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| Abstracts
Time, Trust and Freedom - the End of Time for Our Generation Mike Allison Layton, UT, USA We bill the Internet "Paradigms Broken". Truly it is not. Instead, the Internet reinforces almost all of our paradigms about how we work and play. No one has shown any truly revolutionary practices on the Internet but, the nature of the Internet itself has begun to cause a psychological metanoia. Most of this has to do with the changing lexis of time, distance and proximity as these relate to: Thresholds of trust and security Authority of the printed word Identity and persona The Internet narrows gaps in space and time. But we know these gaps still exist physically, so we retain a great degree of physical security while we sacrifice a certain amount of psychological security. Therefore, we offer greater trust to strangers over the Internet, than we would our neighbors. This new threshold of trust allows us to accept and exploit a degree of anonymity on the net. It allows us to offer parts of our actual persona, or even create false personas. Not just anonymous or androgynous in the sense of a assuming a pen name, but the actual opportunity to assume an altered persona and "behave" in that manner. World-wide communications, instantaneous and virtually free, allow for simpler collaboration and the possibility of contacting people with whom we might not otherwise collaborate. People feel comfortable collaborating at a distance because of increased trust. The other change is the perceived authority of the written word. Increased access and openness allow broadcast of nearly anything. We are the last generation for which the printed word carries implicit authority. But many of these effects are limited to those of us steeped in the mythology of the past. The next generation won't carry our connotations about time, distance and proximity. Theirs will be radically different. True change will follow. http://www.konnections.com/mallison
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| Brazilian
Literature Report of Use and Making a German Literature Data Base
Gloria Celeste Bahia de Brito Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil German literature in an electronic medium aims at creating a bilingual literary data bank with texts on the humanities, with special reference to German literature. The data bank will be of use to discuss and disseminate German literature in Brazil, as well as hypertext questions, translation theory and history of literature/translation. This paper
is an adaptation of BRITO, Glória Celeste Bahia de and SHAUFFERT,
Rosary. A literatura Brasileira em Meio Eletrônico (Brazilian
Literature in an Eletronic Medium). Electronic publication: Now, we
aim at continuing the research works which are being developed at
NUPILL - Núcleo de Pesquisas em Informática, Literatura
e Lingüística (Group of Research in Computer Sciences,
Linguistics and Literature) - which has developed activities related
to interface between the above areas since 1996.
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Mapping Collaboration by Way of Story Diane Caney Australian Humanities Review, Australia
This presentation will be a new media production which traces some of the ways in which Robin Petterd (PhD candidate, Hunter Street Art School, University of Tasmania, Hobart) and Diane Caney have invented narratives during their collaboration since 1997. The new media production will exist on the Web as well as being a performance piece with which Diane Caney will interact during its presentation at INCUBATION. The presentation will seek to both trace the formations of our existing online stories/ semi-autobiographies/fictocriticisms in innovative ways AND to address questions about narrative, intertextuality and the blurring of text/image/sound boundaries as they occur on the Web. These ideas have already been explored in our collaborations, and so our presentation at INCUBATION will be a meta-exploration.
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| Gateway
Rhetorics -- (hyper)Paratexts and Peritexts -- Liminal Communities
(in) formation
Cris Cheek Dartington College of Arts, Norwich School of Art & Design and Research Student at Edge Hill, UK Web Site Gateways form an incisive rhetoric of projected community, even though such formulations may be unwitting rather than intended by design. A Gateway is a location of arrival and departure, as is a link. It is a hinge of access upon which hangs the desire to enter or to jump away. In the quest for site stickiness an overall ethos is often quickly conveyed about the communities for which a particular site is intended to perform an interface. These are Web variants on Genette's Paratexts and Peritexts. So what do contemporary site gateways tell us in themselves, what coming communities do they suggest, what politics are conveyed there and what reading / writing practices are signalled by them; what assumptions does a given gateway embody? This illustrated paper will examine the gateway rhetorics of some sites written in England which are orientated towards poetics, in the light of such questions, placing them into a broader translocal context.
