same resources, or share genetic material, perhaps one colony will outlive the other, perhaps new bacteria will emerge through horizontal poetic gene transfer. 10) Proteopoetics: create a code that converts words into aminoacids and produce with it a three-dimensional proteinpoem, thus completely by- passing the need to use a gene to encode the protein. Write the protein directly. Synthesize the proteinpoem. Model it in digital and non-digital media. Express it in living organisms. 11) Nanopoetry: Assign meaning to quantum dots and nanospheres of different colors. Express them in living cells. Observe what dots and spheres move in what direction, and read the quantum and nanowords as they move through the internal three-dimensional structure of the cell. Reading is observation of vectorial trajectories within the cell. Meaning continuously changes, as certain quantum and nanowords are in the proximity of others, or move close or far away from others. The entire cell is the writing substrate, as a field of potential meaning. 12) Agroverbalia: Use an electron beam to write different words on the surface of seeds. Grow the plants and observe what words yield ro- bust plants. Plant seeds in different meaningful arrays. Explore hybridiza- tion of meanings. 13) Molecular semantics: Create molecular words by assigning meaning to individual atoms. With dip-pen nanolithography deliver molecules to an atomically-flat gold surface to write a new text. The text is made of molecules which are themselves words.

185 DRUGS, MACHINES, AND FRIENDSHIPS Cybertext, Collaboration, and the Beatles, Take 10 (Norwegian Round Table Mix)

William Gillespie

I’ll start with the Unknown. Our philosophy, while coexisting with the subtle and complex and peculiar and tedious and old-fashioned reasonings of the poststructuralist era as well as fin-de-siecle pre-Y2K-apocalypse Clinton-era America, was more simple: we are writers too. We want to write. We are writers because we write. We have discovered ourselves. And also: we can write together for fun as well as for practice and even for art. Precisely because we are unknown are we free to write. We will read and write each other’s writing, and write each other’s and our own criticism until we have forgotten who we are, and the edges of our flesh have dissolved, surrendering us to dissipate in a shimmering ether of spirited collaborative intertextuality. We have all the microcosm a scholar could ask for, without leaving the boundaries of nowhere, the midwestern United States, neither east nor west coasts. Textasy, in short, where we can’t help but write. Our every movement sends out ripples across the surface of the text. And we can yell and splash each other and get water in our nose, even though literature is supposedly a private pool held by print publishers and professors. Our recognition will follow our confidence. We walked backward into the canon so it looked like we were leaving. We want to write. We are writers too. We have discovered ourselves. And so did chicken succeed egg or vice-versa. We had written plays, poems, stories, three-by-five cards, radio theater, criticism, book reviews, and the odd paragraph. We had been playing writing games together for years. We used computers. And so the collaboration of the Unknown, the game, came as naturally to us as to some Little Leaguers slipping on their mitts and heading out to the park to play base-

186 ball. There was no need to question whether we should be playing writing games: the point was to plunge in and have fun writing. HTML was mostly new to us: a little harder than a typewriter, and a little easier than Micro- soft Word. What was unnatural? Why did the writing game last for far more than an afternoon?

Hypertext1

In June 1962, when producer George Martin first signed the Beatles, he was ambivalent about them. “I’ve got nothing to lose,” he reasoned (Lewisohn 1988, 17). In their live audition there was little hint of the inven- tive chemistry they would later achieve in the recording studio. The Beatles started with a plagiarized sound. They were essentially a live R&B quar- tet, performing mostly unoriginal three-minute songs with verses, a chorus, and a middle eight, for drums, bass, two guitars, and two-to-four-part harmonies. They were cute and competent and sounded American and wore suits. They were commercially perfect, as if they had come in a can. In the early 1960s Abbey Road was a two-track studio used essentially to capture live recordings without the noise of an audience. There were few ways to revise the live recording without literally cutting up the tape. In February 1963 ten of the songs on the Beatles’ first album (Please Please Me) were recorded in the course of ten amazing hours. Later the Beatles could easily spend as much time working on a single unreleased song (‘Not Guilty’) as they did recording their first album. In October 1963 the Beatles first began to use four-track (‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’). Four-track stimulated their imagination such that its freedom would soon become a limitation. They found new ways of using the machines to record more than four tracks. They rigged an eight track machine by syn- chronizing two 4 track machines (‘A Day in the Life’). They removed erase heads from a tape deck allowing them to layer sounds indefinitely on a single piece of tape (‘Tomorrow Never Knows’). In October 1964 the Beatles first used the recording studio to record an unfinished song (‘Eight Days a Week’), listen to the recording, and finish the song based on what it sounded like on tape, and thus feedback between the collaborators and machines began to shape the composition process. In 1965 the Beatles, George Martin, and attendant engineers, began to tape their rehearsals, perhaps understanding that how they sounded on tape was more important than how they sounded in a room (‘Ticket to Ride’). And they began

187 to make habitual use of the four-track. By August 1966 the Beatles had stopped performing for audiences and were learning that while the recording studio could capture their live sound without all the damn screaming, it could also capture the sounds and music nobody had thought of yet. A song could be more than a chord structure, it could be a soundscape of imagined timbres. There was so much that the technology was not designed to do, but nevertheless could. The Beatles, George Martin, a few dedicated engineers (notably Geoff Emerick, Ken Townsend, Chris Tho- mas), and countless largely uncredited session musicians (including Mar- tin and Thomas) literally broke the rules of the staid Abbey Road studios, explored the potential and limitations of the machines, and made art. An ordinary cassette has four tracks: left and right stereo channels for sides one and two. Multitracking is a process by which simultaneous, independent sounds can be recorded on to different tracks on one piece of tape. For example, with a four-track tape, you could record the drums and bass of a song on track one, while recording two guitars on track two. Then you could play back tracks one and two while adding lead and back- ing vocals to tracks three and four. You could then mix those four tracks onto two tracks of another four-track tape, losing some fidelity and ren- dering those four tracks no longer independently editable, but giving you two new tracks onto which you could add, for example, four French horns and the sound of an orchestra tuning up. This is how Sgt. Pepper’s Lone- ly Hearts Club Band was recorded. The Beatles discovered they could use multitracking to record forward, but also to record down. George Martin describes this process as painting a picture in sound with an infinite palette (Martin & Hornsby 1979, 141), and as adding layers to a cake (ibid., 149). Instead of simply recording a song straight through from beginning to end, the Beatles could work on the whole thing at once, by layering bits and pieces here and there. They got over the conservative idea that sounds had to be recorded at the speed at which they would be played back. They learned to speed up vocal tracks (‘When I’m 64’) or slow down instrumental tracks (‘Rain’) to create effects. They pushed it. Why not a guitar amplifier feeding back? (the Beatles introduced this rock cliche in October 1964 recording ‘I Feel Fine’) a sped-up electric piano solo? (‘In My Life’) or tape loops? (‘Tomorrow Never Knows’) Why not an orchestra wearing silly hats? a dog whistle? or twelve pianos (and a harmonium) all playing one majestic chord? (‘A Day in the Life’) What happens when one uses headphones as micro-

188 phones? (‘A Day in the Life’) loudpseakers as microphones? (‘Paper- back Writer’) rotating speakers from Leslie organs as vocal amps? (‘To- morrow Never Knows’) Can a guitar sound like a piano? What would singing sound like if sung while the singer were lying on his back (‘Revo- lution I)’? swinging around the microphone on a rope (‘Tomorrow Never Knows’) or if recorded through a condenser microphone immersed in a jar of water? (one of the songs on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded this way, its title either forgotten or purposefully omit- ted from the record to conceal a flagrant and dangerous abuse of Abbey Road equipment) What kinds of distortion could be created by plugging an electric guitar directly into a recording console instead of recording its amplifier with a microphone? (‘Revolution’) overloading a microphone amp? (‘I am the Walrus’) or singing directly into the mixing board without using a microphone? (Martin and Emerick were unable to fulfill this impossible request) The Beatles were trying to think directly onto tape and their production team made it possible. Why not the smell of sawdust? (‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’) monks singing underground? guitars like seagulls? flanging? (‘Tomorrow Never Knows’) Why not a song that isn’t even a song? (‘Revolution 9’) When the machines did something unexpected, the Beatles welcomed these accidents as new ideas (the alarm clock in ‘A Day in the Life,’ the placement and missing final note of ‘Her Majesty,’ the chance occurrence of King Lear when mixing the radio into ‘I am the Walrus,’ the rattling wine bottle on the speaker cabinet in ‘Long Long Long’, the edit one minute into ‘Strawberry Fields Together’, the segue between ‘Good Morning’ and ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’). Sometimes they even left important decisions to be made by accident, employing aleatoric methods such as the cut-up technique (‘Be- ing For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,’ run-off groove of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). Beatles arrangements evolved from how their band sounded playing together in a room to how an imagined band (for example two bass guitars, lead guitar, electric piano, two drum kits, mellotron, eight violins, four cellos, a contra bass clarinet, three horns, a choir of 16 voices, a performance of The Tragedy of King Lear, and vocals (‘I am the Walrus’)) might sound playing together but all in different rooms, or even different univers- es. Sometimes one Beatle might record all the tracks himself (‘Wild Hon- eypie’), occasionally they might play together as a rock band (‘Sgt. Pep- per Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’), but most songs used unique and

189 impractical ensembles (for example drums, bass, tambourine, organ, two guitars, honky-tonk piano, vocals, and about ten guys in white lab coats using pencils to feed tape loops through machines (‘Tomorrow Never Knows’)). If Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were a real band, it would need even more people than are pictured on the album cover. The Beatles recorded songs that couldn’t be played live. You can’t play a guitar backward on stage, it doesn’t matter how good you are. They deviated from their instrumentation and genre as the machines imposed their potential and limitations on the music. They challenged the recording studio and challenged the record. Songs didn’t have to be three minutes, they could be long (‘A Day in the Life’) or short (‘Her Majesty’). Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album recorded without silences between the tracks, signaled a decisive shift in focus from the single to the “Long Playing” record album as their medium. Now they were composing song cycles. A song might now be written to complement its context (‘Sgt. Pepper Reprise’) or refer to other songs (‘Glass Onion’). Like jigsaw puzzle pieces, a song could lack closure but add closure to the whole. As the Beatles started out wanting to record traditional three-minute monaural pop songs for radio (‘Love me Do’) and ended up composing monstrous two-sided layer cakes (Abbey Road), The Unknown was a conventional idea subverted by an unexpected interaction with technology. In the beginning we wanted to write a book of criticism of our own writing. While it might be unusual for a trio of unknown writers to create a book of scholarly criticism about their own work, the idea of a book of literary criticism was neither original nor did it spring innocently from our artistic vision. Books of criticism are what professional scholars write: a default genre. As an accessory for the book of criticism we would first publish a book of our poetry and fiction: The Unknown: An Anthology. As a promotional gesture for the Anthology, we would write a hypertext. The hypertext, originally meant to be a bit of ad copy – at most a publicity stunt for the real “serious” print work – devoured the project. In a late revision of the Anthology, I added scenes from the hypertext to the collection of poems and stories. When the book of criticism appears, it will be as much about the hypertext as it is about the poetry and fiction in the Anthology. In this manner our interactions with machines – computers – and the art those interactions created – hypertext – changed the project we had set out to do into something unknown. In June 1988 the Unknown agreed to write a hypertext together. Hy- pertext? We shrugged. We started writing. We found ourselves ready to

190 play baseball in a four-dimensional park. It was impossible even to tell which team we were on or which direction to run. But understand: we were there to have fun. It was Saturday. There was nothing but to start playing ball. So we played ball. And Christ was it a long game. It took two days just to find what we thought was first base. It was the edge of a tsunami breaking gracefully with the weight of a freight train. After being forced for so long to walk the narrow passageways of sequential fiction, trained as we were in the art of obsolete literary form, the accumulated weight of untried narrative technique swept us up. And we were cool. We had no idea how to play four-dimensional baseball but seldom had the handful of spectators that dotted the bleachers seen a team take the field with such big smiles. And so we played ball. Rather than try to impose the rules of baseball onto this four-dimensional park, we let the park impose its disorder on our game. And it quickly became too late to figure out the rules, or when the game was over. All we had was an infinite beginning. We had no idea how many innings there were, or when the season ended. We would either agree to put down the gloves and walk away or keep playing until we were desperately embittered with our teammates, since every time we made it to third base, and thought we were on the verge of scoring a run, we discovered that in the distance there was a fourth base, and a fifth base, and a sixth base, and if we ever made it back to the home plate we wouldn’t even recognize it, it would just be another base. We were caught in a narrative tidal wave trying to swim. Any dilemma we created we had to write our way out of. Any problem in the text would be difficult to erase or extract, it could only be flooded with other writing. We treated accidents as intentions. Scott Rettberg says that the entire hypertext was “a mistake we decided to keep.” We forgot about the book of criticism. The Web became our canvas. If the purpose of HTML was to organize and clarify information then we would use it to disorganize and further complicate information. We played with links, and tried to subvert what little grammar they had. On the Web, the link did not have a standard meaning more explicit than “find out more about this word or phrase.” Whatever a link meant wasn’t supposed to pose a contradiction or nonsequitur. On the first night of writing, Scott wrote a scene with the phrase “Up in Conneticut, for that unforgettable barbeque with Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, the details of which we have sworn never to reveal.” (sic) (‘east.htm’) From that phrase I added a link to a scene revealing the details of the barbeque (‘detailsofwhich.htm’).

191 The link referring to inaccessible information was intended to instigate subversion. The rhythms and juxtapositions of footnotes, rebuttals, digres- sions, jump cuts, and commercial breaks found their way into our transitions. It grew. Our complications developed complications. While our intentions at the outset may have been to write a single seamless collaborative- ly-authored narrative, the nature of the machines created seams. Author- ing was channeled into writing individual scenes (HTML pages / nodes). We would sculpt these building blocks, sometimes one at a time, sometimes a sequence of blocks designed to be put together, and add links to and from them, and thus did the impossible architecture of the fiction evolve. The idea of sequence became exponentially more confused with each new scene. The Unknown stopped being a narrative sequence, and became instead a narrative sculpture. We were lifted from our familiar world of causality and working in dimensions we had never before perceived. We were composing fiction differently. Dirk describes the writing process as “like a jazz band with each member taking solos that referred to the previous riffs already laid down by whoever went before us.” We started out faking a standard – a sort of chromatic ‘Take Me out to the Ball Game’ – but after a few rounds of solos we were no longer in a recognizable key and there was no way to end. We kept playing. The narrative grew branches. We clung to the idea of sequence, and scenes became very short, links on multiple interlocking chains (‘milwaukee.htm’). We thought the branches of story might exist in the same narrative plane, describing a single coherent story universe, as with much of the sort of fiction we like in books. When this aspiration collapsed (were we approaching San Diego from the east? (‘kansas.htm’) or the north? (‘sandiego.htm’)) there was a sense of release. The last bridge to our understanding of sequential fiction was swept away in the tidalwave. Our compulsion toward closure dissipated, and that tree of branching narratives became an explosion of multiple trajectories, a haze of shrapnel. Each new scene would now take place not after or before but within. We were adding daubs of paint to a canvas, tiles to a mosaic, cutouts to a collage, layers to a cake, writing down. New scenes accumulated autono- my and began to function less as lead-ins to what they linked to (‘tomorrow.htm’) or commentary on what they linked from (‘creative- writer.htm’) and more as works that could stand on their own (‘rhyme.htm’). Now, while thinking out from the center where the hypertext began, from the first scene we wrote, where the story actually begins

192 (‘unknown.htm’) to its possible continuations; we were also thinking in from the world (literature) to the story. We began consciously to pay hom- age to our influences (‘cortazar.htm’), to incorporate existing genres (‘musical.htm’) and styles (‘spininterview.htm’). We brought the known into The Unknown as we decided that certain people, events, writing styles, and even texts – should become our own. Why not typing tests? (‘typetest.htm’) our students’ essays? (‘fivepara.htm’) program notes? (‘vienna.htm’) The Unknown now became skilled in the art of saying much by saying little, attempting through concise scenes to evoke familiar worlds. Though discontinuous, The Unknown doesn’t seek to disorient you, rather it seeks to orient you everywhere at once (‘inorbit.htm’). Few of the individual scenes are baffling (‘gospel1.htm’); it might not be clear which diagetic level they take place on, or when they happened in the story, or who is narrating them, but it is clearly science fiction (‘inorbit.htm’) or ecstatic (‘dirkspirit.htm’) or about Beckett (‘unnamable.htm’) or the desert (‘texas.htm’). Like jigsaw puzzle pieces that don’t really fit together, Un- known scenes had closure but made problematic the closure of the whole. As links accumulated to and from newly added writing, scenes written earlier became more heavily linked to. New scenes were hardest to find. We wrote several endings (‘eighties.htm’, ‘theend.htm’, ‘laparty.htm’), but the more developments we added, the more reading paths led inexora- bly back to the center: the first chapters we wrote. We tried to think of a way to offer the reader explicit reading paths that went against this current. Web design standards dictated that we needed a universal means of navigation, and thus were created indexes in which diagetic levels were arranged according to a color scheme translated by Scott Rettberg from the Chicago Transit Authority subway map. In ascending order of verisimilitude the subway lines of The Unknown are Brown for Art (‘brownline.htm’), Red for Fiction (‘redline.htm’), Purple for Metafiction (‘purpleline.htm’), Blue for Documentary (‘blueline.htm’), Orange for Correspondence (‘orangeline.htm’), and Green for our (real) Live Ap- pearances (‘greenline.htm’). From this point on, we knew when writing a scene that it would fall into one of those categories. This taxonomy was based on the writing our exploration of the technology had generated, and further exploration took place mostly along the lines of this indexing scheme. In these indexes we arranged the scenes’ title tags in alphabetic order by filename. And thus we created navigation that neither clarifies nor facilitates a clean overview of the contents. The Unknown has a search engine but you have to read to find it.

193 As an authoring tool for fiction, typewriters are designed to capture a take of a story, from beginning to end. The technology does not facilitate revision (changing the text once typed). Electronic writing allows limitless overdubbing and in this manner enables more types of collaborative writing. Revising The Unknown took place live on the Web (indeed, much of the revision happened after it had already won an international award (in a tie with Geniwait). Being edited during its publication, The Unknown was a sort of rooftop concert. When traveling and writing together we would try to make use of our immediate surroundings (‘dac1999a.htm’) the way a studio recording might try to capture the acoustics of a particular room. Because most scenes were written spontaneously, because much was written on location, and because we excised very little of The Unknown, it was important that the first take be strong. We emailed writing to each other. We visited each other in our respective cities (‘cinti1.htm’). We devised ways to work around the limitations on collaboration posed by the ordinary one-person computer keyboard. We took turns writing (‘ditch- scott. htm’). We wrote responses to one another (‘algren.htm’). We included email exchanges (‘000912.htm’) and chat room transcripts (‘chattrans.htm’). We wrote to the Web using as authoring tools portable cassette recorders (‘inthecar. htm’), notebooks (‘brownread15. htm’), postcards (‘postcards/1.html’), water colors (‘katie/diary.htm’), hotel sta- tionery (‘plimpton.html’), and radio stations (‘altxinterview.html’). We abused the equipment: we took portable computers to bars and passed them around (‘nicknjoe.htm’). We used our friends as characters (‘bleak- ley. htm’) and as largely uncredited session musicians (‘unknownclub. htm’). As the Beatles traded instruments and each sang lead vocal on every album, the Unknown would write in each other’s styles and from each other’s point of view (‘laauster3.htm’). As the Beatles raided the sound effects cabinets at Abbey Road, and began using scraps of their own outtakes in their albums, the Unknown plundered our own computers for autobiographical fragments: book reviews (‘readgaddis. htm’), new year’s resolutions (‘newyears96.htm’), letters we had sent each other long before we became our own fictional characters (‘aug1496.htm’). The Unknown’s weird conflation of fiction and autobiography got weirder. Through simple multimedia it was possible to add recordings and pictures to our work. In this manner we could write a fictional scene about a live reading, record a live reading of the fictional scene, and add the live audio back to the scene. As we began to see how this collision of reality and

194 fantasy was adding up to The Unknown, we worked with the material of reality and fantasy to facilitate it. The fantasies became more fantastic, and the reality followed, until we were at Brown University using a digital auditorium to perform a scene I had written, entirely satirically, about giving a reading at Brown University in a digital auditorium (‘brownu.htm’). After Brown we added to the scene written before Brown the cassette recording from Brown. Paul Auster has a character called “Paul Auster”? Well move over, here’s three guys writing fiction about three guys with the same names as them, and there is a recording of them reading fiction about themselves reading fiction at Brown at Brown. Instead of two Paul Austers, we’ve got four Dirk, Frank, Scott, and Williams. They write half as well but there are eight times as many of them. And the thing is, two of those four facsimiles are real, the ones who were credited with authorship whose ludicrous biographies appear somewhere in the fiction, and the ones whose voices you hear reading the fiction about reading fiction at Brown at Brown wearing suits. But this replication was not wholly motivated by canny postmodern strategy. Although Brown has yet to stock their book- stores with big color posters of us, that fiction about going to Brown was a joke that came true. Be careful what you joke about. We thought hypertext was funny; we didn’t know how serious it could be. With regard to the nature of the technology there is no real cause for comparison between the Beatles and the Unknown. While both groups engaged machines with a playful spirit, attentive to unintended effects, the Beatles worked long hours in laboratory conditions (right down to the lab coats worn by Abbey Road engineers) while the Unknown wrote on the fly in hotel rooms (‘fbifiles. htm’), at work (‘kendralet. htm’), in the back seats of moving cars (‘dac1999c.htm’), and on cocktail napkins at bars (‘dec1994.htm’). The Beatles had professional recording equipment and access to any musical instrument of the time. The Unknown had an HP Jornada, an LG Phenom, a Kodak F300, an IAWA portable cassette re- corder, and various ordinary computers. The Beatles were paid, as was a production team who could scarcely be improved upon. The Unknown were not paid for The Unknown, nor was our manager Marla (‘marla.htm’). The Beatles could call upon virtuosic instrumentalists at will and were seemingly under little pressure to deal with them in a professional manner. The Unknown didn’t even get an orchestra in funny hats. We mostly kept day jobs. The Beatles had everything they needed in order to create their best work, with the possible exception of privacy. The Un-

195 known were unknown. We had privacy. We could go to restaurants or Salsa, Machines and ride buses or write in public without Friendships: being accosted by screaming fans. The Spineless Cybertext We still can. But the Beatles and the Unknown pushed the machines. Studios Technical limitations, like all constraints, force ingenuity. State-of- The Spineless Books Cybertext Stu- the-art four-track equipment in 1966 dio is located in the mountains near wasn’t quite enough to produce Sgt. Las Vegas, New Mexico. The high Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club desert climate is temperate, dry and Band. In September 1968 the silent save for the occasional thrash- Beatles liberated an unused Abbey ing of a blue jay. Flowers and a sug- Road eight-track machine from stor- ar-water mixture attract butterflies age where it was awaiting minor and hummingbirds to the A-frame technical adjustments. Nowadays, cottage with the networked produc- recording studios can offer well tion equipment (computers, printers, over a hundred tracks, as many as a tabloid-sized flatbed scanner, dig- can conceivably be used. The Un- ital cameras, recording equipment, known was meant to be a hyper- and a thermal binding machine) on text novel, and writing was almost the second floor. There are 1700 all that our machines, programming square feet of interior space (2000 skills, and bandwidth allowed in square feet exterior) and it is still in 1998. Would Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely need of some finish work. A large in- Hearts Club Band be a better al- door planter reuses greywater and bum if it had been recorded with grows food and herbs year-round. At twenty-four-track technology? night the skies are lit up like a celes- George Martin thinks it might have tial Times Square, and UFO sightings been, but Geoff Emerick unequivo- are not uncommon. At first, when vis- cally disagrees: “We were put on the iting writers step out of the car after spot, and that was the sound you the hour and a half drive from the made at the moment; you had to put Albuquerque airport, glance around the right echo on, the right EQ, the the mountainside uncertainly, and vocal had to be right. It made things ask to check their email, they discov- easier in a way, because otherwise er that our only internet connection there are too many variables, and is a slow dialup, and sometimes be- what’s the point? Where do you go? come visibly skeptical. But our computers are in order, if off the grid, and

196 To me, that’s why there’s no great we have come to believe that the ad- product today.” (Massey 2000, 79) vantages of isolation outweigh those Regardless, part of the beauty of of being wired to the distractions of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club the internet. Band is how well it captures its Members of the Spineless produc- moment in history: the summer of tion team take on different combina- love, the drugs, the utopian yearn- tions of roles as circumstances war- ing, and the machines. rant. These are people who are nice George Martin’s contribution to to work with, and good at making the the music of the Beatles cannot be machines accommodate the desires overestimated. He produced almost and temperament of the artists. They every song, played various instru- like to try new things and develop ments including piano (‘In My Life’) methods of using the machines that and harmonium (‘Being for the Ben- are unique to each visiting artist. Wil- efit of Mr. Kite’), scored almost all liam’s role is to facilitate literature by the difficult instrumental arrange- creating circumstances in which the ments (‘I am the Walrus’), worked writers can give their best perform- late hours, and even made it possi- ances. This frequently involves cook- ble for Lennon and McCartney to ing dinner, and his stance on cilantro co-author albums when the songwrit- is unequivocal. Our designer Ingrid ing duo weren’t speaking (The works with the visiting artists to per- Beatles). John Lennon would make fect their interface (print or screen). surreal requests and George Martin She specializes in the nuances of would invent the technical means to Photoshop, Quark, and Indesign, as fulfill them. Paul McCartney would well as painting, etching, and print- sing the melodies he wanted the making. Our sound engineer Paul has string and horn players to play, and built a soundproof booth for record- George would transcribe them, ing, although he prefers to set up the “writing the dots” on to staff paper microphones outdoors to capture for the musicians. George Martin audio with the resonance of moun- and Geoff Emerick showed a will- tainside. He is fond of his reel-to-reel ingness to overlook the rules of the fourtrack machine, and sometimes staid Abbey Road studios to devise uses it to capture the audio before unconventional production tech- transferring it to the digital studio to niques that in many cases would con- manipulate using Soundforge and stitute abuse of the equipment. Dur- other digital sound editing and mul- ing the recording of ‘A Day in the titracking tools. Yes we have a piano, Life,’ 40 classically-trained musi-

197 cians were brought in to record the and the tuner makes it up from Taos orchestral buildup (overdubbed four once a year. We have no theramin times for a total of 160 on the fin- yet, but a baritone ukelele and a ver- ished recording). George Martin re- satile assortment of guitars and key- calls the evening: “The Beatles asked board instruments. We have also me, and the musicians, to wear full been offered a Wurlitzer Funmaker Or- evening dress, which we did. I left gan, though it is not yet clear how the studio at one point and came we will get it up the mountain. We back to find one of the musicians, sometimes fall back on oblique strat- David McCallum, wearing a red egies. It (usually) goes without say- clown’s nose and Erich Gruenberg, ing that William, Paul and Ingrid are leader of the violins, wearing a go- all writers as well, and are ready to rilla’s paw on his bow hand. Every- jump in to the text when appropriate. one was wearing funny hats and Some of our visiting writers more carnival novelties. I just fell around memorable lines may actually have laughing! ...When we’d finished do- been written by our staff, but we’ll ing the orchestral bit one part of me never tell. said ‘We’re being a bit self-indulgent It sometimes inspires skepticism here’. The other part of me said ‘It’s among computer purists that much bloody marvellous!’” (Lewisohn of the material incorporated into our 1988, 96–97) The incident is a won- cybertexts is hand-painted, per- derful illustration of what might hap- formed on acoustic instruments, or pen in a collaborative cybertext stu- even typewritten, but we welcome dio. I dream of such a studio and its such skepticism. Our art is content- engineers. What kinds of skills or dis- driven, and our projects welcome position might a cybertext engineer collaborators whose primary “axe” is need in order to facilitate feedback not a workstation. Our cybertext pro- between collaborators and ma- ductions tend to have a print com- chines? How might a cybertext pro- ponent as well as an electronic com- ducer coax the best possible per- ponent, and we draw on artistic tra- formances from the writers? What ditions as diverse as architecture and sort of equipment might a cybertext printmaking (we do not, however, studio have? What tools might ena- have a sculpture studio on site). The ble collaborative writing? Are there point is not computers, the point is no computers built for two? whatever we are working on at the time. And hummingbirds, butterflies, yucca, Indian paintbrush, juniper, and piñon.

198 NOTES

1. I use the word “hypertext” to denote multisequential writing. The use of image, sound, movement, or sophisticated interfaces, is not ruled out but not what I mean by “hypertext.” I mean text. But I am not talking about a single discontinuous text. I am speaking of any text, print or electronic, that either has explicit multiple reading paths or no default reading path. This includes a dictionary but not To the Lighthouse. This includes the New York Times but not “The Babysitter.” The New York Times does not explicitly structure multiple reading paths, but neither does it facilitate a default reading path, the implied (and usual) reader behavior is to scan headlines in some sections but not others, and not to read from beginning to end straight through from A1 to H12. I like hypertext though I do not particularly like the word – I don’t see how a word like that can ever become a household word, and the fact that it has the word “hype” in it doesn’t do much for its credibility as a literature. Incidentally, my “hypertext” does not include footnotes. I concede that the cognitive action of a footnote can be similar to that of a link, but footnotes are a convention of linear text, and the multiple pathways they offer are cul-de-sacs, subordinate to the thoroughfare of the main text as often indicated by a smaller typeface. A footnote makes it appear as though you have a choice of reading paths but in actuality your choice is whether or not even to read the footnote. Unless you break away from the main text in the middle to read the footnote and then stop. The end.

199 REFERENCES

Cunningham, Mark (1998) Good Vibrations: A History of Record Produc- tion. London: Sanctuary Publishing. Gillespie, William & Marquardt, Frank & Rettberg, Scott & Stratton, Dirk (2001) The Unknown. Available: http://www.unknownhypertext.com. Gillespie, William & Marquardt, Frank & Rettberg, Scott & Stratton, Dirk (2002) The Unknown: An Anthology. Champaign & Chicago & Cincinnati & San Francisco: The Unknown Press. Gillespie, William & Marquardt, Frank & Rettberg, Scott & Stratton, Dirk (forthcoming) Criticism of the Unknown. Lewisohn, Mark (1988) The Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Abbey Road Studio Session Notes 1962–1970. USA: Harmony Books. MacDonald, Ian (1994) Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties. New York: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Martin, George & Hornsby, Jeremy (1979) All you Need is Ears. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Massey, Howard (2000) “Revolutionary Recording – An interview with Geoff Emerick”, EQ (January). Excerpted from Howard Massey’s then-forthcoming book Conversations with Record Producers. Unknown, the. Personal Interview. August 2002.

200 THE CODING AND EXECUTION OF THE AUTHOR

Nick Montfort

One seldom-discussed cybertextual typology is offered by Espen Aarseth in chapter 6 of Cybertext, “The Cyborg Author: Problems of Automated Poetics.” As someone who writes using computers – and who writes entire works whose course is influenced by this use of computers – this neglected topic in cybertextual studies seems to demand my attention not only as theorist and a critic but as an author. Am I crediting my computer properly when I attribute the authorship of works that my computer helped to create? Should I give myself and my computer a “cyborg name” (like a “DJ name”) for just this purpose? When I write or use a new program, or replace my computer with a faster one, am I a new cyborg and thus a different author? Should my computer have a say in the publishing and promotion of works that we authored together? And should other important and inspirational mechanisms – my CD player, for instance, and my bookshelves – get cut in on the action as well? The phrase “cyborg author” may not have a long history, but it was used as early as 1994, in a paper by David Wall. He conceptualized the World Wide Web as a cyborg author. The Web was discussed more as a publishing system (or “author of community”) than as an author in the sense that the term is usually used. While the concept of the “cyborg author” seems difficult to discuss in any formal sense, there are clearly reasons to be interested in the authorship of texts by humans and computers working together. The two difficulties that immediately present themselves regarding the cyborg author concept are the nature of the cyborg (and, more broadly, the new sorts of relationships humans and computers might have with one other as works are authored) and the nature of authorship. I will look at these briefly and also give a short account of my

201 own experience writing 2002: A Palindrome Story in 2002 Words with William Gillespie and with the assistance of a suite of computer programs. Then, I will turn to more critically consider a recent set of poems, Static Void: Fifty-Nine Sonnets, and a Fragment, which was created by two human authors using an open source computer program they devised. I will close by trying to offer, not a new typology for human-computer co- authorship, but a model for this co-authorial process, one which is more sensitive to the actual practice of electronic literary composition and is particularly informed by the work of poets using procedures. The idea of a computer co-author, and the formal nature of the computer, certainly calls for a formal idea of co-authorship. While such a description of a co-authorial process cannot capture all the nuances of the process, it can help to point out features of this process that are of particular interest and can help us understand the role of the different participants more fully.

Cyborgs, Simians, and 100 Typewriters

The concept of the “cyborg” as it is has been used in the more specific discussion of cyborg authorship seems chimerical in many ways – as we might expect from a cyborg – and so I will admit up front that where I am really heading is into a discussion of collaborative human-computer authorship, which can also be called human-computer co-authorship. A drive- by of the cyborg is worthwhile on the way, however. The term “cyborg” was coined by Manfred E. Clynes, who used it in an article he wrote with Nathan S. Kline for Astronautics in September 1960. The cyborg, which the two described as an “exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously” (Clynes & Kline 1995, 30–31), was imagined by Clynes and Kline for the express purpose of space travel. The idea was that people should make themselves into cyborgs rather than trying to carry every bit of an earth-like environment along with them on trips into space. Almost all the cyborg enhancements imagined in that original paper involved mechanisms for injecting drugs automatically in response to some change that was detected. Kline was a pharmacologist, and the first crea- ture to be labeled a cyborg was a white lab mouse trailing an apparatus that continually pushed drugs into it. While the continual consumption of pharmecuticals is essential to certain types of creative writing (and, I sus-

202 pect, to certain types of literary creation for the computer), this is hardly what most of us have in mind when “cyborg author” is mentioned. Donna Haraway’s discussion of the cyborg as a boundary-blurring, forward-looking figure and N. Katherine Hayles’s view of the cyborg as a posthuman entity dominate the academic consideration of the cyborg today. Such views are not looked upon kindly by musician and scientist Clynes, who said in a 1995 interview that “parenthetically, the idea of a cyborg in no way implies an it. It’s a he or a she. It is either a male or female cyborg; it’s not an it. It’s an absurd mistake” (Gray 1995, 48). Clynes, who called the movie Terminator a “travesty” of his “real scientific concept,” noted that the purpose of the cyborg was to make it possible to exist, qua man, as man, not changing his nature, his human nature that evolved here. Not to change that but to simply allow him to make use of his faculties, without having to waste his energies on adjusting the living functions necessary for the maintenance of life. (Gray 1995, 47)

Later in the interview, Clynes seemed to contradict his insistence that human nature would not change for the cyborg: “Homo sapiens, when he puts on a pair of glasses, has already changed. When he rides a bicycle he virtually has become a cyborg” (ibid., 49). The idea that wearing glasses and riding bicycles makes us into cyborgs – an idea quite consistent with cybernetics and with how our boundary of our awareness must change for these internalized devices to be useful to us – certainly complicates the idea of cyborg authorship. And it gets worse, as one author wrote soon after the cyborg concept coalesced: A man with a wooden leg is a cyborg. So is a man in an iron lung. More loosely, a steam-shovel operator or an airplane pilot is a cyborg. As I type this page I am a cybernetic organism, just are you are when you take the pen in hand to sign a check. (Halacy 1965, 13)

Clearly “cyborg” blurs too many boundaries (or draws too large of a boundary) for those concerned with authorship and computers. But whatever the difficulties with the cyborg concept, and leaving aside for now the question of whether (or rather, how) cyborg existence might change human nature, there is one interesting feature of the cyborg. In the archetyp- al case one becomes a cyborg consciously in order to explore a new envi-

203 ronment. This is a piece of the cyborg worth taking along into the discussion of human-computer co-authorship.

Is There an Author in This Classpath?

Aarseth points out a few ways in which the notion of “author” has recently been complicated (noting, for instance, that “today’s complex media productions are seldom, if ever, run by a single ‘man behind the curtain.’” (1997, 165)) He does not take up the rather different way that the concept has been problematized by Barthes in “The Death of the Author” and by the New Historicists. Culture “writes” authors (even the supposedly lone author not working on a complex multimedia production) in many ways in this view, and it is the context of a certain individual’s writing, not just the particular individual (or cyborg) with the pen or keyboard, that shapes a text. Indeed, the capital-A Author as a pure voice apart from culture and history is no longer a tenable concept. Italo Calvino anticipated Barthes’s main point about the death of the author and the birth of the reader (whom Barthes called “the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost” (1977, 148)) in a speech in 1967, saying “[o]nce we have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition, the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading” (Calvino 1982, 15). He added, “What will vanish is the figure of the author” (ibid., 16). Calvino noted (giving the epigraph to Cybertext) that literature would only have a “poetic result” due to “the particular effect of one of these permutations on a man endowed with a consciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society” (ibid., 22). Based on this, an appropriate role for a human in human-computer co-authorship would certainly be “shock testing,” since computer authors cannot be expected (certainly not at this stage) to be surrounded by such individual and cultural ghosts and to react in the same way. The human should be that author who also reads, reflects, and revises. Despite Calvino’s assurance that the combinatorial game of literature could easily be played by a computer, some wonder whether a computer can truly be an author. Since questions of authorship are important ones for the courts, perhaps it is understandable that one United States legal

204 scholar has specifically taken up the question at hand in a paper entitled “Can a Computer be an Author? Copyright Aspects of Artificial Intelli- gence” (Butler 1982). According to an 1884 U.S. court case, an author is “he to whom anything owes its origin; originator; maker; one who com- pletes a work of science or literature.” Authorship, in U.S. law, must involve the expression of an idea. Yet someone who modifies a text can be an author. While an author must make some original contribution, this standard of originality is very low – only truly trivial variations would be considered insufficient for a determination of authorship. (Butler 1982, 729) Thus, an editor who corrects a text is legally an author of the resulting text. Butler considered both the automatic creation of texts and the automatic creation of software by computer programs. This covers a case not high- lighted Aarseth’s typology: a computer and human working together may generate a not just texts but cybertexts. Thus, a cyborg author might write a computer program that then generates text, or might write a computer program that writes another computer program that generates text. With- out getting too dizzy about these possibilities, the important thing is simply to realize that when we discuss human computer co-authorship we are not restricted to the case of the authorship of texts. The law would seem to hold that computers cannot be authors since their being authors would require that they have certain legal responsibili- ties and status. In considering whether a computer or “man-machine hybrid” might legally be designated as an author, Butler asked, “How could a machine be a real party in interest in a lawsuit?” (ibid., 739) Machines are already parties in interest in lawsuits every day: such machines are called “corporations” and have been given the legal status of individuals. In fact is difficult to imagine that modern copyright law could possibly exist for the benefit of human beings rather than for the enrichment of such machines. Butler admits that “[p]ublic policy considerations support the existence of trusts and corporations” but he claims (without naming any specific problems) that the problems with giving computers the status of authors “outweigh any advantages of this alternative by a wide margin” (ibid., 739–40). If we consider that making a non-trivial modification of a text is authorship, it certainly seems that (if anyone wanted to provide for the other implications) computers could legally be named as authors. The most interesting aspect of the legal discussion (for use in considering a situation of human-computer co-authorship) is that modifying a text, and not actually generating symbols for the first time, suffices to make one

205 an author. This idea can fit very nicely into a semiotic concept of human- computer co-authorship, in which the production and manipulation of signifiers (rather than the expression of an idea) is the main concern.

Deep Speed and 2002

In November 2000 William Gillespie and I began writing 2002: A Palin- drome Story in 2002 Words. We anticipated from the beginning that we would write with a computer co-author, whom we named “Deep Speed.” In fact, we did employ computer software as we wrote, and the computer had a larger role in our work than simply facilitating email exchanges between us and serving to do the usual word processing. 2002 was published in a limited edition for New Year’s Day, 2002; it was published on the Web on 20–02–2002; and it was printed as a trade book, designed by Ingrid Ankerson, in October 2002; illustrations by Shelley Jackson were featured in this volume. When Gillespie and I were finished with the text, neither of us felt that Deep Speed had really been a co-author. I will try to briefly describe how we wrote 2002, why it became clear to us that Deep Speed was not a co-author, and what might have made Deep Speed a true co-author. Although Gillespie and I have spoken and corresponded about this topic of course I can only claim to represent my own views here. I do not know, for instance, if Gillespie would really be willing to entertain the notion of a computer co-author if the computer had participated in a different way in our process. Deep Speed was comprised of several Web-based perl programs written by Gillespie, several command-line perl programs that I wrote (including pvp, the Palindrome Verification Program, and numerous ad hoc programs that I used to help me in working with particular fragments), a text file called WORDS.TXT, WordNet, and a version of the American Her- itage Dictionary that had surprisingly flexible search capabilities. (We also consulted the OED and other online dictionaries, of course.) At the very beginning of our work another individual wrote a program that searched for reversible English text on any Web page that one might specify. Use of this program brought perhaps two short texts to our attention, and they were worked into the draft, but the program was only available to us for a short time.

206 We wrote 2002 by drafting “reversible” fragments (English-language texts which, when reversed letter-for-letter, could be repunctuated into other English-language texts), emailing these to each other, revising them while maintaining their reversibility, and then repeating the process. A particular text one of us wrote might seem nonsensical to the other, so much so that it did not seem it could be revised into a sensible text, and in this case we might not bother rewriting it. We decided that certain events should happen and we then wrote (or tried to write) reversible texts that described them happening, while we also more or less discovered certain events in texts that we devised. Gillespie devised several types of fine food and drink that could be placed on both sides of the palindrome, such as “Regal Lager,” “Retro Porter,” and “wet stew;” I contributed “broiled deli orb” and “Red Ice Cider.” Such short phrases often inspired fragments and episodes. We also discussed what characters would be involved and what would happen to them, and we talked and emailed about the overall tone and style of the palindrome and what our goals were on higher levels. At a certain point we arranged the fragments we had into a single text and took turns revising that. Throughout the process, we used our verification programs to ensure that we were actually writing reversible texts – repairing any problems we found – and we did searches of computer dictionaries. I also wrote programs to find all the palindromic words in a large English word list and to search for other words that were particularly helpful at certain points. It was probably easy for Gillespie and me to decide that Deep Speed was not a co-author because both of us did actually have a co-author to whom Deep Speed could be compared. Deep Speed was not offering new ideas about what characters would be involved, what events would happen in the narrative, how the incidents would be arranged, what sorts of borderline English syntax were acceptable and what sorts were not, or even how to punctuate the text. Deep Speed was not rewriting fragments of eyebrow-raising nonsense to move them toward the edge of meaning or gently suggesting that certain reversible nonsense should really be left out. These were the tasks I considered the most difficult. Although we might use Deep Speed to determine whether a certain phrase could be reversed to a series of English words, our software did not generate text which we might rewrite or directly incorporate. Making numerous first- draft textual contributions (offering fragments to revise and include) would have gone much further toward computer co-authorship. Weighing in on

207 other sorts of authorial discussions, and determining what was sensible and what was not, was something I would have also expected from a co- author, although I did not ever expect Deep Speed to perform these tasks, even if it could have served as something of an oracle at times.