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The Function of Copyright in the Author/Publisher/ Purchasing Reader Pathway S C Crawford Institute of Contemporary Arts, England From the print publisher's perspective the first law of publishing is establishing your market and that you have a market. The crucial issue is not how, what or who you publish but who to. Those "who to's" are the people who will pay for your product. Publishing is not a charity. Knowing your market is all, selling your print run is all (although this latter exigency is changing, as will be discussed). Is publishing on the Internet any different? The topic will be discussed from the point of view (a) of a practicing poet; (b) of someone who works in academic publishing; and (c) of an intending Web-publisher. Examples will also be presented from the experience of the poetry group Poets of London and the group's associated published Web site anthologies as well as from the piloting of the group's first (intended-to-be) commercial publishing venture. For a book, the key research question is "is it a useful book?" What is the key question for an Internet product? How will the medium change the message and the way in which the message is presented? Will email contributions be treated any differently from manuscripts sent in the post? What does a publisher do that an author (or an illustrator or a designer) can't? Does peer review, editorial nous, getting endorsements and reviews for your book matter with an Internet product? Will the Web-publisher be a key figure in converting potential Web-readers into potential Web-purchasers? What are some of the new projects and the new collectivities? For a book, page iv, the imprint page, is a tightly written legal document. Anyone who reproduces, copies or transmits any paragraph of the work without written permission is liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. Who is this protective of -- and why? Copyright prevents anyone else claiming ownership of the author's work. It also restricts distribution. Copyright ensures that if a publication sells, a proportion of the profit goes to the author. What should copyright on the Web do? Who is the Web-publisher seeking to protect -- and why? http://www.poetsoflondon.com
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Maria Damon Department of English, University of Minnesota, USA I'd like to address the ways in which the loveandwar and other story-frames were used in a class I was teaching. The graduate creative writing seminar is called "Unfinishing Your Work", and the story projects fit some of the aspects I wanted to cover as "unfinishing" techniques or philosophies: collaboration, open-endedness, the fragmentary nature of much contemporary work. My own collaborator and seasoned cyber-poet Miekal And ("Literature Nation", "Eye Voyage", "The Plagiarist Codex", etc.) gave a guest lecture in a computer lab on campus, so that each of the 10 students could access trAce's storyboards. Then we all contributed to the stories. I found the results fun and interesting, though few if any of the students have chosen to revisit the site after the class meeting. (The MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota is very conservative, and this two-hour session is probably the only exposure students will have to transgeneric Web-oriented composition in their 2-3 years in the program.) I will talk about this from my position as a teacher wanting to expose my students to something new and as a sometime Web poet (and minor contributor to loveandwar), my colleague Miekal is a deeply immersed participant in both trAce's endeavors and in the larger Web-poetic project. Perhaps our presentation can open up into a larger discussion about how to "teach" this material and these processes in a traditional, non-techno (humanities and arts) context.
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From Thackeray to Moulthrop: the Interactive Reading Experience Suzanne Ebel Department of Print Media, Publishing and Communication, Napier University, UK The advancements in communication technologies and hypertext software for authors have enabled writers to experiment with the possibilities that hyperfiction presents. The digital narrative has moved on from the MUDs and MOOs of the college labs to more sophisticated multiplot stories that interweave lexias and invite the reader/user to "read" in a new way. Or do they? Is anything truly ever new? I propose to compare Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1845), set against the background of the Napoleonic wars with Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1991), set against the Gulf war and Desert Storm. My paper will look at the common themes of the novels as well as the processes that readers might use to appreciate the authorship of these two very different writers. Thackeray's writing processes are well documented and commentated upon: he wrote, illustrated, edited and published his work in the Edinburgh Cornhill Magazine, encouraging his readers to respond to the serialisations so that he could amend plot or character to appease his readers. Moulthrop on the other hand wants his readers to respond in a proactive manner so that they can experience fully the thrill of navigation and the new ways in which reader/users have to respond to hypertext fiction in order to satisfy their reading needs. In conclusion, this paper will show the commonalities between nineteenth-century print fiction and twentieth-century digital narratives and the similarities in reading practices then and now.