Gnoetry and Static Void

“What would be the style of a literary automaton? I believe that its true vocation would be for classicism. The test of a poetic-electronic machine would be its ability to produce traditional works, poems with closed metrical forms ...” – Italo Calvino (1982, 12–13)

Static Void: Fifty-Nine Sonnets, and a Fragment is authored, the title page indicates, by “Jon Trowbridge, Eric Elshtain, and the machine.” This makes Static Void a rare work in which the computer is actually credited as an author. The book was written using the pre-release open-source software Gnoetry, which was written by the two human authors. Gnoetry took as input thirteen Project Gutenberg texts: the King James Bible and works by Conrad, Dante, Dickens, Dreiser, Joyce, Mary Shelley, Steven- son, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Thorstein Veblen, and H.G. Wells. The words “static void,” incidentally, are used in Java to declare that a method does not belong to any specific object but to the class as a whole, and that it does not return any value. It is important to note several shortcomings of Static Void. It is dogger- el. It is made of English words, but the lines are so strained syntactically that they can seldom be imagined as felicitous English. The prosody is just as bad. There is no enjambment at all in any of the poems; each line ends with punctuation and is its own sentence. (This is an acknowledged limitation of the current Gnoetry code; the authors presumably hope that a future version will not have this limitation.) Despite the rigor that pervades the poems, some lines do not scan as pentameter – e.g., “Oh, I need no man, neither raising up?” (line 11, 45) which of course also is not sensible or grammatical – and this is due to another noted defect in Gnoetry. The unspectacular rhyme is schematic with the occasional defect of the sort one might expect: e.g., the word “record” appears so that syntactically it must be a noun, with lexical stress on the first syllable, but it is in a place where the rhyme scheme requires it to be pronounced as the verb “record”

208 with different lexical stress. Some rather obvious additional rules (a quatrain should rhyme abab where a ≠ b) could have been applied to prevent some of the failings, although the syntactical and semantic problems seem more profound. Reading the book is like actually getting to listen to HAL from 2001 sing “Daisy;” one may be amazed and pleased, but not for any aesthetic reason. Here, for example, is sonnet 52: The engine was a very narrow sluice. The while among the foliage overhead. The street there as the custom to induce. They had allowed the chorus girls ahead. The water, sighed and opened with a loud. His sorrow, yet he managed did me treads. Yes, he rejoined the voice of it, allowed. Extorted with a curse upon the shreds. Said anything he prattles still, observes. I never bargained to begin his crook. That’d do the higher mental state deserves. As giving them away, death overtook. I often wondered if he was derived. She think themselves so long before deprived.

How, then, should one bother to read such a book? It clearly would be unrewarding to read the contents as poems fit as they are for human consumption, or even as parodies of the sonnet form. And if one believes that none of the standards that apply to human poetry should apply to poems of this sort, perhaps it would be better to offer the book to one’s toaster instead of reading it oneself. Ted Nelson declared in his 1981 Lit- erary Machines, in speaking of a different sense of literature, that, despite the seemingly quirky way in which fields of research advance, “literature is debugged.” With this in mind, and as a way of trying to improve open source software, I will consider Static Void as the output from a process which ultimately may result in interesting literature but which has yet to be debugged. In fact, the book seems to be offered more as output to aid in debugging than as a book of poems. It seems likely that Trow- bridge and Elshtain did not edit the poems that Gnoetry produced particularly so that they would give an accurate impression of the type of output that other users might expect from their version 0.1 program. Seen in this

209 light, there was good reason for the authors to present – and there is good reason for others to consider – these outputs. One thing about Static Void which may not be evident from consideration of a single poem is that there seems to be something of a voice that makes itself manifest over the course of the sonnets. The syntactical problems are varied but one notices consistencies throughout in the way parts of speech are impossibly shunted into place; that consistency begins to invite interest. Perhaps this is the same crash-fetish interest we have in seeing ELIZA/DOCTOR break down as she continues her questioning, but perhaps these systematic ruptures help us to actually see language (not just the failing program) in a different way, as early text-altering programs like TRAVESTY may have done. It is difficult to watch English being broken upon the rack of the sonnet by a computer program – and the interrogation conducted in this book seems to have simply caused the early death of the prisoner – but the idea itself holds out hope that something intriguing may be tortured out of language by such tactics. To use a less gruesome metaphor, the arrangements of words here can be seen as an alien terrain, or at least a hint of one possible new territory that, cyborg- like, human-computer co-authors might explore. On a small scale, in terms of generating interesting and valid English, the current process does manage to work at times. Taken out of their contexts, there are good lines, some of which express ideas not in the source texts: The stranger overcame a hemisphere. (line 13, 24; line 3, 32) I saw a figure swimming upward rapt. (line 13, 34) Do with the language movement with a rod. (line 1, 35)

Here is a pair of lines that surprise: Turn up against the holy day in flesh. A hundred gleaming windows, their cafes. (lines 9–10, 36)

The first of these turns from abstract to concrete, the second from generic to specific. One is asked by the first line to turn “in flesh” (a seemingly tautological suggestion, but perhaps it means “do not turn metaphorically, but literally”?) against the holy day. The architectural image that follows seems apt; it provides a glorious secular scene and might even be read as a suggestion that one go to eat on a day of fasting. Here the machine voice

210 seems to be speaking poetry, yet with an alluring accent, in a way human poets do not speak. True, mining for such lines is, as Charles O. Hartman writes, “treating the computer as a retarded or psychotic human brain” that might provide “flashes (however far apart) of ordinary or extraordi- nary lucidity” (1996, 82). But if some lines do work, it can only help to identify why they do. The final difficulty is that no whole quatrain, much less a whole sonnet, holds together semantically at all. If computers are trained on statistical features below the sentence and line level, how can we expect any sense to emerge at the level above the line? Rhyme is not reason. But there is something specific to suggest, based on this difficulty: A program that generated syntactical English and could be trained on features above the sentence level might offer better output, or statistical rules might be put in place to constrain a poem overall.

A Post-Cyborg Model for Human-Computer Co-Authorship

I will mention two other sorts of human-computer work as I begin the discussion of how to model and understand human-computer co-authorship. First of all, there is grep poetry of the sort produced by Loss Pequeño Glazier and others, as described by Glazier in his book Digital Poetics (2001, 96–103). The process involved here is fairly simple: one runs the program “grep” on a text file, specifying a pattern. This searches the file for occurrences of the pattern (performing a “global regular-expression” search, hence “grep”) and returns only those lines that contain the pattern. This is, as Glazier writes, “a formal method or program for parsing or altering machine-readable text according to a fairly basic procedure” (ibid., 99). Of course a grep could be carried out by a person rather than an automatic, electronic computer. In fact one geek might request that another look through a printed list to find some information by asking “could you vgrep [visually grep] the movie time for me?” It is the formal procedure that makes grep a “computer” in the sense we are concerned with here. And for this reason we can also include a famous technique of the Oulipo, the n+7 substitution rule for transforming a text: replace every noun with the seventh noun ahead of it in the dictionary. It does not matter whether

211 a person or a computer (with approximately human-like ability to distin- guish parts of speech) carries out this procedure. A human author using the procedure is co-authoring with a computer. The human author’s contribution to the process is the selection of the source text. Here is Aarseth’s categorization of several works in their “Cyborg- Author Combinations” (1997, 135) along with my own categorization of Glazier’s grep process, the use of the n+7 procedure, and writing of Static Void as I understand it:

Examples Pre... Co... Post... Scene from Manhattan Murder Mystery XX Tale-Spin X – Schank’s version of Tale-Spin XX Racter XX – The Policeman’s Beard (stories and poems) X X – The Policeman’s Beard (dialogue) X X X Glazier’s greps X n+7 X Static Void XX

Preprocessing, “in which the machine is programmed, configured, and loaded by the human” (ibid., 135), is a feature of every work here and, it seems, of every possible work. Formal procedures, even if they might be discovered in nature, have to be selected by humans so that they can be used to generate texts. This typology, then, actually divides works into only four categories, and it does not capture anything about how the roles of human and computer may coincide or differ during the two stages. Tale-Spin, which generates every sentence from scratch, is in the same category as Glazier’s greps, which selectively subtract from human-written texts. It seems an improvement to consider human-computer authorship as a process in which the human and computer may both make moves and which has an outcome. (This type of process model can be seen as a “game” in the sense in which the term is used in game theory, although

212 since we are not yet concerned with optimizing the outcome in terms of the players’ utilities there may be little to apply from game theory beyond this definition.) That the computer has been programmed and configured by a person is taken for granted; the first move worth consideration is the first output of a draft text. The final state of this text (representing the work that is in some way published) is the outcome of the game. There are three basic types of moves: a player may generate draft text (G), remove draft text (R), or provide the other player with some instructions or intermediate text (I). Although generating some text and removing some other text could be represented with a G move followed by R (or vice versa) I will also note the move of doing both, altering the draft text (A). So, for instance, the greps might be described quite well in this scheme, in three moves: Glazier G (Provides the source text.) Glazier I (Gives the computer the regular expression to match.) Computer R (Non-matching lines are removed.)

Note that it does not matter that someone else may have written the source text originally. That matter is outside the system since for this particular authorial game we are only considering the relationship between Glazier and grep. We would omit the middle step if Glazier decided upon a regular expression to use first and then selected the source text, issuing no instructions between the selection of the text and grep’s removal of lines. We can be more specific by indicating that at each move a co-author may be restricted to operating on a certain level. As a first crude approximation in attempting a model of this sort, we will ignore the existence of such aspects as prosody, diction, and sense and simply consider the lexical level. Alterations may be made to: L Letters W Words S Line or sentences C Chapter or larger unit (whole story, poem)

“L” indicates that individual letters as well as punctuation marks may be changed (for instance, to alter capitalization or correct a misspelling). “W” indicates that whole words may be added or removed. “S” indicates the

213 same for whole sentences. Although as described here these are not actually orthogonal (one might create a new sentence by adding words and then changing the punctuation) for this first approximation I hope it will suffice to say that an author may generate or remove text from the draft at none, any, or all of these levels during a given turn. These divisions are, if not exactly arbitrary, certainly not the only possible ones. One could have a “phrase” level between word and sentence/line, have a “foot” level for metrical works, or separate out punctuation and capitalization from actually changing letters. I also have not considered during this first description of this scheme how these might apply to providing instructions; The “I” move will be left without any modifiers for the present even though it could involve providing a large corpus of text for statistical training or it could be the simple setting of a true/false switch. Despite its limitations this scheme does allows us to describe Glazier’s greps more precisely as: Glazier G-LWSC Glazier I Computer R-S

Omitting the curious case of the mixup in Manhattan Murder Mystery, which perhaps involved some randomization but which does not seem well- enough defined as a formal procedure for consideration here, the other items Aarseth considered can all be more precisely and helpfully described with this scheme: Tale-Spin G-LWSC Schank’s version of Tale-Spin: Tale-Spin G-LWSC Schank R-C Racter: Racter G-LWS Human G-LWS [repeat both n times] The Policeman’s Beard (stories and poems): Racter G-LWSC Chamberlain R-SC The Policeman’s Beard (dialogue): Racter G-LWS

214 Chamberlain G-LWS [repeat both n times] Chamberlain R-C

For the n+7 procedure: Human G-LWSC n+7 A-W

With a possible additional step, since the human may decide to select only the best sections from the text that remains. For Static Void, presumably the process was something like: Gnoetry G-LWSC Humans I [repeat both] Humans R-C

Of course, in some cases, when the procedure is not documented, the categorization a critic or theorist offers can only be a guess, but all actual processes can be described this way. Various objections might be raised; for instance, who is to say what is a draft text and what is an instruction, since a draft text that one player offers might be read, considered as guid- ance, and then deleted in its entirety? The scheme does not capture the extent of changes that are made, either. “Human A-LWS” could refer to a few minor changes here and there or a total rewrite. This is a defect of considering only the lexical level, which is easiest to deal with but limited in terms of its ability to explain which author might be most responsible for the overall sense of a work. Despite the shortcoming of this model, there still seems to be a great deal of descriptive power in it. It should point out some interesting features of human-computer collaborations. It distinguishes text-generating co-authors (or those who select text from elsewhere for processing) from those who only delete text. Also, one can use this model to note one type of move that is lacking in all of these human-computer systems: except for the human deletions that end most of these games, the computer has the last word. Hartman, a preeminent computer collaborator, found (after re- stricting himself to only performing such deletions at the end of the process for a while) that he could treat the computer’s output as a first draft and alter it as saw fit, rather than simply playing the role of “grep” himself and making deletions at the line or sentence level (1996, 83–87). In writ-

215 ing, for instance, “Seventy-Six Assertions and Sixty-Three Questions,” the last move made was: Hartman A-LW

Yet the computer’s role in the generation of text was certainly not trivial; its participation helped Hartman (as in the case of the original cyborg) think about language in new ways and explore new territories. There is something of a bonus: this perspective on human-computer co-authorship not only applies to a single human and a computer. It also applies to human-human co-authorship, and it can be used to accommodate an arbitrarily large number of authors. I am sure it would be impossible for Gillespie and me list all the “moves” of the authorship process for 2002, and one would have to consider that our remote collaboration involved diverging and converging games running in parallel, but a trace of the whole authorship process would show, even using a purely lexical model like this one, that Deep Speed did not play the same sort of role that Gillespie and I did. It would also show that we two human authors contributed about equally. Various types of editorial and less equal co-authorial relationships can also be modeled in this way. My hope is that by employing this model of co-authorship – and, in the future, by employing a more refined model that looks beyond the lexical level – we can also better understand in what ways computers and humans can work well together and how people author texts together. The problem of human-computer co-authorship is part of a general unexplored question of co-authorship. I hope my bizarre angle of approach to it will not be the only one.

216 REFERENCES

Aarseth, Espen (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barthes, Roland (1977) “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text. Edited and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 142–148. Butler, Timothy L. (1982) “Can a Computer be an Author? Copyright As- pects of Artificial Intelligence”, Comm/Ent Law Journal 4:4, 707–747. Calvino, Italo (1982) “Cybernetics and Ghosts”, in Creagh, Patrick (ed.) The Uses of Literature: Essays. San Diego: Harcourt, 3–27. Clynes, Manfred E. & Kline, Nathan S. (1995 [1960]) “Cyborgs and Space”, in Gray, Chris Hables (ed.) The Cyborg Handbook. New York & London: Routledge, 29–33. Reprinted from Astronautics, September 1960. Glazier, Loss Pequeño (2001) Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Gray, Chris Hables (1995) “Interview with Manfred E. Clynes”, in The Cyborg Handbook, 43–53. New York & London: Routledge. Halacy, D.S., Jr. (1965) Cyborg – Evolution of the Superhuman. New York: Harper & Row. Hartman, Charles O. (1996) Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press. Montfort, Nick & Gillespie, William (2002) 2002: A Palindrome Story in 2002 Words. Urbana, Illinois: Spineless Books. Available: http:// spineless-books.com/2002. Nelson, Ted (1981) Literary Machines. Sausalito, CA: Mindfull Press. Trowbridge, Jon & Elshtain, Eric & the machine [Gnoetry 0.1] (2001) Static Void: Fifty-Nine Sonnets, and a Fragment. PDF-format e- book. Chicago: Beard of Bees. Available: http://www.beardofbees. com/pubs/Static_Void.pdf. Wall, David (1994) “The World-Wide Web as a Cyborg Author in the Postmodern Mold”, Student paper for ENCR 481: Contemporary Literature and Theory, at the University of Virginia. Available: http:// www.iath.virginia.edu/courses/encr481/wall.paper.html.

217 SOFTVIDEOGRAPHY

Adrian Miles

Interactive video has much that it could learn from hypertext. Not the hypertext that is most of the web, nor the hypertext that is parodied in many of the essays in the recent interactive cinema anthology New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative (Rieser & Zapp 2002), but the hypertext theory and practice that has spent over 20 years actively making, theoris- ing, reading, and researching multilinear narrative, multilinear structure, link typologies, narrative closure in interactive narrative, anti narrative, and so on and so forth. It would be academically trivial, and probably spiteful, to catalogue the way in which recent writing on interactive cinema literally reprises the anticipation, excitement and assumptions about interactivity and nascent futures that hypertext experienced, or to point out that in three or four years exactly the same retrospective criticisms will be made of interactive video as have been made of hypertext. Multi- linear narrative, structure, and architecture are problems common to new narrative in general, so I’d like to extend this research more specifically with an investigation into ‘softvideo’ practice – critical ressentiment can take care of itself.

softcopy

In 1988 Diane Balestri published a paper that by its regular appearance in introductory books on hypertext, for example Bolter (1991) and Snyder (1996), can be considered a canonical work. In this essay she discrimi- nates between using the computer to author ‘hard copy’, that is work which requires a material substrate such as the page, and using the computer to author ‘softcopy’, work that is only intended to be presented via the immaterial substrate of the screen.

218 The implications of the distinction between hard and softcopy have been extensively explored in hypertext theory, and have been used to affirm numerous key qualities of hypertext as softcopy: screens are variable in their dimensions and may be multiple; screens may constantly vary in their dimensions; work no longer need have a front, back, or middle; content can be changed at will; readers can manipulate the presentation of content through the alteration of font size and properties, window dimensions, text and window colour; content and structure can be variable during the reading or use of a work; a work may have multiple (and simultaneous) narrative architectures; and it may be unable to be represented or distributed in any adequate hard copy format. However, much of the literature on softcopy appears to have concen- trated on its implications for the presentation or reading of content or doc- uments, whereas softcopy also has obvious and significant implications for how we consider the authoring of content, a point well made in a different context by Moulthrop and Kaplan (1991). All that is meant by this is that if we are working in a fully softcopy environment, that is working on a computer to present material that is only to be realised via the computer, then we can use new or different tools, and certainly different methodologies and practices, than those we might use for hard copy authoring and presentation. This should not be confused with the common Information Tech- nology instrumentality that uses digital tools to do old jobs in new ways, softcopy is instead a paradigmatic shift in the sorts of objects that can now be authored which entails, like most paradigm shifts, new ideologies (or at least the revisiting of old ones) of not just reading but also authoring. As an example of hard copy (print) ideology in softcopy environments, consider the role of alphabetisisation, which we ordinarily use to serially order things like academic bibliographies. Of course, they only need to have this order because they have traditionally appeared on paper, so that if you need to find a particular bibliographic entry you need to know where in the list it ought to appear. However, in a softcopy environment this is no longer necessary (and its persistence is largely due to the hegemonic hold of print literacy in academic culture) because a simple search function can easily retrieve and display any bibliographic entry, anywhere in the document or docuverse. This is not an argument against the alphabetical ordering of lists in bibliographies, it is only to point out that features like ‘sort’ in word processing programs are there to facilitate content into hard copy and maintain existing paradigms of content authoring and dissemination.

219 Most hypertext tools, on the other hand, tend not to rely on things like alphabetisation to sort or categorise information, including lists. To write in a softcopy environment is to begin to recognise some of the ideological assumptions drawn from the hard copy world that have naturalised (and socialised) our approach to the authoring, publishing, and reading of content in softcopy domains. These assumptions are derived from our intimate understanding and experience of the material resistance of hard copy environments (which for instance is why and how we have things like pagination), as it is a sophisticated material literacy that lets me make a list using a biro on paper rather than glass, and mistakes the decision to do this as my own. In print literacy this material resistance includes such things as the materiality of language (de Saussure’s signifier), our tools of inscription, and what it is we think we want to say with these. That each of these have been naturalised by the hardcopy paradigm of traditional print literacy is foregrounded by softcopy as a writing and reading practice.

softcopy towards digital video

Simply put, softcopy suggests that it is not only the presentation of objects that may change in digital environments but also the sorts of objects that can be created. However, we can only make these new objects when we are able, as most of us are with print literacy, to recognise and write in and with the qualitative material resistances and affordances of the softcopy world. This materiality is often thought to be superfluous in electronic environments, after all digitisation erases difference at the machine level, but of course as any new media practitioner knows there is resistance in code, the screen, bandwidth, users, and so on. There is a difference however between being able to affirm this resistance as that which constitutes work – work as an object and work as praxis – and regarding this resistance as noise that an imagined electronic future will dissolve. When we move to video and digital technologies it is apparent that digitisation is firmly established in the production work flow of film making at almost all professional levels, with significant creative and industrial consequences, as Elsaesser and Hoffman’s (1998) anthology and Mc- Quire’s (1997) report show. Certainly, everywhere from introductory film schools to high budget features have adopted digitisation in various guises,

220 and with the introduction of iMovie on the Macintosh and Windows Movie Maker on Windows XP, digitised video is largely the only way domestic users have ever had to edit their work. While the aesthetic influence of the digital as a mode of narration on commercial and industrial production remains relatively minor, though landmark narrative fiction works are probably Tykwer’s Lola Rennt (1998), Figgis’ Timecode (2000), Cochran and Surnow’s television series 24 (2001), and Nolan’s Memento (2000) (see for instance Hales (2002) and Dovey (2002)), it is also the case that most of the digital tools used in cinema production have been resolutely orientated towards hard copy outcomes, and in fact treat digital video largely as if it were only hard copy orientated. This hard copy view also extends to computer based video work that is not intended for traditional screen based (television and cinema) delivery, such as online, CD and DVD content.

desktop digital video into softvideo

Desktop based digital video is probably at a similar point to what desktop publishing was with the introduction of the first Macintosh in 1984. It is now possible to shoot, edit and print to tape broadcast quality video using a small digital video camera and a laptop computer (indeed Apple’s influence here is striking with Final Cut Pro largely revolutionising and redefin- ing digital video production as it moves from the desktop to the laptop). Like desktop publishing before it – right down to the almost but not quite affordable tools – desktop digital video primarily decentralises the ability to do what previously could only be done with very expensive, essentially centralised, capital and skill intensive resources. And, just like desktop publishing, its major effect is not to see a revolution in genres or a revisited poetics of cinema, but simply facilitates access to production resources so that more people more or less can now do more of the same. This, it must be stressed, is not a bad thing. However, as hypertext rather elegiacly showed us, it was not WYSIWYG design and printing that led to significant new digital genres (indeed the laser printer is irrele- vant in this context), but work that was designed to take advantage of the environment that the computer in its entirety provided. In the case of digital video, the same applies. For example, iMovie and Final Cut Pro, Win- dows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere, Avid Xpress DV, and Media 100 are all digital editing systems intended to facilitate content for presentation

221 in existing televisual contexts. This means, much like the printer in desktop publishing, that they’re primarily used to print content back to tape, whether to the camera or a VCR hardly matters. If you like, these digital tools are primarily orientated towards publication (or transmission) and this form of publication requires a linear time based substrate, the privileged model of which is of course film and its avatar the video cassette – video hard copy. Now, obviously I am suggesting that this is not so very different from using your computer to get words out onto paper, and it isn’t. But of course it also suggests an alternative conception where we can use our computers to work with time based media where the delivery environment is not subject to the temporal tem- perance of cinema and video. This does not simply mean that we can now make works that are multilinear, which seems to have been the popular understanding (and practice) of much networked interactive media. As we’ve seen, softcopy in relation to writing, includes much more than multilinearity, and while all the formal qualities of softcopy may be formed in relation to their interrogation of the stability of the page, they have also provided a poetics of screen based textual production and reception that productively looks outside of the page or the book. This suggests that we ought to be able to articulate a new poetics for desktop video – where historically digitisation in regard to video has been understood to be little more than a combination of a moving image plus sound track that can be played ‘randomly’ – that is neither specifically cinematic, videographic, or generically multimediated, a poetics that looks towards the formal possibilities afforded by digital, networked, screen based video. This poetics requires the video equivalent of softcopy, or as I prefer, softvideo.

applied softvideo

A softvideo poetics requires an immanent form of working with digital video that is perhaps modelled as much on writing as it is on film making practice. This is not an argument for the necessity or inevitability of code but only the simple observation that we have a sophistication in the way we use a biro and a piece of paper that is an exemplar of an informed literate poetics. We doodle, take notes, write in the margins, sideways, on recto and verso, apply different pressures for variable densities of ink, and so on. Contrast this to interactive digital video, as a specific, immanent,

222 and emergent digital computer process, and what largely happens is that traditional praxis remains untouched. We shoot, we cut, we compress, we put the moving image plus sound track online or into our interactive work. What is the difference between hard and softvideo? Largely that in hard video the digitised video remains a singular or if you like sufficient media object in or for itself. I mean this not only in terms of perhaps what the video segment, fragment or sequence might mean, but more specifically as an object in itself where the integrity of the object is and remains singular. It is a moving picture track with a sound track with a fixed duration. This is digital video as a delivery envelope, and even where such content might be inserted and made a part of multilinear interactive works, whether fiction, nonfiction, experimental, online, CDROM or DVD it is not interactive for the video remains mute in regards to interaction which generally happens outside of itself. In other words, it is not that much different from television, click, it plays, click, it stops, click, it gets louder, or perhaps quieter. However, if we approach video as softcopy, that is as softvideo, then we can think about digital video in dramatically different ways. This thinking, of course, can only be preliminary as I think it is clear that the genu- inely novel forms or genres that will emerge from a properly digital video practice are yet to be recognised, or even found. (In much the same way that I would argue that blogs are one of the first major immanent genres for networked Web based writing, and they took a good five years to appear, and probably another two years to become obviously visible and intelligible as a genre.) But such a thinking does and will ground itself within the materiality of digital video as a practice that hears and responds towards that which is immanent to, and enabled by, these technologies, a looking forwards toward the new rather than our current looking back- wards to define the forms and uses for digital video. A first step towards softvideo is to no longer regard digital video as just a publication or delivery format, which is the current digital video as desktop video paradigm (which is of course the same as the desktop publishing model) but to treat it as an authoring and publication environment. This suggests that a major theme for a softvideo poetics to explore is the description or development of a videographic writing practice within video itself, that is to use digital video as a medium in which we write. To return to my hypertext analogy, it is the difference between writing in a native hypertext architecture (say for instance Eastgate’s Storyspace, Apple’s

223 Hypercard, or even simply HTML) and writing in Microsoft Word and choosing to save your document as a web page. The former is writing hypertext while the latter confuses publishing in a medium with writing in the medium. To write in or with digital video should allow us to articulate a vocabulary of the elements that may constitute the formal contexts of softvideo, so that softvideo can become an engaged rather than imaginary practice. Currently, as far as I can determine, QuickTime is the only readily accessible digital architecture that supports the qualities of softvideo, and what follows is an explanation and exploration of some of the implications of this as I have developed them in my own applied research practice. As a simple example of what I mean by the materiality of softvideo is the difference in the way that a softvideo architecture conceives of frames and frame rates. If, or instance, I wish to show a still image with a continuous soundtrack, then in most video editing programs I simply import or capture (or draw) the requisite image, then stretch its duration to the soundtrack. When I save and export this work it will then draw this still image for the required number of frames at the specified frame rate. This is digital video as hard copy, for if my delivery environment is the computer screen then there is no need whatsoever to draw the single image at any frame rate, because there is not in fact a need for a frame rate in this sense – frames per second itself being very much a hard copy or hard video concept. However, if I author my content in something as simple as QuickTime Player and do the same thing, then the final digital movie that is produced operates in a softcopy manner, QuickTime simply displays one image (one frame if you like) and holds it on screen for the specified duration while the soundtrack plays. In real terms this means that to add (keeping our example rather simple) an image to a soundtrack and then saving this as a completed digital video only adds the size of the still image to the final digital file. This is the case whether the movie runs for one, three, or twenty minutes. This is a softcopy conception of digital video. A project that illustrates this well is “International Day of Time De- pendent Art” (Miles 2002) where approximately two minutes of digitised video, or if you prefer 2MB, has been stretched to run for twenty minutes twenty seconds. Of course the effect of this is to make the indexical video content (what the video footage is of) appear in extreme slow motion, but the point is that this is a digital movie that now runs for over twenty min-

224 Figure 1. Screenshot from “International Day of Time Dependent Art”.

utes, yet is only 2MB in size. Stretching its duration to forty minutes, if I am authoring in QuickTime for softvideo, makes no difference to the file size – it would still be 2MB in size. This is, of course, just a beginning, but it does suggest some of the ways in which cinematic duration becomes problematised in softvideo (a point I shall return to). More significantly for a softvideo practice is the under-

225 standing that an architecture such as QuickTime is a multitrack and multi- object architecture. What this means is that a QuickTime (and in the near future MPEG 4) file does not need to consist of one video track and one sound track, indeed the “Day” work mentioned above consists of nine video tracks, one text and one sprite track, but can more or less include any number of video, audio, text, picture, and indeed several other sorts of tracks. Now, this immediately makes possible various forms of videographic collage and montage within a single work, what Manovich (2001) describes as spatial montage. For instance, by combining one picture track with, say, nine video tracks, a movie like “canberra rain”(Miles 2002) is possible, with the divided video panes in themselves providing a form of montage, a literal cutting, internally within the movie, while also being simultaneously a form of video collage. In addition, nine text tracks are available within “canberra rain” which adds another layer or level of collage within the movie as they toggle between visibility and invisibility in response to user activity, and of course as each text pane partially obscures the video panes it also becomes an additional level of montage, though a montage performed via collage.

Figure 2. A Screenshot from “canberra rain”.

226 Figure 3. A screenshot from “Exquisite Corpse”.

Figure 4. A screenshot from “voxvog”.

227 When child movies (see for example “Child movies”, Miles 2002) are introduced, that is tracks where the content is independent of the parent movie , then further formal problems become evident. For example in “Exquisite Corpse” (Miles and Stewart 2002) three child movies are arranged within a wide screen parent movie. As the three videos and their accompanying sound tracks are child movies each can be played independently of the parent movie, and independently of each other. This also means that each child movie may also be of variable duration. In the case of “Exquisite Corpse” the user mouses into the upper or lower bar over each video window, which simply runs its associated video pane at normal speed, with full volume. At the same time the next video pane in the series plays at half normal speed, and then the next track at quarter normal speed. Mousing into another video track simply repeats the process in series. A simpler outcome is effected in “voxvog” (Miles 2002) where the central video window is divided into four transparent sprites that count and store the number of mouse entries (that is the action of the user moving the mouse into the sprite space is counted) and this is used as a variable to control which of 70 individual images to load in each of the four smaller video panes. These four panes are childmovie tracks and so what gets loaded in this particular work is conditional on when and where the user mouses within the video space. Of course these could also have been loaded on the basis of time, a combination of time and user activity, or indeed just randomised.

one softvideo poetics

It is important to recognise within these works, and in softvideo practice in general, that each of the tracks that constitute a Quick Time work are independent objects able to be scripted by the softvideo writer (softvide- ographer?). That is, each track can be conceived of as analogous to individual nodes in a hypertext work. Furthermore, each of these tracks (as objects) have a range of properties that can be controlled or negotiated via a softvideo writing practice, which in this case is literally scripting, so that their speed, visibility, volume, size, colour, transparency, direction of play, mobility, and even their presence, can be engaged with. While a softvideo movie may contain nine video and nine text tracks each can easily be

228 made to move, play, overlap, disappear, reappear, and so on on the basis of readerly actions. As a point from which to begin, certainly in the contexts of my own applied research practice, these formal elements constitute the domain of one particular softvideo practice (for softvideo is a methodology rather than a genre, style or formula) involving the use of softvideo for networked interactive desktop video. These works, known as vogs (video blogs) appropriate the generic form of the personal blog as one appropriate model for articulating a softvideo argot. This means the vogs are works that consider themselves to be sketches rather than monuments, after all, in an age of desktop consumer digital video it is probably time that video became as disposable (or cheap) as the word. As the vog manifesto (Miles 2000) states, networked interactive desktop video are an applied softvideo practice that recognises a set of key terms as enabling and productive constraints. These terms include their production and delivery via a network, on desktops, they require and assume interactivity, and they treat digital video as an authorial plastic architecture rather than a delivery format. Vogs are networked in that they are distributed via existing, viable network infrastructures, often including low band. In addition, a vog may utilise the network as an integral part of its softvideo practice, for instance

Figure 5. A screenshot from “Bergen Appropriation”.

229 in appropriating objects outside of itself that reside on the network (for instance “Bergen Appropriation” Miles 2001), providing links to objects that are available on the network, or in a more sophisticated model utilise things like QuickTime’s child movie abilities to load external content when requested. However, vogs are also networked in a less technical sense through the softvideo writing model they offer. They are small works that, like blogs, tend towards a public intimacy and offer a model for what I’d characterise as a distributed softvideo writing practice, in the same manner as blogs (Mortensen and Walker 2002). In other words, they are less about consumption (watching others content) than exploring models for authorship and production, for as blogs and most other successful and viable networked communication technologies indicate, it is the ability to participate as communicative peers that is much more significant and viable for distributed networks than our reconstruction into new consumers. A vog is interactive in that the user has to do something, and this something affects in a literal way the work itself. This is more or less Aarseth’s (1997) ‘ergodics’ where the reader or user needs to perform non–trivial actions to read the text, and these actions are non–trivial because they have consequences for the text. Hence, clicking a play, pause, or stop button is not ergodic, nor is it what I would characterise as interactive – unless we want to call our everyday use of television interactive – as they are essentially trivial actions (much like turning the pages of a book) and do not qualitatively affect the text in itself. Of course, this also presents the possibility that while an individual vog ought to be ergodic, it would be perfect reasonable when considered as a genre or a collected body of work to have a vog or vogs that in fact are not ergodic. This would be analogous to those hypermedia works that might utilise passages where there is little user choice, for instance parts of “Grammatron” (Amerika 2002) or “Hegirascope” (Moulthrop 1997), and recognises that when interactivity is taken as a given then the lack of such interactivity becomes significant and meaningful. A Web example of this would be the “last page on the internet” screens where the playful irony of the work can only operate because of our now taken for granted assumption that all web pages are in fact linked in and out. Finally, as an applied videographic networked practice vogs recognise that the visible context of publication or distribution is the personal computer screen. This does mean that the context of viewing is individual, personal, and probably domestic. It also means that users in such environ-

230 ments are generally time, bandwidth, and screen poor. Simply put, most people, most of the time, may not have two hours to interact with your content each week, and so much like blogs, vogs tend to be brief and either self contained or episodic. Even where users have significant bandwidth, for example first world universities, this still poses considerable restraints on the screen dimensions and resolution of softvideo works. In addition, users not only generally have smaller screens than those who work professionally in new media, but of course as a personal and domestic space user computer screens are also being used for other things at the same time, so a vog does not usually attempt to own all of a users screen space. This reflects the way that people actually do use their computers, ordinarily having several windows, programs and activities underway at once. An appropriate use of softvideo for such contexts then ought to recognise this and insert itself within or around what is the desktop computer equivalent of Raymond William’s (1990) televisual flow.

conclusions (consequences)

The implications of a work as simple in structure as “Exquisite Corpse” (Miles and Stewart 2002) are quite dramatic. As each of the child tracks has been scripted to loop “Exquisite Corpse” is a film with no duration, that is it has no end. This is a much more radical implication than simple video looping suggests, where such looping has tended to be singular and stable and so no fixed end simply means iterative repetition, for here there are three loops, with completely independent and variable durations, where the speed of play is partially controlled and negotiated by the user. Hence, to play this work, and here play becomes a very literal and active verb, the user via their action and the scripting is controlling the playing rate of each of the three tracks, and as they move from one to the next the duration of each is constantly changing, effectively always changing the duration of the whole. Furthermore, the relations or combinations established between each of the three video panels is and remains an open set, for mousing through the movie in the manner required to play it produces forms of collage (images on a common plane in simultaneous vision) and montage (when and where you mouse effects visual changes in the relations between consecutive parts) meaning there is no fixed work, canonical order, se-

231 quence, or teleological point that the relations among each of the three works aims towards. Hence, not only is the work of no fixed duration due to the combination of three variable loops, but also each time it is played performs a new and singular iteration of the work. The recognition that each track within the work is in fact capable of being an independent entity is a major paradigmatic shift in terms of traditional cinematic practice. It does begin to suggest the ways in which softvideography is a qualitative shift from the more usual methods of digital video production and it also helps to illustrate the way in which softvideo is analogous to hypermedia writing rather than traditional visual and audio editing practices. Each track, which of course can be of variable duration, location, size, content, and type, becomes an object to be written with, where this writing with is constituted by or in the event of authoring the work. To use a specific film analogy, if each track within a softvideo work is considered as an object then the activity of making or writing softvideo is constituted by not only the decision about which objects to include, but also which variable properties for each object ought to be scripted, and what that scripting might affect. Softvideo becomes more or less a form of ongoing and always variable, and so open, mise–en–scène. Once we recognise that tracks in a QuickTime softvideo work are discrete objects writing with these, providing an interface that controls them in some variable manner, and then actually playing these works (where it is clear that to play means much more than stop, pause, start), suggests that softvideo always requires and participates in an engaged and individuated process. It’s model is always a contextualised singularity.. All that I wish to mean by this, and I do want to insist on the change it represents, is that rather than compose the work visually and acoustically (before the camera and then in postproduction), then ‘flattening’ this work into hard copy, there is an ever present malleability to the material that now extends from the moment of content production, past that moment of traditional authorial closure, into its future. This malleability is not the question or problem of the ways in which the work will always be interpreted differently, but affects the very nature of the object that is to be interpreted, as such a work, at least in some respects, will always be a qualitatively different object in each presentation. It is not that the object produces varying interpretations but that users in the act of reading the work will inevitably produce varying works.

232 That the practice of softvideo raises significant and productive questions for traditional cinematic practice and theory ought to be obvious. One major question revolves around the way in which softvideo prob- lematises montage as a fundamental mode of time based discourse, for each of the works discussed shifts the location, role and function of montage away from the preselection and serial ordering of an eventually fixed sequence towards other possibilities. Montage as a principal of selection and organisation can now reside somewhere between the shooting or gath- ering of material, a dynamic combinatory system of construction (more or less automated), and a user who (more or less) knowingly controls and determines the particular montage event and sequence. The use of multiple windows further complicates this as the relation of window to window offers a complex collage practice, whether this be via a multiwindowed work or, in the case of the vogs, that the works appear in an always and already multiwindowed environment (the PC screen) so that a simultaneous visual relationship to other windows is always present. When time is added to this, so we recognise that the collage that is the computer screen also varies in time (this window now opens over that window) then we have a combination of collage and montage that does appear to be one of the major formal properties of such digital environments (Landow 1999; Manovich 2001). While cinema has always had a sophisticated relationship to temporal- ity it has also had a certain belligerence – ninety minutes of film or video has always and will always occupy ninety minutes. Not in softvideo. Like cinema and hypertext, it is the manner in which the parts reflect a qualitative change in the whole that is the principle of meaning and construction in softvideo (Deleuze 1986; Miles 1999). This suggests that not only is spatiality largely not of great significance for such screen based works, but that the cinema’s indexical relation to time may no longer be the bed- rock for a screen based interactive softvideo practice. However, as De- leuze more than adequately demonstrates (and for that matter Chris Mark- er’s La Jetée), cinematic duration is not the same as the record or representation of time (time as quantity) but rather the expression of a qualitative change in an always open set. This suggests, to me at least, that Deleuze will offer softvideo an applied argot that will assist in our theoretical consideration and development of a new desktop cinema practice, a theoretical endeavour that I hope will complement a possible future softvideo practice, a videographic écriture.

233 REFERENCES

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235 Rieser, Martin & Zapp, Andrea (eds.) (2002) New Screen Media: Cinema/ Art/Narrative. London: British Film Institute, 135–45. Snyder, Ilana (1996) “Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth”, in Ruthven, Ken (ed.) Interpretations. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Williams, Raymond (1990) Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

Filmography

Figgis, Mike (2000) Timecode. Marker, Chris (1962) La Jetée. Nolan, Christopher (2000) Memento. Tykwer, Tom (1998) Lola Rennt. Various (2002) 24.

236 A MATTER OF INSIGNIFICANCE The MUD Puzzle Quest as Seductive Discourse

Ragnhild Tronstad

Previous attempts to analyse MUD1 quests from the perspective of hermeneutics revealed a number of problems connected to regarding questing as primarily an interpretative activity.2 Although interpretation is of fundamental importance in order to solve a quest, and even if appropriation of the texts’ meaning to a certain extent may contribute to or enhance the player’s self-understanding,3 it does not seem appropriate to regard ”understanding” or ”appropriation of meaning” as a goal in itself when it comes to questing. One indication of this is the fact that the text space in quests may be experienced as exhausted independently of any ”fusion of hori- zons” – that is, independent of the player’s experience of having reached a (more or less complete) understanding of the text. Of methodological problems arising when approaching the quest from the perspective of hermeneutics, the more severe one is perhaps that the several parts of the quest will then inevitably be judged according to their relation to the final meaning of the quest, instead of being related to the whole, as the whole of a quest is impossible to identify before a final meaning is reached. Reading the quest retrospectively, however, parts that didn’t contribute to this final meaning may easily be overlooked. Still, such insignificant parts do have great influence on the questing experience. To understand questing, therefore, we should approach the text as it functions in the process of questing, before the text space defined by its limits as a whole is hermeneutically exhausted. The experience of having exhausted the text space in quest environments may provide the player with a sense of narrative closure to a ”quest story”. However, this does not mean that narrative closure is what determines the exhaustion of the text space. If this were the case, MUD quests

237 could just as well be explained (and discarded) as ”inferior narrative art”4: inferior because they, in contrast to more complex literary works, are easily exhausted through interpretation. But even if a sense of narrative closure may follow the solution of a quest, the text space is not to be regarded as exhausted until the player has acquired all points available in the area: combat points, quest points, and, maybe most importantly, explore points, or ”explorer flags”. Quest points are obtained when the quest is solved, the combat points when every monster in the area has been killed at least once. Monsters are normally fairly easy to find, although not always easy to kill. Explorer flags,5 on the other hand, can often be very well hidden, requiring that the player investigate every little aspect of every little room in the area, turning every stone, climbing every tree, seeking out the most unthinkable possible action in order to interact with a certain object. Such activity is worthwhile as long as there are still missing flags.6 When there are no missing flags left, there’s little chance that there will be any possible actions worth performing either. The text space may now be regarded as exhausted, as there are no more secrets expected to be found within it. In cases in which the completion of a quest does not provide any satis- factory closure of the quest as a story, inconsistencies or loose ends in the narrative may continue to be intriguing but will in general be re-examined by the player only insofar as there are missing points left in the area. When all points are gained, such narratives lose their potentiality, which is what gave them seductive power in the first place. Or to put it differently: When all points are gained, no player will go hunting for the better ”story”. The expectation of secrets to be found, thus, is determined by the knowledge of missing points in the area rather than by inconsistencies or loose ends in the narrative. From the perspective of the player during the process of questing, there is still no finite meaning attached to the quest. Instead, there is potential meaning. As a researcher approaching the quest from an analytic point of view, it is necessary to situate oneself in a similar position: that is, one must approach the quest discourse as it functions before final meaning is attached to it. I have found theories of seduction to be useful analytical tools in this respect, balancing and correcting the hermeneutical perspective. Based on my readings of Jean Baudrillard’s Seduction and Shoshana Felman’s The Literary Speech Act, I will in this essay show in what way regarding questing as a seductive, rather than interpretative, discourse may affect

238 our understanding of how quest rhetorics work. I will start out by present- ing parts of Baudrillard’s theory: First, his opposition between seduction and production, which implies the additional opposition between seduction and interpretation. Then his sketch of the seductive game, how seduction operates on the surface of meaning, is rule-bound and thereby avoids responsibility with regards to the laws governing ”ordinary life”, or life as we know it outside of the seductive game. In the next section, I will present Shoshana Felman’s reading of the Don Juan myth, as represented in Jean Baptiste Molière’s play Don Juan and, secondarily, in the opera Don Giovanni by Lorenzo Da Ponte and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Using J. L. Austin’s theory of the performatives, Felman identifies a fundamental attitude difference between the characters in Molière’s play: where Don Juan himself is totally devoted to the performative act, his antagonists want meaning. Act and meaning, in Felman’s (and Austin’s) view, are different orders and, accordingly, must be approached in different manners. Approaching the quest as a seductive discourse acting in accordance with the principles demonstrated by Don Juan, throughout the essay I will use examples from Tubmud7 to show how the seductive acts of the quest are fought by the player – the antagonist in this case – seeking, and eventually obtaining, final meaning. There are, however, strategies for fighting back. Countering and evading the player’s insistence on closure, clever quests and quest objects use such strategies for what they are worth. This is their seductive power.