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Fifth
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What did you Expect?: Feminist Hypertexts for the Academy Caitlin Fisher Social and Political Thought, York University, Toronto, Canada I am completing a hypertextual dissertation in an interdisciplinary department -- weaving feminist theory, storytelling, narratology, fictions; looking at hypertexts online and exploring the way these resonate with other feminist experimental practices. I am, at the same time, building an experimental structure of my own. I will talk about the way my work -- at the level of theory, at the level of code, at the level of play -- has been informed by competing understandings of what it means to experiment with hybrid forms and voices in hypertext, in the context of the university. I would also like to talk about my experience with readers of my hypertexts (some of whom are approaching hypertext for the first time) and the challenges I've had presenting hypertexts at conferences. I'd like to perform these challenges, too, of course ;) and will weave theory, fictions, and technology together in this presentation. http://www.yorku.ca/faculty/academic/cfisher
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Language, Image, Linking, Thinking: Cyberpoetry's Emergence in the 1990s Christopher Funkhouser Special Lecturer, Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA Cyberpoetry has proliferated as a result of the World-Wide Web. Artists may now make direct links to core and associated texts (including radiant graphical texts and soundtracks), as well as to external texts. Presented via new media, cyberpoetry thus far reinvents previous twentieth century forms; it is a non-particular, hybrid form, which is not yet whole, comprising many parts, authorial energies, and nascent technological capabilities. Direct connections can be made between cyberpoetry and the interdisciplinary Black Mountain School, visually-based Concrete Poetry, and the animated and sonic qualities of performance poetry. Computer hardware and software are used to amplify and progenerate linear and non-linear aspects of writing; they present visual and/or oral and/or alphabetic dimensions of text. Types of cyberpoetry to emerge thus far may be roughly outlined as follows (combinations of these also occur): Graphical poetry; Animated or Kinetic poetry (includes audio/video based work, Java/Shockwave et al.); Collaborative poetry; Computer-aided or generated compositions; Text-based link-node poetry. This presentation will particularly focus on Christy Sheffield Sanford's work. Author of more than a dozen pieces on the Web, Sanford's output is remarkable for its graphical appearance and utility; she discovers ways to connect disparate forms of text by using graphical communication. Sanford's work is consistently exciting due to its high-quality imagery, inventive technical application, and breadth of subject matter. She has continuously produced high-quality and inventive work for half a decade, fortifying and expanding her own writing by combining alphabetic texts, radiant imagery, and links in order to guide the viewer through texts. Sanford's visual imagery is dynamic: images are not used to illustrate the narrative or as decoration, but to layer meaning and as navigational levers. Sanford's work will be related to the larger attributes referenced above. http://www-ec.njit.edu/~newrev
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Escaping into the Vortex of Imagination: Proposing a Poetics of Creativity and Collage for the Digital Arts David Gillette Department of English Language and Literature, University of Central Florida, USA & Barry Mauer Department of English, Texts and Technology Program, University of Central Florida, USA The digital realm is haunted by past artists and artistic concepts. It has become a point of convergence, a vortex into which artists escape the constraints of their own realms and, in the process, redefine their art and themselves. Photographers become performers and programmers become architects. In this digital world, where so many histories and talents interact and recombine, how do we determine what is creative and what is simply copying? Can digital creativity be theorized? Can it be taught? Is a digital poetics possible? To answer these questions, we will examine how creativity has been defined in the past. We begin by discussing theories of creativity, including the institutional theory of creativity developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the cognitive theories of creativity developed by D.N. Perkins, Michael Baxandall, and James Peterson, and the post-structuralist theory of creativity developed by Gregory Ulmer. While most of these theories have been focused primarily on cases of creativity within traditional realms (fine arts, science), we find there are elements of these theories which are adaptable to the specific problems of representation in digital media. We will then present case studies of creativity in the arts and entertainment, including Cindy Sherman (photography, film, performance), Louis Armstrong (music, social metaphor), surrealism and Hollywood. These case studies focus on the ways in which artists and entertainers have made transitions among diverse media and, in so doing, transformed the definitions of their art by escaping the traditional artistic constraints initially surrounding them. By studying the creative efforts of people in other domains, we aim to learn by example how to promote creativity in the digital arts. We will conclude by proposing a poetics to help us examine, work and teach within the digital arts. http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~english/faculty_frameset.html