Baudrillard on Seduction

Production, like revolution, puts an end to the epidemic of appearances. But seduction is inevitable. No one living escapes it – not even the dead. For the dead are only dead when there are no longer any echoes from this world to seduce them, and no longer any rites challenging them to exist.

For us, only those who can no longer produce are dead. In reality, only those who do not wish to seduce or be seduced are dead. But seduction gets hold of them nonetheless, just as it gets hold of all production and ends up destroying it. (Baudrillard 1990 [1979], 84)

239 Seduction is, in Baudrillard’s view, an opposite of production. What belongs to the order of seduction – to the order of the secret – production will materialise; what seduction plays with and hides, production makes visible. Made visible, the mysterious appearance of an object, a number, or a concept is reduced into something obvious. In the way that Baudril- lard is here reversing the prevailing order by replacing the primacy of production with that of seduction, seduction itself is explained as a strategy of reversal: playing with the immanent reversibility of systems. Etymologically, seduction is derived from the Latin se-ducere: ”to take aside, to divert from one’s path” (Baudrillard 1990 [1979], 22). The seductive game, thus, is leading the other from his truth. Threatening the very foundation of production systems and interpretative disciplines, seduction has always been banished from these discourses. According to Baudril- lard, though, such banishment serves seduction well, as it can after all never obtain any real power. Seduction works only by reversing existing power. But as it reverses the existing power, it is nevertheless more pow- erful. As seduction is opposed to production, it also opposes interpretation: countering the interpretative act by reversing and delaying it, in order to prevent any ”final truth” from being reached. In the seductive game, to seduce the signs themselves is what counts, not the reaching of any truth. Eliminating seduction by attempting to replacing it with final, decisive meaning, interpretative discourse is the ”least seductive of discourses”: Not only does it subject the domain of appearances to incalculable damage, but this privileged search for hidden meanings may well be profoundly in error. For it is not somewhere else, in a hinterwelt or an unconscious, that one will find what leads discourse astray. What truly displaces discourse, ”seduces” it in the literal sense, and renders it seductive, is its very appearance, its inflections, its nuances, the circulation (whether aleatory and senseless, or ritual- ized and meticulous) of signs at its surface. It is this that effaces meaning and is seductive, while a discourse’s meaning has never seduced anyone. All meaningful discourse seeks to end appearances: this is its attraction, and its imposture. (Baudrillard 1990 [1979], 54)

It is the signs themselves that are seductive: empty, absurd, elliptical signs deprived of any meaning or reference. To grasp the seductive discourse, therefore, we need to understand and acknowledge ”the power of the

240 insignificant signifier, the power of a meaningless signifier” (Baudrillard 1990 [1979], 74–75). Every discourse contains something that will evade interpretation, and everything evading interpretation may function seductively: including the MUD quest, starting out as a total enigma.8 Everything in the description of the room may be significant – and at the same time, nothing really is significant. Nothing leads anywhere at this point. When the player doesn’t know where to start, every insignificant word may successfully fake significance. Gradually, though, the initial stage of helplessness is overcome, through examination, exploration, and interpretation. Fighting the seductive ”secret circulation of meaningless signs” hermeneutically, trying to eliminate seduction and replacing it with meaning, the player sets out on her adventure. Replacing the system of signifiers with an even more conventional order, seduction attempts to escape the terror of meaning. As seduction is rule-bound, it is set apart from the order of the Law: Abiding by its rule is at the same time to be free from the restraints represented by choice, freedom, responsibility, and meaning.9 Every game is beyond the Law and also without any moral. This, however, implies that we should never interpret what belongs to the rule according to the Law. This last principle presents us with a new methodological problem, this time connected to treating MUD quests as games: Although quests are rule-bound also in a formal sense, certain rules will nevertheless be defined and identified by way of an emerging narrative.10 These rules cannot be treated as functioning beyond moral or the Law, even if they’re set in a fictional universe. After all, they are identified through a contextual appropriation of meaning. From hermeneutics we know that interpretation and appropriation of fictional content never happens independently of the in- terpreter’s life-world. Although there is no demand of interpretation reaching the life-world of the author of the text, there will of course be, also from the author’s perspective, a life-world implied.11 Taking into account the notion of the life-world and its necessary contribution to both writing and interpretation, it would make no sense to claim that the MUD quest is operating totally beyond the Law. The challenge and seduction are similar, dual forms, Baudrillard writes, operating with meaningless signs but bound by a fundamental rule. Like the challenge, seduction is ”never an investment but a risk; never a contract but a pact; never individual but duel [sic]; never psychological but

241 ritual; never natural but artificial” (Baudrillard 1990 [1979], 83). There is one difference between them though: Where seduction plays on weak- ness, the challenge addresses strength. While the Law can be transgressed, the rule cannot. Violating the rule by not abiding by it is not transgression – it is simply to give up the rule and replace it with the order of the Law again. This is what the cheater does. Playing for profit, he’s confusing risk with investment. ”If games had a finality,” writes Baudrillard, ”the only true player would be the cheater” (Baudrillard 1990 [1979], 140). But as investment belongs to the order of the Law and not to the order of the game, the cheater is not even a player. Replacing the order of the rule with the order of the Law, he does not take part in the game. The quest solver who impatiently asks other players for solutions to puzzles instead of searching within the text itself is in a similar manner not really questing. When he asks other players for hints he confuses the process of playing (act) with the products of knowledge (meaning). Refusing to let himself be seduced by the text, indulging in the game for the sole purpose of playing seems to be of little interest to him. Instead, obtaining possession of the answers – possibly in order to advance faster – is what counts. Through Baudrillard’s theory of seduction, it is possible to identify some of the paradoxes of questing. If questing is a seductive practice, the quest product is in opposition to the questing process. Completing the quest turns it into a product, a finite entity that no longer contains any secrets or exer- cises any seductive power over the player. At the same time, questing would be meaningless, both in a literal sense and as a (part of the MUD) game, if completion wasn’t an integral part of the contract. Similarly, while Baudrillard claims that searching for meaning in the seductive discourse makes no sense, there would be no point in questing at all if the promise of a meaning to be found would be excluded from it, that is, if we would seriously believe that all signs in the quest discourse are nonreferential signifiers meaninglessly circulating on the surface. While it is possible that the meaning of a discourse never seduced anyone, it is equally unlikely that the insignificant signifier could function seductively with its insignificance revealed. On the contrary, to be able to appear as this or that, it is necessary that it disguise itself, that is, that it conceal its non-significance. Although perhaps not referring to anything in reality (which in this case includes the fictional MUD world), the non-signifying signifier will always have to be pointing somewhere to function seductively. Faking significance,

242 it also promises meaning. The player who doesn’t care about detecting this meaning cannot be seduced. Only the player who believes that there is something ”behind” the surface, some secret to be disclosed, may enter the seductive discourse of questing. At the same time, players who are not willing to indulge in the quest as a seductive practice but who encounter the puzzles forcefully as challenges to be overcome – who are playing for the sole purpose of reconfiguring the quest product, to obtain a final meaning – may also find it difficult to enjoy questing.

The strategy of Don Juan

In The Literary Speech Act. Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, Felman uses Austin’s division between performatives and constatives to analyse the Don Juan myth. According to Felman’s analysis, the fundamental conflict of seduction in Molière’s play is reflect- ed in, and may be explained by, the characters’ opposing views of the function of language. Examining the dialogues between Don Juan and the others, she finds that they appear to be dialogues “between two orders that, in reality, do not communicate: the order of the act and the order of meaning, the register of pleasure and the register of knowledge” (Felman 1983 [1980], 31). The secret behind Don Juan’s seductive powers is to be found in the way he is using (or from the others’ point of view, abusing) language. She explains: What is really at stake in the play – the real conflict – is, in fact, the opposition between two views of language, one that is cognitive, or constative, and another that is performative. According to the cognitive view, which characterizes Don Juan’s antagonists and victims, language is an instrument for transmitting truth, that is, an instrument of knowledge, a means of knowing reality. Truth is a relation of perfect congruence between an utterance and its referent, and, in a general way, between language and the reality that it represents. [...] In this view, the sole function reserved for language is the constative function: what is at stake in an utterance is its correspondence – or lack of correspondence – to its real referent, that is, its truth or falsity. [...] However this may be, Don Juan does not share such a view of language. Saying, for him, is in no

243 case tantamount to knowing, but rather to doing: acting on the interlocutor, modifying the situation and the interplay of forces within it. Language, for Don Juan, is performative and not informa- tive; it is a field of enjoyment, not of knowledge. As such, it cannot be qualified as true or false, but rather quite specifically as felicitous or infelicitous, successful or unsuccessful. (Felman 1983 [1980], 26–27)

In previous articles, I have argued that such a conflict between the order of the act and the order of meaning can be identified in quest-solving too (Tronstad 2001 and 2003): While solving a quest, we search for the meaning of it. When meaning is reached, the quest is solved. The paradox of questing is that as soon as a final meaning is reached, the quest stops functioning as a quest. When meaning is found, the quest is history. It cannot be done again, as it is simply not the same experience to solve a puzzle quest for the second time. In this, quests differ from stories, which may, in principle, be re-read a hundred times and still function as stories. This, I believe, is because stories in general belong to the order of meaning, together with Austin’s constatives, while quests are basically performative: They belong first and foremost to the order of the act. When quests are solved, though, they stop functioning performatively. The solved quest thus belongs to a different order than the unsolved quest. Solved, the quest turns into a constative, it enters the order of meaning. This is why the text is experienced as exhausted when the quest is solved: not because it is fully interpreted, but because its primary function is performative, and not constative. It is the performative function of the quest that is exhausted, not the text itself. In principle, the text can now be enjoyed for its constative function. This change in function can also explain why, from an academic point of view, quests are often approached as narratives: As researchers, we approach the quest retrospectively, after we’ve already solved it. Reading and analysing the logs from our questing practice, we already know what lead where, what was significant and what was not. Analysing the quest retrospectively, the context that was unknown to us during the questing process is known. There are no mysterious signifiers left, nothing that may lead somewhere, no seduction. Every part of the quest will now be judged and organised according to its contextual relation to the final meaning. Signifiers that are insignificant in relation to this contextual whole will most probably be ignored. A significant part, in other words, of what made the

244 quest ”work” in the first place will escape us at this time. To ignore the performative’s role in questing this way is, however, fundamentally to mis- judge questing as a practice. As quests are acts before they are meaning, we must focus more attention on the way quests act to understand the way they work. Consulting the strategies of Don Juan – as another representative of the order of the act – is therefore useful in understanding how the performative aspect of questing may function. With performatives, it is the promise – or more precisely the broken promise – that defines and motivates the character Don Juan, while confusing and frustrating his antagonists. Don Juan makes promise after promise, with no intention of keeping any of them. By continuously and inten- tionally breaking his promises, Don Juan abuses the institution of promising. This, however, is exactly what makes it possible for him to continue seducing, to continue promising: ”Paradoxically,” Felman writes, ”the fail- ure to carry out the promise makes it possible to begin it again: it is because the [...] promise is not kept that it can be renewed” (Felman 1983 [1980], 40). ”The trap of seduction [...] consists in producing a referential illusion through an utterance that is by its very nature self-referential: the illusion of a real or extralinguistic act of commitment created by an utterance that refers only to itself” (Felman 1983 [1980], 31). Playing with the self-referentiality of signs, Don Juan places himself beyond the law that the others in the play subject themselves to. His promises do not refer to any truth, constancy, or meaning: their sole purpose is to act upon the others. The felicity of their acting, however, requires that the others believe in their referentiality: ”The act of seduction is above all an inducer of belief,” as Felman writes (Felman 1983 [1980], 33). ”Don Juan in fact does nothing but promise the constative” (Felman 1983 [1980], 35). This is what quests do, too: They promise their solution, by promising meaning. But as disclosure of meaning also implies the end of the quest, it’s necessary to frequently break the promise, in order to prolong the questing experience. Breaking the promise makes it possible to renew the promise. Playing with nonreferential signifiers that lead the player on meaningless detours, the quest acts as seducer: inducing belief that there is a meaning to be found, on the one hand; and contradicting, delaying, and playing against the player’s urge for meaning, on the other. In what follows, I will use the example of the Tubmud quest ”The Realm of Witches Is in Danger,” written by Ardanna, to illustrate how the

245 quest and quest objects12 act as seducers during the questing process and also how the player counters this seduction by insisting on replacing it with meaning. Close examination of rooms and objects is fundamental to dis- close the meaning of the quest: You walk along a long and dark corridor leading slightly downwards into the scary depths underneath the Grey Witch’s castle.To the west, stairs lead up into the Entryhall. There are two obvious exits: up and east. > examine stairs The stairs lead upwards to brighter parts of Ardanna’s castle. > examine corridor It is long and dark and might contain a hidden hint. > examine walls They are made of black stone. Maybe you should search the corridor, there might be something to find... > search corridor After a short glance around, you make out a tiny inscription on the east wall. > read inscription The inscription says: WIKKA PICCA MALEFIZ A picture of no mean artistic value is drawn underneath. It shows a broom, a witchhat, a black witchcloak and a black cat arranged in a circle. [...] > east Five white candles illuminate this chamber with a flickering light. They stand on the corners of a silver pentagram, which is inlaid into the floor. There is one obvious exit: west. > examine pentagram Fine lines of a silver metal form a pentagram on the floor of this chamber. You could step into the pentagram and try out a conjura- tion.... > enter pentagram Sadly you can’t initiate the ceremony! You don’t wear the right attire or don’t wield the right weapon! The demon doesn’t heed your call! But you have become part of the magic ritual now...

246 Having searched the corridor and read the writings on the walls,13 the player may already have a clue as to the correct ”attire” and ”weapon” required to initiate the ceremony. She’ll have to leave the pentagram and continue exploring other rooms to be able to obtain the required items, however. When she has explored all the rooms, examined all the items and interpreted their correct interconnection, the player may finally be able to solve the quest. To have her interpretations thus confirmed – by solving it – is simultaneously finally to have defeated seduction. By detecting its final meaning, the player deprives the quest of all its seductive power, and turns it into a constative. Provided that there aren’t still missing flags in the area, the player may now regard the quest space exhausted. What is special about ”The Realm of Witches Is in Danger,” however, is that it actually – in contrast to most other Tubmud quests – provides multilinearity. It can be carried out in three different ways: as either a white, grey, or black witch.14 It can hardly be carried out all three ways by one single character, however. The reason it cannot be solved in three different ways by one character is that the evil actions performed while solving it as a black witch will not be forgotten by the nice NPCs whose information the player may need to do it the white way. Yet, a player who refrains from performing evil actions will not receive the necessary help from the nasty witch. This multilinear structuring of ”The Realm of Witches Is in Danger” – and the fact that the realm of witches also includes two other areas, Wikkaton and Delilah’s Mansion, where a couple of extreme- ly difficult puzzles may keep the player occupied for years – provides enough resistance to ensure that finding and resolving all potential hints is practically impossible. In this way, this particular quest cleverly evades the exhaustion of the text space that is normally experienced when all flags are found, and all points are gained; and thus it succeeds in keeping the performative alive. By continuing to promise after it has been solved, ”The Realm of Witches Is in Danger” escapes the total transformation into a constative that is the destiny of most other quests.

Fizzlock’s promises

Frankly, if the player is willing to cheat it is actually possible to solve the quest as a white witch after having solved it as a black, and thereby be able to hermeneutically exhaust more of the potential hints in the area.

247 The apparent impossibility to completely exhausting the text space of this quest is connected to the task of obtaining the grey witchcloak that is required to solve the quest as a grey witch. There are, however, indica- tions that such a cloak may somehow be obtained. At the quest board in Wikkaton, for instance, there is an old note from a player praising the quest but in a sidenote complaining about the number of evil orcs he had to kill while solving it, in order to maintain his good alignment. The neutral alignment that he otherwise tended to return to, seemed to him to be the only one with which the quest cannot be solved. Ardanna, who is herself a grey witch, answers him:

> read 17 Re: good! but... (Ardanna, Mar 15 1995) Greetings, one can solve the quest when neutral, but (I admit) no hints are offered on how to obtain the necessary item, which makes it very difficult. But then again, even I wear it every now and then...:-) Ardanna [end of note 17]

Solving a scenario in Wikkaton, the player gets to meet a young grey witch who, if asked, can tell where she got her witchcloak. The player may then try to obtain a grey cloak the same way, which is difficult (I never succeeded). Another potentially possible solution is to find a way to get hold of the grey cloak the warlock Fizzlock is wearing.15 Interacting with Fiz- zlock, however, may initiate a detour. Now, detours occur frequently in questing – being the result of a broken promise, they work to prolong the questing experience. In my opinion detours should therefore be regarded as not only a typical but in fact a required rhetorical feature of the quest genre. The detour initiated by Fizzlock, though, is exceptional because it used to have the potential of making ”The Realm of Witches Is in Dan- ger” a neverending quest – inexhaustible. Trying out the various possibilities for interacting with Fizzlock, he’ll sooner or later tell the player to give him ”something useful” to receive important information about a ”liquifying spell.” Finding the right object to give him does, however, prove difficult. According to Fizzlock, nothing is useful: no object available in Wikkaton, no object from Ardanna’s castle,

248 none of the objects available in the other related area – Delilah’s mansion – or in the external quest rooms of the Zydonia quest related to this again.16 As a result, the player may eventually end up regarding every object she finds in the MUD as something that could be potentially ”useful” to Fiz- zlock. She will, in other words, instead of putting the quest behind her when leaving the quest area, extend the potential text space to be explored in order to solve the quest to include every single room in Tubmud. The following two posts from the Wikkaton board illustrates how Fizzlock kept players busy for years trying to figure out the right thing to give him, hoping to finally be able to obtain that (eventually, as years passed and the collection of explorer points from the realm of witches gradually became more and more complete) last missing flag: > read 22 Fizzlock (Vanguard, Dec 31 1998) hi it looks like noone writes here and i never have:) so here we go. FIX FIZZLOCK! that is all:) Vanguard [end of note 22] > read 23 Fizzlock II (Vanguard, Nov 12 2000) Hi again, Okay it’s been almost 2 years now and hundreds of useless items given to old fizzy. Well i’ve not given up on this yet, i’ll give him every moveable item in this mud..... i shall find what he wants one day:) Vanguard [end of note 23]

Almost a year after the second note was posted and three years after the first, the following replies are posted by Ardanna: > read 24 Re: Fizzlock II (Ardanna, Aug 23) Hiho Van, back to Tubmud after several years I read your note) Alas I do not remember what the deal with Fizzlock is anymore( He is some kind of warlock in Wikkaton, isn’t he? Well, if I can still remember how

249 to access the code, I will look at it. Thanks for using my board :) Ardanna [end of note 24] > read 25 Re^2: Fizzlock II (Ardanna, Aug 23) Hmmm, I think I managed to look at Fizzlock and it seems like he is not finished, very sorry. No matter what you give him, he will not take it. And alas I do not remember if Myxectbo ever got down to writing ”liquify” and he does not either. So if there are still any wizzies around, and someone has the time, feel free to add something to Fizz. /Ardanna [end of note 25] [no more notes]

It’s worth recalling Baudrillard’s words on seduction from the dead quoted previously in this essay: “For us, only those who can no longer produce are dead. In reality, only those who do not wish to seduce or be seduced are dead.” Until the last note from Ardanna appeared, Fizzlock may have been dysfunctional but only from the perspective of meaning. From the perspective of performativity, this same dysfunctionality appears to be exactly that which secured his abilities to act upon the player. In this perspective, it is possible to see how his dysfunctionality was in fact a prereq- uisite for his successful seductive strategies. Unfinished and full of bugs, Fizzlock bravely stood the strain and held the fort, keeping Wikkaton, The Realm of Witches, and eventually the entire MUD inexhaustible to the players. Years without maintenance, neglected by his creator, only made him more stubbornly protective of his secrets. That he may now be fixed and re-appear as a functional NPC is no remedy for the fact that he can never return to the superior position he once kept – as this position of course depended on him being totally empty: In reality, Fizzlock had no secrets. Because there was no final meaning to Fizzlock at all, the player could project potential meanings on him indefinitely. Until, that is, the unfortunate day when Ardanna after years of absence re-appeared in Tub- mud only to put an end to it, depriving Fizzlock of his seductive powers by exposing his true insignificance. Using the perspective of seduction when approaching quests allows us a shift in focus where the texts are examined in terms of effects rather than meaning.17 Meaning does in this perspective occupy a secondary

250 position: Functioning as a main motivation for the player, meaning must necessarily be postponed and evaded through the process of questing as it otherwise implies the termination of the quest. The example of Fizzlock illustrates in this respect how apparent meaning may reflect more significance than confirmed meaning does in the context of MUD quests. Quests and quest objects that reveal their actual significance easily are also easily exhausted. As soon as their meaning is disclosed, they stop acting seductively, effecting (re)actions from the player.

NOTES

1. I’m examining the quests of Tubmud, an LPMUD situated at the Technical University of Berlin. 2. See ”Fictional context and human interaction in Internet games” (Tronstad 2000) and ”Performing the MUD adventure” (Trons- tad 2003). 3. According to Paul Ricoeur, interpretation is ultimately a question of understanding ourselves: ”An interpretation is not authentic unless it culminates in some form of appropriation (Aneignung), if by that term we understand the process by which one makes one’s own (eigen) what was initially other or alien (fremd). [...] I should prefer to say that the reader under- stands himself in front of the text, in front of the world of the work. To understand oneself in front of a text is quite the contrary of projecting oneself and one’s own beliefs and prejudices; it is to let the work and its world enlarge the horizon of the understanding which I have of myself.” (Ricoeur 1981 [1972], 178) 4. Cf. Espen Aarseth’s more general warning of treating games as narratives: ”The narrativistic approach [is] unfortunate because it imposes an external aesthetic on the games, treating them as inferior narrative art, which may be redeemed only when their quality reaches a higher ’Literary’ or artistic level.” (Aarseth 2003)

251 5. Explorer flags are often connected to objects that must be found or to actions that are necessary to perform in order to proceed in the quest. Many of them will therefore be achieved ”automatically” during the questing process. Some flags may nevertheless be overlooked, either because the player is cheat- ing (by asking other players for hints, for instance) or because it is possible to solve the quest without finding the flag in question. (Flags are not visible and the only way for a player to know she found one is to check her score. As the score is updated only after a period of time, it may also be difficult to identify where exactly the flag was achieved.) 6. The score system in Tubmud is organised so that the players may be provided with information of missing points in the different areas on request. 7. In particular from the quest ”The Realm of Witches Is in Danger” and its related areas Wikkaton and Delilah’s mansion, created by the wizard Ardanna. 8. Or we may know something: that the realm of witches is invaded by rats, for instance, and that it’s our task to find a way to exterminate these rats. We also know that there is probably a procedure already defined for how to do this, but we don’t know the procedure, nor do we know where to start to get a clue how to proceed. 9. ”Ordinarily we live within the realm of the Law, even when fantasizing its abolition. Beyond the law we see only its transgression or the lifting of a prohibition. For the discourse of law and interdiction determines the inverse discourse of transgression and liberation. However, it is not the absence of the law that is opposed to the law, but the Rule. The Rule plays on an immanent sequence of arbitrary signs, while the Law is based on a transcendent sequence of necessary signs. [...] Because the Law establishes a line, it can and must be transgressed. By contrast, it makes no sense to ’transgress’ a game’s rules; within a cycle’s recurrence, there is no line one can jump (instead, one simply leaves the game). [...] [The Rule] does not carry any meaning, it does not lead anywhere; by contrast, the Law has a determinate finality. The endless, reversible cycle of the Rule is opposed to the linear, finalized progression of the Law. Signs do not have the same status in the one as in the other. The Law is part of the world of representation, and is

252 therefore subject to interpretation and decipherment. [...] It is a text, and falls under the influence of meaning and referentiality. By contrast, the Rule has no subject, and the form of its utterance is of little consequence; one does not decipher the rules, nor derive pleasure from their comprehension – only their observance matters, and the resulting giddiness.” (Baudrillard 1990 [1979], 131–132) 10. An example could be the rule discussed in the next section, in which a player must choose whether she wants to assume a good, neutral, or evil witch identity to solve the quest. Identify- ing this rule is not a matter of ”thinking like the computer” or even thinking like the programmer but rather trying to ”think like the author”: to try to identify the author’s intentions with the quest as a potential story, or meaningful sequence of actions and events. Cf. Friedman’s distinction. (Friedman 1999) 11. As far as the author of a MUD quest may be present, known to the player, and even interfere while the player tries to solve the quest, I think quests can safely be regarded as less autonomous in this sense than traditional literary works. 12. For an additional analysis of seductive quest objects, see ”Semiotic and Nonsemiotic MUD Performance” (Tronstad 2001). 13. The inscription and drawing appear on three walls, with a slight difference in wording and colour: ”WIKKA PICCA BENEFIZ,” accompanied by broom, hat, a white cloak, and a black cat and ”WIKKA PICCA FIZFIZ” where the cloak and cat depicted are in grey. 14. The colour is dependent on alignment: If the character is saintly, good or nice, it makes a white witch, if it is neutral, it makes a grey witch, and if it is nasty, evil, or demonic, it makes a black witch. Alignment is not permanent in Tubmud, it will change with the alignment of the monsters the character kills: killing good monsters, the character will gradually turn more and more evil; killing evil monsters, the character alignment will gradually move toward good. 15. At a point, Fizzlock had a peculiar bug that made him appear as an object rather than an NPC, which resulted in him not re- sponding to the player’s attempts of communicating with him. A fortunate side-effect was that during this period, the player

253 was able to ”take” things from him, thus obtaining the grey witchcloak by ”take cloak from Fizzlock.” That the player was thereby able to solve the quest as a grey witch too did however not help her much in exhausting the text space – as there would still be a possible flag connected to obtaining the cloak the correct way. (After some time, this bug was fixed and from then on the player would have to interact with him as an NPC again.) 16. ”The seducer knows how to let the signs hang. He knows that they are favourable only when left suspended, and will move of themselves towards their appointed destiny. He does not use the signs up all at once, but waits for the moment when they will all respond, one after the other, creating an entirely unique conjuncture of giddiness and collapse.” (Baudrillard 1990 [1979], 109) 17. Certainly there are also challenges in quests that effect action and hinder exhaustion that are not seductive in this sense: monster slaying is an obvious example.

254 REFERENCES

Aarseth, Espen (2003) “Beyond the Frontier: Quest Games as Post- Narrative Discourse”. In Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. (Forthcoming) Baudrillard, Jean (1990 [1979]) Seduction [De la séduction], translated by Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Felman, Shoshana (1983 [1980]) The Literary Speech Act. Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. [Le Scandale du Corpse Parlant], translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Friedman, Ted (1999) “Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity, and Space”. In On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology, edited by Greg Smith. New York: New York University Press. (Quoted from the online version.). Available: http://www.gsu.edu/~jouejf/civ.htm. Ricoeur, Paul (1981 [1972]) “Metaphor and the central problem of hermeneutics” [“La métaphore et le problème central de l’herméneutique”], translated by John B. Thompson. In Hermeneutics & the Human Sciences, edited by John B. Thompson, 165–181. Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison de Sciences de l’Homme. Tronstad, Ragnhild (2000) “Fictional context and human interaction in Internet games”. In TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissen- schaften, no. 9. Available: http://www.inst.at/trans/9Nr/tronstad9.htm. Tronstad, Ragnhild (2001) “Semiotic and nonsemiotic MUD performance”. In COSIGN 2001: Proceedings of the 1st Conference of Compu- tational Semiotics for Games and New Media, edited by Clive Fencott Andy Clarke, Craig Lindley, Grethe Mitchell and Frank Nack. Ams- terdam. Available: http://www.kinonet.com/conferences/cosign2001/ pdfs/Tronstad.pdf. Tronstad, Ragnhild (2003) “Performing the MUD adventure”. In Digital Media Revisited. Theoretical and Conceptual Innovations in Digital

255 Domains, edited by Andrew Morrison, Terje Rasmussen and Gunnar Liestøl, 215–237. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Tubmud: telnet morgen.cs.tu-berlin.de 7680

256 ARCTIC VIRGINS Élekcriture and the Semiotics of Circumpolar Icon(o)graphé

Cynthia Haynes

One hundred sixty years ago, in 1837, Samuel Morse invented the system of signs now commonly known as Morse code. A simple translation of letters, numbers, and punctuation into long and short magnetic pulses carried over long distances via telegraph wires enabled messages to be sent in a matter of minutes. In 1848, the first recorded report of the effects of the aurora borealis on the telegraph’s relationship between magnetism and electricity occurred during an appearance of the aurora on Novem- ber 17. An Italian named Matteucci observed that “the soft iron armatures employed in the electric telegraph between Florence and Pisa remained attached to their electro-magnets, as if the latter were powerfully magnet- ized, without, however, the apparatus being in action and without the currents in the battery being set in action. This singular effect ceased with the aurora, and the telegraph, as well as the batteries, could again operate without having suffered any alteration” (Norton, np). A few years later, in the winter of 1852, all New England telegraphic operations were affected by an intense aurora, during which the following account was recorded: Towards evening, a heavy blue line appeared upon the paper, which gradually increased in size for the space of half a minute, when a flame of fire succeeded to the blue line, of sufficient intensity to burn through a dozen thicknesses of the moistened paper. The current then subsided as gradually as it had come on, until it entirely ceased, and was then succeeded by a negative current (which bleaches, instead of coloring, the paper). This gradually increased, in the same manner as the positive current, until it also, in turn, produced its flame of fire, and burned through many thicknesses

257 of the prepared paper; it then subsided, again to be followed by the positive current. This state of things continued during the entire evening, and effectually prevented any business being done over the wires. (Norton, np)

It was as if an invisible finger reached down to write something in/delible (Latin> in- + delEre to delete), something impossible to erase, something blue. Yet the negative current, bleached-writing, produced an antiseptic white message – a blank page. Writing – blue – electric. Woman – color – élekcriture. Stunning semaphore, no mundane metaphor, it was a script etched in/of what I call élekcriture.

Figure 1. Telegraphic writing by Morse’s first instrument. (From original in archives of New Jersey Historical Society.)

The term originated from my desire to splice together electricity (from Gr. elektra> the beaming sun) and what some French feminists call l’écriture féminine, writing that resists the masculine economy under which women have labored, suffered, and forcibly learned to be the objective counter- part to man’s self-awarded subjectivity. Lynn Worsham describes the radical potential of écriture féminine as writing that “allows departures, breaks, partings, separations in the meaning, the effect of which is to make meaning infinite and, like desire, non-totalizable (Worsham 1991, 90). Naming élekcriture, as such, is not, however, intended to blithely import l’écriture feminine into electronic media in some superficial way. Nor is it an attempt to capture the currency afforded by the hype of virtual reality, digital art, or other post-nouveau modernist media (media that does not know they are modernist). I confess to harboring a certain intuition about éle- kcriture triggered most often when writing in the synchronous world of MOOs, the effect of which set in motion the idea. But I am no Platonist, so the term never became elevated to the Idea Élekcriture. This, then, is an attempt to sketch a force that cannot be represented in a medium that bears only the nostalgic semblance of a substance worthy of transmitting this force, namely, print. And the telling necessitates, at times, strategic employment of transliteral and transgenic narratives. For now, I let the auroral disturbances of man-made language machines claim the alibi of

258 élekcriture, as we begin at midpoint, in media res (is there ever any other vantage point?), or, as Nietzsche would have it, at high noon,“moment of the briefest shadow” (Nietzsche1982, 486). In The Victorian Internet, Thomas Standage explains that the impact of telegraphy (far-writing) had very similar effects as email has today. By the late 1870s, a third of the operators at the main telegraph office in New York were female. Many were between 18–30 years of age and unmarried. And not unlike today, telegraphic romances between operators began to abound. This led some companies to segregate female operators from male operators and to employ a “matron” to keep an eye on them. We could speculate that this was in order to preserve the moral conven- tions of the day, namely, to prevent immoral behavior among the employ- ees. Or, we could put it in less discrete terms and suggest it was designed to preserve their virginity. Those slender wires taut with sexual tension harbored the most private (and urgent) codes – signs of sanguine (eager to shed blood) young women and men – and the most forbidden tales. Who then, tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all – where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page. – Isak Dinesen

In her short story, “The Blank Page,” Dinesen tells a tale from long ago in Portugal, the telling of which I use as an allegory of élekcriture. It seems that high in the mountains of Portugal, there stands an “old convent for sisters of the Carmelite order” (Dinesen 1957, 100). The sisters were known for one thing: they grew the finest flax and made the most beautiful linen of Portugal. It was said that the linen of this convent drew its “true virtue from the fact that the very first linseed was brought home from the Holy Land itself by a crusader” (ibid., 102). In due time, the convent was accorded the privilege of producing the bridal sheets for all the young princesses of the royal house. It was the custom in Portugal that on the morning “after the wedding of a daughter of the house, and before the morning gift had yet been handed over, the Chamberlain or High Steward from a balcony of the palace would hang out the sheet of the night and would solemnly proclaim: Virginem eam tennemus – ‘we declare her to have been a virgin.’ Such a sheet was never afterwards washed or again

259 lain on” (ibid., 102–03). For hundreds of years, not only did the convent have the privilege of providing these linen sheets, they were also privileged to receive back that “central piece of the snow-white sheet which bore witness to the honor of a royal bride” (ibid., 103). In the gallery of the main hall of the convent hung a long row of heavy gold frames, each of which bore an engraved gold plate with the name of a princess, and each of which contained the square piece from her wedding sheet. Royal ladies from all over the land made pilgrimages to see the gallery at the convent: princesses, queen dowagers, Archduchesses, and others proceeded from near and far. “Within the faded markings of the canvases people of some imagination and sensibility may read all the signs of the zodiac: the Scales, the Scorpion, the Lion, the Twins. Or they may there find pictures from their own world of ideas: a rose, a heart, a sword” (ibid., 103). But, the story goes, in the middle of the long row hangs a canvas different from the others. The frame is as fine, but the plate has no name inscribed, and the “linen within the frame is snow-white from corner to corner, a blank page” (ibid., 104). In its difference, the blankness af- firms a negation. That is, the negative becomes the scene of affirmation, framed by the faces of those who viewed it. “It is in front of this piece of pure white linen that the old princesses of Portugal – worldly wise, dutiful, long-suffering queens, wives and mothers – and their noble old playmates, bridesmaids and maids-of-honor have most often stood still. It is in front of the blank page that old and young nuns, with the Mother Abbess herself, sink into deepest thought” (ibid., 105). The tale ends with the image of a long procession of women who stand gazing in deep thought upon a portrait of illegitimacy. It is a sign of ethos – the ethos of one bride who resisted consumption by the logos through silence (i.e., no logos), an absence of that which consumes everything in its wake by objectification and quantification. And, it signals the absence of totalitarian regimes of legitimacy by its very inclusion among the others. By the tradition of loyality, the proud royal parents of this princess hang it there to speak its own tale of logos; but, more than that, to punctuate the hall with an ethos disburdened of its logocentric stain. It signals, in its silence, the non-passivity of ethos, the movement against dissemination of a prior violation, the sign of which is a non-sign. The consummation of a marriage is deferred because it is not the consummate (perfect) integration, it defies the perfection of logic. With these stories, permit me to bind you, my reader, to the illogical, to a series of auroral/feminine pulsions/writings I call élekcriture. My gen-

260 re of choice is also a story, yet no mere story. Mine is a mystory, what Greg Ulmer terms a genre “capable of organizing this picto-ideo-phono- graphic writing” (Ulmer 1994, xi-xii). Wrought from the sign of the chora, a generative space invoked by Plato, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva, Ulmer underscores one strand of my splice, quoting Derrida: “Chora receives everything or gives place to everything, but Plato insists that in fact it has to be a virgin place... . [s]ince it is absolutely blank... . [e]verything inscribed in it erases itself immediately, while remaining in it. It is thus an impossible surface – it is not even a surface, because it has no depth” (qtd in Ulmer 1994, 65). According to Ulmer, “[c]hora, then, evokes together the thought of a different kind of writing (without representation) and a different mode of value... . the goal is... to explore the invention process itself by means of this problem: What would a writing be that produces understanding without representation?” (ibid., 66). Ulmer calls this means of invention chorography, explaining that “[i]n chorography, I do not choose among possibilities but enter them into the paradigm of the diegesis, creating a network in which to catch an invention” (ibid.,138). Perhaps all of this is to say (all that I have said thus far) that cybertexts are not always (nor only) produced in the most familiar (and ubiquitous) media of today; rather, they often emerge in unrepresentable (natural) media as extra-semiotic signs read by illogical means. In addition to prob- lematizing cybertextual media, delineating the dynamic processes by which cybertexts function, i.e., foregrounding the functional theories of media in which they are produced, should not limit us to normal definitions of func- tionality. Invention should catch us from time to time. Kristeva reminds us, for example, that in addition to what we typically observe about art, religion, and ritual, other phenomena emerge, “fragmentary phenomena which have been kept in the background or rapidly integrated into more communal signifying systems but [which] point to the very process of significance. Magic, shamanism, esoterism, the carnival, and ‘incomprehensible’ poetry all underscore the limits of socially useful discourse and attest to what it represses: the process that exceeds the subject and [her] communicative structures” (Kristeva 1984, 16). But Kris- teva cannot simply leave it at that; nor can I when confronted with the frequent disdain for theory and the inevitable privileging of practice/function. It may seem that fragmentary phenomena will not do when the question is put: what then must we do? Such fragmentary phenomena do not (often) share in the luxuries of theorizing, so they are twice removed from

261 practice.1 And practice is everything. Only practice wins the revolution. So, Kristeva asks: “At what historical moment does social exchange toler- ate or necessitate the manifestation of the signifying process in its ‘poetic’ or ‘esoteric’ form? Under what conditions does this ‘esoterism,’ in dis- placing the boundaries of socially established signifying practices, correspond to socioeconomic change, and ultimately, even to revolution? And under what conditions does it remain a blind alley, a harmless bonus offered by a social order which uses this ‘esotericism’ to expand, become flexible, and thrive?” (ibid., 16). Of the countless examples of women who resisted naming the domi- nant regime as sole beneficiary of their esotericism, let me enter one into the ‘paradigm of my diegesis.’ A group of Norwegian female telegraph workers agitated for higher wages and equal opportunity in the late 19th century. In 1898, ninety-seven female telegraphers appealed to the Stort- ing (Norway’s national assembly) having signed an application for increased wages that had been systematically rejected for six years by the firm’s director. According to the director, “women had ‘performed their work less satisfactorily when it came to operating more complicated telegraph equipment’, (qtd in Hurrell 1998, np; Hagemann 1985, 10) and this was a view strongly supported by the younger male telegraphers in the service, who published a statement claiming that women were ‘also wanting in resolution and ability to take rapid decisions’” (qtd in Hurrell 1998, np; Hagemann 1985, 11). My grandmother worked for Western Union Telegraph Company in 1928 in Anson, Texas, a small struggling west Texas town during the years just before the Great Depression, and it is hard for me to imagine someone less ‘wanting in resolution’ than Wahnie Haynes. I often wonder about the messages she sent, the code she learned, and the people she met over the wire. I like to think that if she were alive, she would understand how I could be ‘courted by’ and marry a Norwegian man I met on the Internet. I apparently come by my predilection for communicating online honestly, although I began my technical journey at an earlier age and on a similar machine. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to possess the opportunities to work with computers, the avenues of access to research in those lived spaces, and the commitment to teach others how to do like- wise, should be mindful of Gayatri Spivak’s invocation to pay attention to our own subjective investment in the narratives we produce. This next story, of virgin élekcriture, is my way of paying attention.