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Take a Walk Down Memory Lane: Hypertext Writing and Narrative Perambulation in the Age of Information Belle Gironda University at Albany, State University of New York, USA This paper will examine the narrative practices of hypertext writing (in virtual "spaces") in relation to various concepts of memory and mnemonic practices. I will first discuss those memory systems and their related metaphors that emphasize externalization and projection. Then I will compare those with contemporary computer-related concepts and metaphors for memory that emphasize internalization and compression. These comparisons will then serve as the basis for an exploration of the ways that the narrative practices of hypertext writing reinvent the "externalization" of memory (as writing) in spatial terms and enact the movement of narrative as the desire to "go" somewhere, or simply to wander. In interactive virtual spaces the mutable nature of memory is made visible as writing is stored in "open" places and in "open" forms so that it is subject to alteration through interaction. Meanwhile, online writing, the 'location" of which is both everywhere and nowhere, occupies a discursive field over-coded with the flow of what we call "information." In his essay, "The Storyteller", Walter Benjamin described information as a "new form of communication" which ("no matter how far back its origin may lie") emerges most forcefully with the consolidation of the middle class "which has the press as one of its most important elements in fully developed capitalism". Information, Benjamin says, is distinguished from storytelling and particularly the novel and the epic as discursive forms, by its inability to "survive the moment when it was new". It is "the enemy of memory" (90). If there is a discursive and human need which the popularization of hypertext, as a "new" form of textuality, can be made to respond to, it may be the need for the re-inscription of the power of memory in the discursive field. At the same time, memory itself is re-imagined as living and mutable. http://www.albany.edu/~gironda
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Look at Helen Keller: New Aesthetic Possibilities from Technologies for the Blind and Deaf Jacqueline Goss Massachusetts College of Art, USA When one reads the letters blind and deaf author Helen Keller wrote as a child (a child learning how to use language even as she learned what language was), one witnesses a will to communicate which was never compromised by a reliance on many necessary tools of communication; new alphabets, Braille typewriters, styluses and tablets, sign languages -- even her hands -- had to be conquered and used fluently in order for Keller to do what we all innately want to do: talk to each other. Reliance on new communications tools appears as a symptom of survival in our fin de siecle era. Touch-tone phones, T1 lines, and myriad software products now link us to those with whom we wish to communicate. As such, Helen Keller stands as a modern-day model for the hearing and sighted (as well as for the blind and/or deaf -- many of whom literally incorporate new communications technologies). Ironically, tools that are supposed to facilitate communication often foster solipsism instead. We fire off email to people sitting at terminals next to us; we take in TV like soma. Some our most beloved communications tools can leave the deaf, blind, or physically impaired out in the cold unless they are adapted to suit these communities' needs. In the same ways in which the utilities of orality determined an aesthetic for written language, assistive technologies coat the information they translate with their own aesthetic. With this paper, I examine the new aesthetic possibilities offered by assistive and adaptive technologies. For instance, how can the Kurzweil reading machine, voice recognition software, and TTY be used for interesting cultural production for all of us? What do these productions ask of their audience? Because of assistive technologies, solipsism gives way to new forms of talking and text --an endangered mode of communication -- is salvaged as a lingua franca of our different communities.
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| Building
Communities of Interest and Geography in the age of online, sms, wap,
and interactive television
Robin Hamman Communities Evangelist at Talkcast, PLC. For
years we have heard about the convergence of digital technologies.
Some of these technologies, such as Refrigerators connected to the
Internet and eyewear linked wirelessly to a database, seem rather
far fetched. Others, such as the ability to send email through an
interactive television set, could prove incredibly useful.