262 Figure 2. The author (top right) and the Monroe Monrobot School Compu- ter [Fort Worth Press newspaper, 1966].

From Morse code to typewriting, I hear the clicking even now as my mother typed my father’s Master’s thesis in triplicate during the summer of 1966. I think it was an old Underwood. In that same summer of 1966 I was chosen to participate in a special summer program for gifted junior high students in math and science. During this program, I learned to use a machine they called a computer. Actually, it was called the Monroe Mon- robot School computer. Over the next few years I excelled in math subjects, but I really wanted to write poetry. Later I used our old Underwood to teach myself how to type. I couldn’t take a typing course that summer after my senior year in high school. It was 1970, and I was pregnant, unmarried, and living in a home for such girls, girls who would surrender their babies for adoption. I had lots of time on my hands and desperately wanted to learn to type, so my mother brought me that typewriter. I took books of poetry from the small library in the home, and I typed poetry ... endlessly and with much enthusiasm. I drew from as much ‘fragmentary phenomena’ as possible to get through a very

263 difficult passage for a young woman of my age. I pounded those keys with passion and sorrow, knowing the act of surrender was near. But let me pause here to splice more fragments with which to conduct the currents of my élekcriture. My name is Cynthia Haynes. I don’t tell you that in order to inform you, for you have only to look at the author of this essay to see that. I tell you so that in speaking my name, I call myself into being. I afford myself an identity beyond the legacy of secrecy (and il/logic) that I inherit from my gender, my generation, and my generic – Haynes. It is my father’s name, the same name my grandmother took when she married his father, Morris Moon Haynes. But, Wahnie Haynes was originally a Keys. That the Keys had Cherokee ancestors is well-known up in the northeastern parts of Oklahoma where she was born. I never knew what Wahnie stood for while she lived. But when she died, I wanted to know – who was she? I asked my father what Wahnie stood for, whether she had a more formal name. He said, “No, it just means Wahnie.” The long answer is that she is descended from Major George Lowry (1770–1852, Rising Fawn), last Cherokee Indian chief who survived the infamous journey called the Trail of Tears, and grandfather to Lucy Lowry Keys, great-grandmother to Wahnie. But Lucy wasn’t really Lucy. (Oh, this is getting complicated.) Lucy was really Wah-ne-nau-hi, a name I have only recently learned translates as ‘storyteller’ in English. Wahnie had a room in her five-room flagstone ranch house that she locked one day, after which we were forbidden to go in there. The door was brown, rickety, and smelled of west Texas red dirt. If you looked through the keyhole, you could just make out the foot of the bed and the long-ago freshness of sheer lace curtains that sometimes in summer moved with the night breeze. I remember that bed, big and sinky in the middle. It was a small room, but it held her daily stored-away dreams. I guess it was a big room in that respect. All I know is that one summer it was unlocked, and the next summer it wasn’t. But suppose we walk across the threshold of that locked room, into Wahnie herself, sweet and billowy once again – a young woman caught no more behind the veil of another language, a story not her own. Here, now, Wahnie speaks in more than whispers, in more than contained life, in uncontained moments of joy. What we found behind Wahnie’s door, the chora of her life, was not a dust-to-dust existence, but a shiny series of possible futures. We found letters, hundreds of them – words that opened doors and windows on her life. We found se-

264 cret hobbies, unfinished projects. We found handkerchiefs, dozens of them, unused and often still in their gift boxes – as were many other items. Wahnie stored her beautiful things away rather than use them. That’s what living in the Depression did to people, and that’s what her private ethic reinforced – save them so you’ll always have them. My parents found many of the gifts they gave her over the years still in their original boxes – nightgowns, blankets, practical things. When you live on a ranch, as Wahnie did, you have to burn the trash, and she couldn’t bear to burn things, so she saved them. Little by little that room became overrun by her secretly stashed objects, and by her privately held dreams. And so, she locked it. I guess I would too if I had saved every rattler off the rattle- snakes they killed each year, neatly organized into small labeled boxes – 1941, 1942, 1943. We found old magazines and books, sweet perfumes and lilac powder in frosted jars. The mounds of photos and mementos rivaled the Christmas cards they had received over the years, names trailing at the end of each one in the unmistakable handwriting of women, the keepers of our language. Some new Christmas cards from the 40s remained unsent and unsigned in their original box, languishing there like the unsigned and unsent birth announcements for my unnamed Baby Haynes. Wahnie and I – inordinate telegraphers – let our language languish behind locked doors, no legitimate means of representing why, no symbolic means of understanding our lack.2 But élekcriture is not consigned to the economy of legitimation, nor to systems of representation in which writing stains the page like every proc- lamation of every High Steward: Virginem eam tennemus – ‘we declare her to have been a virgin.’ If anything, élekcriture functions like an im- maculate conception – some auroral disturbance of man-made writing inscribed by the very finger of Elektra – revirginizing3 (though not by ab- stention) the hymen/hymn of writing. The problem is how to escape the ‘maternal’ aspect of suggesting such a link. In “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” Kristeva’s study of the shift in representation of the Madonna from Byzantine artistry to continental humanism, she reveals a “style of representation” (Kristeva 1980, 251) that has “pushed to the limits of representability” (ibid., 269) the figuration of the maternal beyond the patriarchal Western “economy of representation” (ibid., 243) to an “integration of the image accomplished in its truthlikeness within the luminous serenity of the unrepresentable” (ibid., 243). Kristeva struggles within the system of representation she calls the ‘symbolic’, ultimately lashing

265 herself to the stake of a semiotic signifying process she claims is pre- linguistic, “a rhythmic but nonexpressive totality” (Kristeva 1980, 40) – the feminine unrepresentable desire in language, jouissance. Simply put, Kristeva posits a split subject: divided between unconscious and conscious motivations, which correspond to two signifying processes, semiotic and symbolic. Unlike the more phallo-pedestrian schools of semiotics offered by Saussure, Peirce, Eco and others, Kristeva relates the semiotic to the chora, a term even Plato describes as mysterious and incomprehensible. In some ways, it appears that Kristeva wants badly to elucidate, but then retain that incomprehensibility (Roudiez introduction to Kristeva 1980, 6). Toril Moi, Norwegian feminist literary theorist, characterizes Kristeva’s semiotic chora as what “will be more or less successfully repressed and can be perceived only as pulsional pressure on symbolic language: as con- tradictions, meaninglessness, disruption, silences and absences in the symbolic language. The chora is a rhythmic pulsion rather than a new language” (Moi 1985, 162). Until recently, I’ve been perfectly content with Kristeva’s desire to transgress representation, to “tear the veil of representation,” to speak in “a fire of tongues…[and] exit from representation.” It was my desire as well. And though this is no either/or situation – either abandon representation or languish under the alibi of the unrepresentable ... I still feel com- pelled to represent élekcriture as more than the aporia it seems to be. But without the aporia, we would not have been able to take a reading on our bearings. We are bearing down on the question of the representation of élekcriture, and Kristeva ‘bears’ it for us with her subsidiary approach. By valorizing the ‘mere testimony of a withdrawn body’ in her countless depictions of the chora, or the pre-symbolic semiotic nonspace of the Vir- gin Mary, who (against her orthodox representations) defies all those who see her as ‘living area,’ ‘dwelling,’ ‘or union…a contact without a gap, without separation,” (Kristeva 1980, 251) Kristeva reveals the double bind of feminism: its desire to found a politics based on difference in relation to language and meaning, while being caught under the Law of the symbolic, without which no thing is thinkable. This is also the double bind of representing élekcriture, it has the effect of situating us in the space of the untenable. The untenable is not, however, indefensible, nor does it necessarily render us paralyzed. In short, there is a tension behind the untenable that wields its own measure of power. Drucilla Cornell’s discussion of Derrida and

266 Levinas in The Philosophy of the Limit provides a useful model for a similar move on Kristeva, a passage that allows us to use her without excusing the conundrum I’ve been describing. Like Kristeva’s notion of jouissance, Derrida’s concept metaphors the trace and différance elude our ability to represent them adequately in language. As Cornell explains, différance is the “trace of what differs from representational systems and defers indefinitely the achievement of totality. When we attempt to think ‘exteriority,’ whether as Infinity or as ‘matter,’ we are always walk- ing on a tightrope and risking the fall into another mechanism of appropriation” (Cornell 1992, 70). Cornell recognizes, also, that “we cannot escape representational schemes ... what we confront in the aporia ... is différance, the inevitable difference between the Saying and the said that can only indicate the beyond allegorically” (ibid., 70). But, she maintains, “to run into an aporia, to reach the limit of philosophy, is not necessarily to be paralyzed. We are only paralyzed if we think that to reach the limit of philosophy is to be silenced ... . The dead end of aporia, the impasse to which it takes us, promises through its prohibition the way out it seems to deny. To promise through prohibition is the ‘action’ of allegory” (ibid., 70–71). To promise through prohibition is the icon of the virgin. To represent the prohibition through the northern lights is to allegorize the “fragmentary phenomena” of Kristeva’s semiotic and my élekcriture. In the circumpolar female iconography of nordic culture, in both its literal and figurative stratospheres, they saw in the aurora borealis the souls of dead virgins dancing, old maids and spinsters guarding the door to heaven, reflections of the shields of the Valkyries, choosers of the slain – all figures occupying a liminal threshold between two domains of representation: the semiotic and the symbolic. Naming neither one nor the other, the lights move and morph into hues that shatter whiteness and darkness. In the saying, however, it is necessary to qualify (briefly) my use of Nordic female iconography in deconstructing Kristeva’s semiotics. And to do that I must also note my marginal status with respect to Nordic feminist theories and practices and explain a bit about them. Although Nordic is a term that generally designates the countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, my primary (and very preliminary) research has been focused on Norwegian culture and landscape. And what began as a vague sense that women enjoyed better social conditions in Norway than in other parts of the world has grown into a more concrete certainty that they do. But generally speaking, according to Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen,

267 although Nordic women’s studies and gender research began in the 50s and 60s as it did in the United States, it differs from North-American approaches in two ways. First, a parallel development of “qualitative and critical empirical sociology in Norway” called “problem-oriented empiri- cism” helped facilitate sex-role research and later women’s studies. Sec- ond, there are general traits of the Nordic culture and society that explain the relative speed with which Norwegian feminists have achieved what they have in comparison with their North American counterparts. Nielsen explains: “In Nordic culture and political history, equality and community spirit are central values. This has been expressed in strong and varied popular movements, a close relationship between state and society, the strong position of social democracy, and the building of the welfare state. These special nordic features have furnished official and political legitimacy for the demand for gender equality. Struggles for equal rights and better social life conditions for women, as well as political and philosophical theoretical discussions of the status of women, have taken place in the nordic societies since the late 18th century” (Nielsen, np.). However, in a recent collection of essays called Is There a Nordic Feminism, feminists from the five countries suggest that a geo-political focus that situates Nordic feminism in relation to the non-Nordic helps to “make visible a body of work that ‘has sometimes been obscured by the writings of the French or American feminist scholars’,” writes Robin Scott in a review of the book (Scott 1999, np). It is my goal to understand in what ways Nordic feminism has been obscured, and to what degree reporting on its achievements can benefit the very French and North-American feminist scholarship that has eclipsed Nordic feminist research. Using Nordic female iconography and circumpolar “fragmentary phenomena” such as the northern lights is one way to bring both traditions into dialogue. Nordic feminist research ranges from “women’s rationality of care” to “phenomenological and qualitative research methods,” from “peace research and human rights” to “primary industries and economy, ecology and administration of nature resources (for example, women’s participation in fisheries, forestry, and agriculture) and to areas such as biotechnology, conceptions of nature, and the world of sports.” Nielsen explains that such perspectives give “Norwegian women’s research a stamp of interdisciplinary and empirical orientation.” The advantage of pairing feminism and state politics has resulted in unprece- dented financial and political support from the Norwegian government, support that feminists all over the world envy.

268 Thus, Nordic feminism is instructive in both its applied theory and coop- erative traditions, but equally significant are its cultural and naturalist traditions, which may defy representation by phallogocentric standards, but teach by unrepresentable means. Cornell is right, “that the un[re]presentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as an alibi for stay- ing out of juridico-political battles,” which Nordic feminists have obviously embraced. In other words, and drawing from the productive confluence of Nordic and French feminisms, arctic virgins dancing in the aurora borealis could signal an allegorical unveiling and shattering of representation’s alibi as well as of Kristeva’s case against representation. In my pentimen- to4 on Kristeva I see something revealed beneath her portrait of representation that is conducive (and heuristic) to our hologram of élekcriture. In her essay, “Giotto’s Joy,” Kristeva’s analysis of Giotto’s frescos hones in on the aporia apparent in her critique of representation when she suggests: “Formative light is nothing but light shattered into colors, an opening up of colored surfaces, a flood of representations” (Kristeva 1980, 233). There. It is said – a flood of representations, of fragmentary phenomena, of jouissance not set free from representation, but set free by the liberation of representation into its phenomenal heterogeneity and proliferation. But let me be clear – we are not defining élekcriture by building an anti-foundation foundation from the “ruins of representation,” rather we are funding its radicalization with such allegories and “fragmentary phenomena” as telegraphy, typewriters, rattlers, radiations, refractions, rev- ontuli (Finnish for aurora borealis), also with pentimenti, circulations, circum(polarizations), and salient juxtapositions. As Geoffrey Sirc notes: “Letting the other speak (allos + agoreuei) is the very definition of allegory” (Sirc 2002, 193). Similarly, Kenneth Burke’s notion of “entitlements” offers us a semiotic in which the “things of the world have become material exemplars of the values which the tribal idiom has placed on them” (Burke 1966, 361). Still another useful Burkean idea is that terms sometimes “radiate” in an outward direction, sharing jurisdiction with other terms, and, I would add, by extension, with natural phenomena (ibid., 369). For example, we can readily see the kinship of the ancient Greek term chasmata , which likened the auroral arc structure to the mouth of a celestial cave, and the scientific term isochasms, which are two geographical points which share an identical frequency of auroral occurrence. Now, imagine a porous hymen – through which we see the northern lights, and through which they see us – and the following links between language and frag-

269 mentary phenomenon entitle the morphology of an aporia that radiates out from the arctic aurora herself – salient juxtapositions among science, mythology, art, folklore, and Kristevan semiotics, to which we will return shortly. A result of intense solar activity that streams to earth as electrical particles, the northern lights are technically speaking “a complicated interplay between the so-called solar wind and the earth’s magnetic field” (Hansen 1997, 11). When the lights appear to dance or shimmer, they are called “pulsating auroras” by which is meant “the repetitive intensity modulation in the auroral luminosity” (Spaceweb, np). “When oppositely moving VLF waves and energetic electrons interact, so called cyclotron resonance interaction is possible. In these interactions, VLF waves are amplified by the transition of energy from the spiraling electrons to the waves. As a result, the pitch angle of the electron is reduced and electrons scatter into the loss cone” (emphasis mine; Spaceweb, np). Despite the scientific data, the northern lights perpetually defy representation. Of course we may explain the phenomenon in terms of the magnetic interplay between the solar wind and earth’s magnetic field, but at the same time, the predict- ability of those variables cannot account for the unpredictability and inef- fability of the aurora borealis. Even scientists are dazzled by their transi- ence, variability, and complicated variations in intensity. These showers of electric particles “tear along like impetuous squalls, creating arcs, draper- ies and rays,” notes Truls Hansen of the Auroral Observatory at the Uni- versity of Tromsø (1997, 11). “The particle precipitation is found in a ring around the magnetic poles, and in this ring the northern lights are situated like an unbroken halo around both poles…called the auroral halo” (ibid., 11). But Asgeir Brekke reminds us, “the northern lights are more than a matter of physics, because they are a kind of ‘persona non grata’ which does not allow itself to be tied down in physical formulae or mathematical chains like the stars and planets” (Brekke 1997, 43). In Norse mythology, the lights represented the very bridge of the gods, Bifrost, which, in a “brilliant show of colours, formed an elegant, quivering arc between heaven and earth” (Brekke 1997, 19–20). Among the earliest artistic renderings of the lights, perhaps the most beautiful (and representative) were drawn by Louis Bevalet (figure 3), an artist who accompanied the French expedition to Svalbard in 1838. In describing Bevalet’s illustration, Brekke claims it “allows a majestic aurora to fling itself in immense folds over [Norway]” (22).

270 Figure 3. Painting by Louis Bevalet.

In 1892, Gerhard Munthe (figure 4) titled this painting “Suitors, Daughters of the Northern Lights,” and we see polar bears (isbjørn) entering the daughters’ bed chamber, licking their feet in a posture of worship, rem- nants of earlier folklore and mythology. Among the circumpolar indige- nous people of Nordic regions, some say that the auroral halos are the dancing souls of dead virgins, or old maids waving their mittens. Some believe the “mystical veils” are still-born children playing ball with their afterbirth. Icon of the threshold between life and death, arctic virgins sig- nified liminal figures characterized in Norse mythology as the Norns, and later the Valkyries, goddesses who determined the destinies of kings, who chose the slain and escorted them into Valhalla, the hall of Odin. In Fin- land, when the auroras filled the sky, they said “the women in the north are hovering,” or “the old women in Pohjanmaa are hovering over Konnun- suo” (the place where dead virgins lived) (Brekke 1997, 43). To hover means, literally, to remain in an uncertain state – the site of this hovering is the limit of symbolic order. According to Moi, Kristeva defines woman not essentially, but as situated at the threshold of this limit…”[sharing] in the disconcerting properties of all frontiers” which has enabled male culture to locate and “vilify women as representing darkness

271 Figure 4. Suitors, Daughters of the Northern Lights by Gerhard Munthe.

and chaos, to view them as Lilith or the Whore of Babylon, and sometimes to elevate them as representative of a higher and purer nature, to venerate them as Virgins and Mothers of God” (Moi 1985, 167). So, the whitewash is not over. Yet Kristeva’s desire to release the unrepresentable marks but a tear in the veil of representation. Her call to abandon representation pales when juxtaposed with her all-too-brief review of color in “Giotto’s Joy.” In her analysis of Giotto’s paintings in the Arena chapel in Padua, Kristeva explains that his particular use of colors, especially a “luminous phosphorescent blue,” signifies a break with Byzantine tradition and the dogma of the church that controlled ‘representation’ itself. She suggests that color is not restricted within the “strict codes of representation and verisimilitude,” as are form and space (Kristeva 1980, 226). As such, “[c]olor translates an oversignifying logic in that it inscribes instinctual ‘residues’ that the understanding subject has not symbolized” (ibid., 221). “Color is the shattering of unity” (ibid., 221). It shatters the “dominion of One Mean- ing” (ibid., 224), in this case, the color white. It does not suppress light, but segments it with spectral multiplicity.

272 Backtrack to the winter of 1852, to the “heavy blue line” that etched itself onto the blank page of one telegraph machine, then bleached white by the negative current that followed the postive-ly blue. Re-coil the story of the ‘blank page,’ allegory for Wahnie, for Baby Haynes, for mystory of élekcriture. Working heuretically from telegraphy, circumpolar Nordic, mythic female iconography as well as from the spectre of the aurora borealis, my vision of the arctic virgin is not simply, nor only, circum/ spection. Nor does it aim to speculate on whether chasmata de-pict the chora. Blending folklore and theory, magnetospheric studies of the northern lights with semiotic translations, this analysis holds forth the polar hymen, its pulsating auroral electrons scattering into the “loss cone” of the earth as a sign of élekcriture and the ‘arctic virgin’ – all surface, all luminosity, all pulsion. The arctic virgin re-emerges as no ice maiden, no snow queen, no valkyrie. She is the pulse of a polar hymen tightly quivering from the stress of a universe aching to penetrate her auroral arc. In the end, she is an aberration of cybertextuality: consigned to wander, to err; incapable of producing an exact mirror image, destined never to represent the rational object, cybertext. With/in élekcriture she is the streaming of color and language above the ground of function; thus, she rejects ‘function’ in light of its proximity to foundations, or the ground. The arctic virgin as abberant heuristic and semiotic aporia misfires by failing to ignite as a sign of, or a medium for, cybertext. This is not due to some miscalculation; rather, it is, finally, more a function of misgivings – of perpetual doubt about the cybertextual. There, just there, the arctic virgin glimpses us and shivers.

Figure 5. Auroral Ovals

273 NOTES

1. One obvious exception is Freud’s “mystic writing pad,” an analogy he used to explain how the psyche receives and records material (see “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’”, 1925, and Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writ- ing”). 2. Portions of these narratives are drawn from my “Family and Forbidden Zones” and “... – – – .../Women, Computers and the Language of Distress” essays. 3. The concept of revirginization stems from a recent trend in abstinence education. Sometimes called “secondary virginity,” a “’born-again’ virgin, is when an individual who has had premar- ital sex chooses to ‘start again’ and wait until marriage” (http:// www.geocities.com/thevirginclub/Secondary.htm). 4. “Term (Italian for ‘repentance’) describing a part of a picture that has been overpainted by the artist but which has become visible again (often as a ghostly outline) because the upper layer of pigment has become more transparent through age.” From http://www.xrefer.com/entry/144991.

274 REFERENCES

Brekke, Asgeir (1997) “The northern lights over Alta: a bridge to the outside world” and “Women in the northern lights.” In Anne Merete Knudsen (ed.) The Northern Lights: Science, History, Culture, 13–42; 43–48. Alta, Norway: Alta Museum. Burke, Kenneth (1966) Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U C Press. Cornell, Drucilla (1992) The Philosophy of the Limit. NY: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1978) “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Writing and Difference, 196–231. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dinesen, Isak (1957) “The Blank Page.” In Isak Dinesen Last Tales, 99– 105. New York: Random House. Freud, Sigmund (1925) “A note upon the ‘mystic writing pad’.” [Int. J. Psychoanal. 21:469]. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho- logical Works of Sigmund Freud. 19, 227–232. London: Hogarth Press. Hagemann, Gro (1985) “Feminism and the Sexual Division of Labour. Female Labour in the Norwegian Telegraph Service around the Turn of the Century.” Scandinavian Journal of History. vol. 10. 145–146. Hansen, Truls Lynne (1997) “The northern lights – what are they?” In Anne Merete Knudsen (ed.) The Northern Lights: Science, History, Culture, 7–12. Alta, Norway: Alta Museum. Haynes, Cynthia (1998) “Family and Forbidden Zones: Finding the Keys to the Moon.” in Carolyn Guyer (ed.) Mother Millennia. Available: http:/ /www.mothermillennia.org/CynthiaHaynes.html. 9/6/02. Haynes, Cynthia (1999) “... – – – .../Women, Computers, and the Langu- age of Distress.” Pre/Text: Electra(Lite) 2.1. Available: http:// www.utdallas.edu/pretext/PT2.1/haynes/. 9/6/02. Hurrell, Greg (1998) “Henrik Ibsen, Frederika Bremer, Marie Michelet and the Emancipation of Women in Norway.” Nordic Notes, vol.2. Avai- lable: http://www.ssn.flinders.edu.au/scanlink/nornotes/vol2/articles/ hurrell.htm. 9/1/02.

275 Kristeva, Julia (1980) “Giotto’s Joy.” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach toLiterature and Art, 210–36. In Leon S. Roudiez (ed.) Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia (1980) “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini.” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, 237–70. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. NY: Columbia University Press. Moi, Toril (1985) Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen. Nielsen, Harriet Bjerrum. “Women’s Studies and Gender Research in Norway.” Kilden. Available: http://kilden.forskningsradet.no/english/ eng_art_hbn.htm. 11/29/99. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1982/1888) Twilight of the Idols. The Portable Nietzsche, 463–564. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking. Norton, Patti. “The Aurora Borealis and the Telegraph.” Available: http:// www.rainbowriderstradingpost.com/article1.html. 8/31/02. Scott, Robin May. “What is Nordic Feminism, Anyway?” Forum: For Gender & Culture, 1.4.99. Available: http://www.forum.kvinfo.dk/ forum.asp?PageID=28322). 11/29/99. Sirc, Geoffrey (2002) English Composition as a Happening. Logan, UT: Utah University Press. Spaceweb. “Pulsating Aurora.” University of Oulu, Finland. Department of Physical Sciences. Available: http://ousrvr2.oulu.fi/~spaceweb/ textbook/aurora/pulsating/. 9/6/02. Standage, Tom (1999) The Victorian Internet: The remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century’s on-line pioneers. New York: Berkley. Ulmer, Gregory (1994) Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Worsham, Lynn (1991) “Writing against Writing: The Predicament of Écriture Féminine in Composition Studies.” Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age, 82–104. Eds. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb. New York: MLA.

276 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Bruce Andrews is the author of over two dozen books of experimental poetry & performance scores. Most recent are Lip Service (a reworking of Dante’s Paradiso from Toronto’s Coach House Press) and The Mil- lennium Project (over 900 pages online at http://www.princeton.edu/ eclipse). Northwestern University Press published his collected theoretical essays, Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis; supplementing these are more recent essays on Andrews’s author page http://epc.buffalo.edu/ authors/andrews. Andrews has taught Political Science and Political Econ- omy at Fordham University fulltime since moving to New York City in 1975. He is the Music Director of Sally Silvers & Dancers, and collaborator with Silvers for almost 20 years, creating multi-media theatrical projects, scores for improvising musicians, soundscapes and live mixing on choreo- graphic concerts in New York (and in Europe and Mexico). In 2003, he has an Artist Residency at Engine 27, the New York City sound art center.

Sandy Baldwin is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University. He has published on innovative poetry, as well as on topics such as the mnemotechnics of user interfaces, the semiotics of money, the politics of Microsoft Word, and crash test dummies. His poetry and performances appear solo and with groups such as Purkinge, 9 Way Mind, the Atlanta Poet’s Group, and VoPo. His poetry was recently anthologized in Another South: Experi- mental Writing in the South (Alabama) and will appear soon in The Jour- nal of Artist’s Books.

Giselle Beiguelman is a new media artist and multimedia essayist who teaches Digital Culture at the Graduate Program in Communication and Semiotics of PUC-SP (São Paulo, Brazil). Her work includes the award- winning The Book after the Book (1999) and (2000), nominated for the Trace/ Alt-X New Media Competition. She has made art for mobile phones (Wop Art, 2001) and involving public-access and internet-streaming for electronic billboards like Leste o Leste? and

277 Egoscópio (2002), released by The New York Times, among others. Beig- uelman’s work appears in anthologies and guides devoted to digital arts including Yale University Library Research Guide for Mass Media (S. Wilson, 2001) and Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (The MIT Press, 2001). Her work has been presented in international congresses, conferences and venues such as Net_Condition (ZKM, Germany), Netáforas v.3 (MECAD, Barcelona) and The 25th São Paulo Biennial. Artist web site: http://www.desvirtual.com

Philippe Bootz, associated researcher in communication at the GERI- CO-CIRCAV (University of Lille 3) since 1994, and contributor in multimedia at the ENSCI (Paris) since 1999. He is President of the association MOTS-VOIR since 1984 and Editor of the journal of electronic poetry Alire since 1989. He is also a co-founder of the French group LAIRE (Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture), created in 1988. He has had numerous exhibitions and publications since the late 70’s.

John Cayley is a London-based poet, translator and publisher. He is the founding editor of Wellsweep, a small press which has specialised in literary translation from Chinese, and he is known internationally for his writing in networked and programmable media (http://www.shadoof.net/in). Cayley is the recent winner of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Award for Poetry 2001 (http://www.eliterature.org). His last book of poems, adaptations and translations is Ink Bamboo (London: Agenda & Belew, 1996). Cayley has lectured on the writing programme at the University of California, San Diego, where he was also a Research Associate of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). He is an Honor- ary Research Associate in the Department of English, Royal Holloway College, University of London, and an Honorary Fellow of Dartington College of Arts, closely associated with their Performance Writing programme.

Maria Damon teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry, co-author of The Secret Life of Words (with Betsy Franco) and Literature Nation (with Miekal And), and co-editor of Poet- ry and Cultural Studies: A Reader (with Ira Livingston) She is a member of the National Writers’ Union.

278 Lori Emerson is from Edmonton, Alberta (Canada). Her essays have appeared in such journals as Open Letter and Essays in Canadian Writ- ing. She is currently researching cyberpoetics and notions of the posthuman as a PhD candidate in English Literature at SUNY Buffalo. She was a coordinator for the 2002 Language & Encoding Symposium at Buffalo, and has been a contributing editor to the Buffalo Poetics list and the Elec- tronic Poetry Center.

Markku Eskelinen is an independent scholar and experimental writer of ergodic prose, interactive drama, critical essays and cybertext fiction. Excerpts from his earliest fiction were published in The Review of Con- temporary Fiction (Summer 1996) according to which he’s also “easily the most iconoclastic figure on the Finnish literary scene.” He has given papers and other presentations at various international conferences, including Siggraph and the series of Digital Arts and Culture conferences. He is also an editor of Game Studies - the international journal of computer game research (http://www.gamestudies.org).

William Gillespie runs the independent publishing house Spineless Books (spinelessbooks.com), and is an electronic writing fellow at Brown Uni- versity.

Loss Pequeño Glazier is a poet, professor of Media Study, a Poetics Program Core Faculty member, and Director of the Electronic Poetry Center (http://epc.buffalo.edu), the world’s most extensive Web-based digital poetry resource, at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He is author of the award winning Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poet- ries (University of Alabama Press, 2002) and organizer of E-Poetry: An International Digital Poetry Festival, one of the most celebrated digital poetry series in the field. (E-Poetry was also the first digital poetry festival ever held, in Buffalo in 2001.) He is the author of several books of poetry and digital poetry projects. His work has been shown at numerous muse- ums and galleries, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and he has lectured and performed throughout the U.S. and in London, Paris, Berlin, Norway, Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Canada, and other countries. Se- lected digital projects and other work are available on his EPC author page (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier).

279 Cynthia Haynes holds a Ph. D. in Humanities with concentrations in Rhetoric, Composition, and Critical Theory from The University of Texas at Arlington. She currently directs the Rhetoric and Writing program and teaches in the School of Arts & Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas. Recently Haynes was inducted as one of the first women whose electronic texts are now archived in the Texas Women’s University Li- brary. With Jan Rune Holmevik, she co-created Lingua MOO and helped develop the enCore educational MOO core. Haynes co-edited (with Jan Rune Holmevik) a collection of essays, High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs (University of Michigan Press, 1998; 2nd ed. 2002). Holmevik and Haynes also co-authored MOOniver- sity: A Student’s Guide to Online Learning Environments (Allyn & Bacon, 2000). Haynes is currently at work on her book, Beta Rhetoric: Writing, Technology, and Deconstruction, forthcoming from SUNY Press.

Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his interactive net installa- tions and his bio art. His visionary combination of robotics and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. His work deals with issues that range from the mythopoetics of online experience (Uirapuru) to the cultural impact of biotechnology (Genesis); from the changing condition of memory in the digital age (Time Capsule) to distributed collective agency (Teleporting an Unknown State); from the problematic notion of the “exotic” (Rara Avis) to the creation of life and evolution (GFP Bunny). Kac’s work has been exhibited internationally at major venues and his work is part of the permanent collections of several muse- ums and collections. The recipient of many awards, Kac lectures and publishes worlwide. His work is documented on the Web in eight languages: http://www.ekac.org. He is the Chair of the Art and Technology De- partment at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Eduardo Kac is represented by Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago.

Raine Koskimaa works as a professor of digital culture at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, where he teaches and conducts research especially in the field of digital textuality. He has published two books and several articles dealing with the issues of digital literature, hyper and cybertextuality, reader-response studies, media use, cyberpunk science fiction, and narratology. His Ph.D. thesis Digital Literature. From Text to Hypertext

280 and Beyond is available at http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis/ He is a member of the Literary Advisory Board for the Electronic Literature Or- ganization.

Talan Memmott is a hypermedia artist/writer/editor from San Francisco, California. He is the Creative Director and Editor of the online hypermedia literary journal BeeHive (http://beehive.temporalimage.com). His hypermedia work has appeared widely on the Internet. In 2001 he was awarded the trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Award for his work “Lexia to Perplexia”, which also received honorable mention for the Electronic Lit- erature Organization’s award in fiction. He is a tutor for the trAce Online Writing School, and has been a speaker, panelist, reader and performer at various conferences and universities.

Adrian Miles is an internationally recognised theorist who works in hypermedia and networked interactive video. His work has been published in numerous peer reviewed publications and he is a regular participant in international conferences and forums. He is currently on the Literary Ad- visory Board of the Electronic Literature Organisation, the editorial board of Postmodern Culture, and Text Technology, and has been on the academic boards of the 2002 Association of Computing Humanities annual conference and the ACM 2002 Hypertext conference. Adrian is regularly invited to present his research, teaching, and creative work internationally. Current research includes the application of Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema to interactive video and hypermedia, video blogging, and the development of new pedagogies for new media teaching. Adrian has been actively involved in the Digital Arts and Culture community since its inception in 1998 and was the conference chair and organizer of the MelbourneDAC 2003 Streaming Worlds.

Nick Montfort is now studying for a Ph.D. in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, forthcoming) and coeditor, with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, of The New Media Read- er (MIT Press, 2003). He holds masters degrees from the MIT Media Lab and from Boston University, where he was cowinner of the Ameri- can Academy of Poets Prize. He wrote and programmed the interactive fiction works Ad Verbum and Winchester’s Nightmare and was coauthor, with William Gillespie, of The Ed Report and 2002: A Palindrome Story.

281 Jim Rosenberg was born in 1947. His work has included a wide variety of forms including linear work, works for multiple voices both live and on magnetic tape, and word environments constructed in San Francisco and New York. He began a life-long concern with non-linear poetic forms in 1966, with a series of polylinear poems called Word Nets. By 1968 this concern had evolved to an ongoing series of Diagram Poems, which continues to the present.This body of work includes Diagrams Series 3 and Diagrams Series 4. Diagrams Series 4 is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.well.com/user/jer/diags4/diags4.html. Since 1988 his work has consisted of interactive poems, beginning with Intergrams, published by Eastgate Systems (Cambridge, MA.). Two newer titles, Dif- fractions through: Thirst weep ransack (frailty) veer tide elegy and The Barrier Frames: Finality crystal shunt curl chant quickening give- away stare are also published by Eastgate.

Roberto Simanowski works as a professor of cultural studies in digital media at University of Jena. He is the founding editor of the web journal Dichtung Digital (http://www.dichtung-digital.de). Simanowski has published and lectured extensively about themes related to digital literature. He is the author of Interfictions. Vom Schreiben im Netz (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 2002) and the editor of Literatur.digital. For- men und Wege einer neuen Literatur (München: DTV, 2002).

Janez Strehovec received his Ph.D. from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1988 in Aesthetics. Since 1993 he has been working as principal researcher at the projects Theories of Cyberarts and Theories of Cy- berculture. His recent research project involved in the National Research Program for the next three years is Theories of Internet Culture and Inter- net Textuality. He is also Assistant Professor for New Media Theories at Academy of Visual Arts, University of Ljubljana. He is the author of five books in the field of cultural studies and aesthetics published in Slovenia. His books include Technoculture, the Culture of Techno (1998) dealing with the subject of techno not just as a lifestyle issue and music movement but as a crucial principle of the recent artificial realities. He has also written in journals such as the Journal of Popular Culture, the Popular Culture Review, A-r-c, Afterimage, Dichtung Digital and CTheory, and has presented his papers at various international conferences in Europe and the United States.

282 Ragnhild Tronstad is currently finishing her Ph.D. thesis at the Depart- ment of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, addressing questing and character interaction in MUDs from various perspectives including game studies (”ludology”), theatricality, performativity, and hermeneutics. Her research is funded by the SKIKT program at the Norwegian Research Council and the University of Oslo.

283 PUBLICATIONS OF THE RESEARCH CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

1. Symbolit • Toim. Katarina Eskola. 1986. (pp. 110) Sold out. 2. Maaria Linko • Katsojien teatteri. 1986. (pp. 116). Sold out. 3. Näkökulmia kulttuurin tuotantoon • Toim. Katarina Eskola & Liisa Uusitalo. 1986. (pp. 127) Sold out. 4. Kimmo Jokinen ja Maaria Linko • Uusi Tuntematon. 1987. (pp. 122) 5. Kimmo Jokinen • Ostajat, lukijat, arvioijat, tukijat. 1987. (pp. 115) Sold out. 6. Juha Lassila • Kultalevyn alkemia. 1. print 1987, 2. print 1988. (pp. 162) Sold out. 7. Liisa Uusitalo & Juha Lassila • Vanhojen kirjojen kenttä. 1988. (pp. 65) 8. The production and reception of literature • Edited by Katarina Eskola & Erkki Vainikkala. 1988. (pp. 78) 9. Martine Burgos • Life stories, Narrativity and the Search for the Self. 1988. (pp. 28) Sold out. 10. Heikki Hellman & Tuomo Sauri • Suomalainen prime-time. 1988. (pp. 130) 11. Erik Allardt, Stuart Hall & Immanuel Wallerstein • Maailman kulttuurin äärellä. 1988. (pp. 86) Sold out. 12. Kimmo Jokinen • Arvostelijat. 1988. (pp. 131) Sold out. 13. State, Culture & The Bourgeoisie • Edited by Matti Peltonen. 1989. (pp. 82) 14. J.P. Roos • Liikunta ja elämäntapa. 1989. (pp. 72) 15. Anne Brunila & Liisa Uusitalo • Kirjatuotannon rakenne ja strategiat. 1. print 1989, 2. print 1991. (pp. 114) 16. Reino Rasilainen • Julkaistu ja julkaisematon kirjallisuus. 1989. (pp. 89) 17. Juha Lassila • Riippumattomat televisiotuottajat. 1989. (pp. 126) 18. Literature as communication • Edited by Erkki Vainikkala & Katarina Eskola. 1989. (pp. 215) 19. Anne Raassina • Lukutaito ja kehitysstrategiat. 1990. (pp. 123) 20. Juha Lassila • Mitä Suomi soittaa? 1990. (pp. 263) Sold out.

284 21. Johanna Mäkelä • Luonnosta kulttuuriksi, ravinnosta ruoaksi. 1.print 1990, 2. rint 1992 (pp. 89) Sold out. 22. Sublim Ylevä sublime • Toim. Erkki Vainikkala. 1990. (pp. 107) 23. Timo K. Salonen • Konserttimusiikin yleisö makujen kentällä. 1990. (pp. 104) 24. Maaria Linko • Teatteriesitykset ja julkisuus. 1990. (pp. 81) 25. Kyösti Pekonen • Symbolinen modernissa politiikassa. 1991. (pp. 154) Sold out. 26. Ulrich Beck, Klaus Mollenhauer & Wolfgang Welsch • Philosophie, soziologie und erziehungswissenschaft in der postmoderne. 1991. (pp. 69) 27. Päivi Elovainio & Zeinab Shahin • The Gender Fate of Women in Rural Egypt. 1991. (pp. 112) 28. Eija Eskola • Rukousnauha ja muita romaaneja. 1992. (pp. 152) 29. Urpo Kovala • Väliin lankeaa varjo. 1992. (pp. 204) 30. Maaria Linko • Outo ja aito taide. 1992. (pp. 121) 31. The First Thirty • Edited by Urpo Kovala. 1992. (pp. 132) 32. Vanguards of modernity • Edited by Niilo Kauppi & Pekka Sulkunen. 1992. (pp. 188) 33. Timo Siivonen • Avantgarde ja postmodernismi. 1992. (pp. 122 ) 34. Katarina Eskola, Kimmo Jokinen & Erkki Vainikkala • Literature and the New State of Culture. 1992. (pp. 60) Sold out. 35. Sanna Karttunen • Musiikki kulttuurisessa tietoisuudessa. 1992. (pp. 174) 36. Risto Eräsaari • Essays on Non-conventional Community. 1993. (pp. 214) 37. Annikka Suoninen • Televisio lasten elämässä. 1993. (pp. 171) Sold out. 38. The Cultural Study of Reception • Edited by Erkki Vainikkala. 1993. (pp. 215) 39. Mieheyden tiellä • Toim. Pirjo Ahokas, Martti Lahti ja Jukka Sihvonen. 1993. (pp. 185) Sold out. 40. Jukka Kanerva • ”Ryvettymisen hyvä puoli...” 1994. (pp. 151) 41. Uusi aika • Toim. ja kirj. Nykykulttuurin tutkimusyksikön tutkijat. 1994. (pp. 260) 42. Tuija Modinos • Nainen populaarikulttuurissa. 1. print 1994, 2. print 2000. (pp. 124) 43. Teija Virta • Saippuaoopperat ja suomalaiset naiset. 1994. (pp. 135) 44. Anne Sankari • Kuntosaliruumis. 1995. (pp. 108)

285 45. Kai Halttunen • Pienkustantajan arkipäivä. 1995. (pp. 95) 46. Katja Valaskivi • Wataru seken wa oni bakari. 1995. (pp. 114) 47. Jukka Törrönen • Aito rakkaus maskuliinisessa maailmassa. 1996. (pp. 100) 48. Tuija Nykyri • Naiseuden naamiaiset. 1996. (pp. 144) 49. Nainen, mies ja fileerausveitsi • Toim. Katarina Eskola. 1996. (pp. 274) Sold out. 50. Raine Koskimaa • Cultural activities in five European countries. 1996. (pp. 152) Työraportti, vain tutkimuskäyttöön. 52. Raine Koskimaa • Seksiä, suhteita ja murha. 1998. (pp. 215) 53. Timo Siivonen • Kyborgi. 1996. (pp. 209) 54. Aina uusi muisto • Toim. Katarina Eskola & Eeva Peltonen. 1. print 1997, 2. print 1997. (pp. 355) 55. Olli Löytty • Valkoinen pimeys. 1997. (pp. 147) 56. Kimmo Jokinen • Suomalaisen lukemisen maisemaihanteet. 1997. (pp. 226) 57. Maaria Linko • Aitojen elämysten kaipuu. 1998. (pp. 92) 58. Kai Lahtinen • Vem tillhör teatern? 1998. (pp. 258) 59. Katja Möttönen • Riitasointuja vai tema con variazioni. 1998. (pp. 128) 60. Aki Järvinen • Hyperteoria. 1999. (pp. 187) 61. Susanna Paasonen • Nyt! Ja ikuisesti – rewind. 1999. (pp. 188) 62. Pirkkoliisa Ahponen • Kulttuurin kierreportaikossa. 1999. (pp. 168) 63. Reading cultural difference • Edited by Urpo Kovala & Erkki Vainikkala. 2000. (pp. 334) 64. Inescapable Horizon: Culture and Context • Edited by Sirpa Leppänen & Joel Kuortti. 2000. (pp. 273) 65. Otteita kulttuurista • Toim. Maaria Linko, Tuija Saresma & Erkki Vainikkala. 2000. (pp. 422) 66. Kimmo Saaristo • Avoin asiantuntijuus. 2000. (pp. 191) 67. Jaakko Suominen • Sähköaivo sinuiksi, tietokone tutuksi. 2000. (pp. 368) 68. Cybertext yearbook 2000 • Toim. Markku Eskelinen & Raine Koskimaa. 2001. (pp. 202) 69. Sari Charpentier • Sukupuoliusko. 2001. (pp.155) 70. Kirja 2010 • Toim. Lauri Saarinen, Juri Joensuu & Raine Koskimaa. 1. print 2001, 2. print 2003. (pp. 259 s.) 71. Irma Garam • Julkista yksityiselämää. 2002 (pp. 102 s.)

286 72. Cybertext yearbook 2001 • Toim. Markku Eskelinen & Raine Koskimaa. 2002. (pp. 196) 73. Henna Mikkola • Sukupolvettomat? 2002. (pp. 138) 74. Satu Silvanto • Ecce Homo – katso ihmistä. 2002. (pp. 161) 75. Markku Eskelinen • Kybertekstien narratologia. 2002. (pp. 106) 76. Riitta Hänninen • Leikki. 2003. (pp. 161) 77. Cybertext yearbook 2002–2003 • Toim. Markku Eskelinen & Raine Koskimaa. 2003. (pp. 283)

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