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The OULIPO Experience in the Internet Framework Eleni S Konidari University of Crete, Rethymnon, Greece In 1960, Raymond Queneau set up an experimental literary group, the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (OULIPO). Among the members of the group were Francois Le Lionnais, Marcel Dussan, Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Jacques Roubaud and Georges Perec. All members shared a common view of literature as a joyful experience, they experimented with language games mainly based on formal constraint, they were interested in cybernetics and recreational mathematics and they sought the implication of the reader in the text. Perhaps the most well known applications of these ideas are Queneau's Cent Mille Milliard de Poemes (1961), Calvino's Se una Notte dâ Inverno un Viaggiatore (1979), and Perecâs, La Vie, Mode dâ Emploi (1978). Parody, pastiche, irony, playfulness, reflexivity, self-referentiality, quotation, randomness, fragmentation, and allegory were some of the hallmarks of Oulipan literary production. The project of the group was twofold: on the one hand, a research on literary devices used in the past (re-creation) and on the other, a research on the potential applications of formal languages, e.g. computer science, to literature (recreation). Some of the techniques which were afforded in the creation of texts, were: wordplay, intertextual references, collaborative production of texts, involvement of the reader, etc. The result is paradoxical because although the texts are produced in a paradigmatic structuralist spirit, they resist structuralist analysis. In this way, the Oulipan project appears to be far more ambitious than a harmless ludic treatment of literature. The artificial reproduction of traditional literary forms, mocks the fallacy of originality and pure imagination. The net provides us with the excellent opportunity to review such approaches to literature, by employing innovative techniques. This paper addresses the possible revival and expanding of the OULIPO experience, by the utilization of Internet potential.
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Voyages and Discoverings Through Electronic Poetry Alckmar Luiz dos Santos Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil The use of new instruments of texts production does not happen without some clamor, mostly in areas as Arts and Human Sciences. Traditionally, these areas have often oscillated between hesitation and an enthusiastic acceptance of the new techniques, reducing an all set of possibilities to such a poor manichaeism. Regarding the use of cybernetic processes (including both computers and Internet), poetical writing, in Brazil, shows an evident strength. However, how to think about the emergency of these new paradigms in peripheral countries, whose relationship to technology oscillates between dependence and creative innovation? Moreover, and more specifically, how to think about the impact of this new electronic writing, from the point of view of a Brazilian literary tradition that also has oscillated, in the last years, between a poetics established on traditional forms of printed texts and the merge of graphical elements? This work intends to avoid the easy alternative of manichaeism. One of its purpose is to argue how new instruments and processes -- as Pierre Levy claims -- do not operate by substitution, but by shifts. The using of cybernetic technologies in literary writing does not entail an immediate assimilation, but a modification, an upheaval in the fetichistic selfportrait that technology wants to impose us. In this case, it is possible to argue that the peripheral situation of Brazil can be reverted in advantage, for it makes possible a critical incorporation of these technologies in literary writing. Another intention is to make a survey of the current Brazilian literary production in Internet and computers, trying to understand in which way it articulates itself to the national poetical tradition and to the Portuguese literary inheritance too (specifically a visual poems tradition, in XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries). A first approach, and examples of poetical writing in computers with Gilbertto Prado, can be found at http://www.cce.ufsc.br/~nupill
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Paola Marchionni Commonwealth Resource Centre, Commonwealth Institute, London, UK This paper aims at illustrating an innovative Internet storytelling project organised by the Commonwealth Institute, Dreaming Online. It will trace the various stages of its development, form its inception to realisation, and will evaluate its outcomes. Dreaming Online features Internet residencies with four internationally renowned Australian Aboriginal storytellers, including Cathy Craigie, Francis Firebrace, Boori Pryor and Pat Torres, and launches on 1st June 2000. The project will be hosted on the Commonwealth Institute's Web Site, http://www.commonwealth.org.uk, and is aimed at schoolchildren at Key Stage 2 (7-11 years old). Dreaming Online was devised as a literacy project which encourages pupils' understanding of other cultures and creative writing through Australian Aboriginal Dreaming stories, or Creation stories. By participating in this project, pupils will make use of such stories as an inspiration to produce their own writings as well as make use of and develop ICT skills as a support in the study of English. Dreaming Online will feature newly commissioned works by the four Aboriginal storytellers, including a sound version of their stories, a wealth of background information on Australian Aborigine peoples, the Dreamtime and the process of storytelling, teachers' notes, pictures, biographical information on the storytellers, and many links to other relevant Web sites. Pupils will be able to e-mail the storytellers and receive personalised replies, which will be put online, publish their own stories and drawings on the Web site, participate in an interactive quiz and take part in a discussion forum with children from other participating schools. Among the intended outcomes of this project is to provide on-line access for schools to a unique resource of specifically commissioned Dreaming literature written by Australian Aboriginal storytellers and to offer a possible template for creative writing projects on the Internet which can inspire future projects. This presentation will also focus on the collaborative nature of this project, in that from an initial grant from the Arts Council of England, the Commonwealth Institute has been successful in bringing together in partnership a number of other organisations, such as the Australian Museum, Sydney, Montage project (the British Council, Sydney) and the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. literature@commonwealth.org.uk
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Affectivity + Acquiescence = [a] lower case [in] capital letters: a rubric for network actors Lisa McDonald University of South Australia Affect_To sift what is becoming Acquiesce_ To assimilate the place of rupture Act_To be [in]discrete Described as the major descriptive disruption to notions of the contemporary "real self", the Internet provides rich and extensive forums for the exchange of cultural arrangements. Computer mediated communication (CMC) has become central to the everyday habits and practices of postmodern Western society. The very pervasiveness of a technological trajectory informs much recent work in the critique of the post-industrial or "information age". Such work recognises that the construction of social and political action in the 1990s revolves around notions of "primary identity", or concepts of "the self", and that historically, "information societies" are distinguished "...by the preeminence of identity as their organising principle" (Castells, 1996). Through this paper I explore the interplay between presence and absence as it situates the telling of personal narratives (subjectivities) in new realms of habitation, realms which court the variously described "Thirdspace" of existence; the place of coalescence between lived/actual experience and its representation, in this case through CMC, the "real-and-imagined" places of spatio-temporal collapse (Soja, 1996). I also wonder if I am satisfied, if the potential of "new" textual forms seems still constrained through existing cultural limitations, metaphors and other transformations. This is a discussion which is concerned with becoming acts of [in]discretion, scattered acts that are sourced through the body and rest on performative frames of being and doing (Butler, 1993). Perhaps acts which not only write narrative, but are themselves narrative, going everywhere, yet nowhere; notional spaces that remain in perpetual attendance. Places of my body...
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In Place of the Page, Construction Phase 3 Brigid McLeer Dartington College of Arts, UK This paper would refer to the above project, as both a description of its process and development, as well as a way to open out debates that the project is dealing with to a wider and yet more specifically focused audience. So what is "In Place of the Page"? Well, "In Place of the Page" started life as a non-linear conference paper, exploring -- both in subject matter as well as in form -- the crossovers between the strategies and ideologies of contemporary non-linear poetry and contemporary (typo)graphic design. In order to do this it also drew on discourses from performance and architectural "praxis". The paper was written on one large sheet that folded out like a map and delivered in a meandering, exploratory way, following the "logic" of its non-linearity. In a more general sense then, this paper was also exploring how writing could negotiate space in such a way that this 'writing space' becomes an invested territory or ground of voices, identities -- discourse and exchange -- as well as a formally inscribed and articulated site. Since writing and delivering this paper, I have been taking samples of it and reworking them -- small localities of its discourse so to speak -- and treating them, visually and textually, to make texts that look quite like architectural plans or drawings -- plans to a place of discourse. So phase 3 of this project, which began in January 2000, takes this material and use it as a starting point for an online discussion forum. I have invited 10 people (who I know to be already exploring some of these questions in different ways in their own work/lives) to join in this discussion online for a period of about 6 months. As we write/talk to each other I will be sampling from these texts (in the manner described already) and will continue to make these "architectural texts", which will in turn be posted up onto the Web for discussion and will finally form the basis of a printed book. What I hope all this will open out, apart from the issues already integral to the project, are further issues relating to the nature of this on-line "speech-space", questions of authorship, appropriation/citation and transcription/translation and also the relationship between the static mode of the book and the more dynamic mode of the Web. In effect what I hope to end up with, in the book, is a book of "plans to a writing place" -- that is in fact the place already utilised in the Web environment. By the time of the Incubation conference, the project should be well under way and so what I would like to do here would be to present what we've done and discovered so far, as well as the issues it has thrown up for us. Ideally I would also include in that presentation some others involved with the project and their experience of it. The project has been commissioned by "Acts of Language"
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Lexia to Perplexia: Hypermediation and the Ideoscope Talan Memmott BeeHive Hypermedia Hypertext Literary Journal, San Francisco, CA, USA LEXIA TO PERPLEXIA is based upon the premise that the prefixations of all terms in hypermedia are negotiable and subject to change without notice. Through the presentation of a hypertext piece and supporting paper I hope to demonstrate the wide potentialities of the medium, the crude and transitory landscape through which the medium is currently progressing, and their effects upon the hypermedia writer/artist. LEXIA TO PERPLEXIA will address the ways in which communication technologies decrease the time it takes for terms to enter into common vocabulary, and how rapid progress shortens the life span of such terms. The practitioner of hypermediated writing is surround by shifting ground. The hypermedia writer stands apart from the traditional concept of a writer and can perhaps be located only in transition between artist-writer-engineer. Beyond the writing, the practice involves the additional strata of digital imagery, code and scripting. These new complexities expand the field for narrative, as well as formal, and deconstructionist experimentation. The necessity to know and understand the syntax of additional languages (HTML, JavaScript, Java...) forces a change in what it means to be multi-lingual. Content, intent and operations merge through cross-mediation to create a flexible media/um that allows narrative to be expressed through demonstrative rather than illustrative use of images, performative code and scripting capable of carrying narration without literary text, etc. An ideoscope that leaves exposed an allegory of process... (as if to put the post-structuralist adage -- THE WORLD is TEXT -- through a Blanchot-type reversal, to read -- TEXT is the WORLD). The LEXIA TO PERPLEXIA hypertext will consist of diagrammatic animations of certain aspects of the hypermediated writing process along with text-based narrative, theoretical annotation and dynamic functionality that allows the user/reader to affect the body of the text. http://www.temporalimage.com/beehive/tm/index.html
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Is Cyber-Fiction Necessarily Postmodern?
Adrian Mihalache & Arthur Helweg
Dept. of Anthropology, Western Michigan University, USA
A natural affinity between the vast amount of fiction posted on various Web sites and the postmodern theoretical approach is more often than not taken for granted. It is a tacit assumption that the cyberspace provides just another medium for the same old stories to be told. The way one tells them is, however, quite another story: participation, immersion, fragmentation, simulation seem to be the keywords that best describe it. Moreover, it is expected that the delight a cyber-reader (an interactor) may get out of his or her patient perusal of the screen would stem, at least in part, from the kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of various stylistics which hint, parodically or not, at past literary forms.
This essay is an attempt to prove that the cyber-fiction develops according to a paradigm completely different from the postmodern one. Modernism started when the story of the confrontation between the person and the world became less interesting than the one of the relationship between the world and the fiction. Postmodernism has barely reconciled the person to the world, using the fiction as a median term. Cyberculture distorts the balance of this threesome, by focusing on the conflict between the person and the fiction, while the world fades away. This new opposition brings forth a new type of subjectivity, mainly characterized by its romantic drive to global comprehensiveness and, hence, to self-destruction. The cyber-subjectivity is concerned more with the formulation of new themes, than with the development of a new rhetoric.
The story of an adventure was replaced by the adventure of the story. The story of the story promised to put an end to any adventure. The time for new stories has come, it is a time for cyber-stories.
http://homepages.msn.com/StageSt/adriannic/index.html
Internet Communications Services That Eat Your Copyright
Miranda Mowbray
Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK
This paper is about a trend in the ownership of digital intellectual property: the owners of virtual communities and other Internet communications services have been issuing terms of service which claim some rights to the intellectual property transmitted through their services.
In some cases, for example the Sony Pictures Entertainment virtual community, the terms of service threaten to undermine authors' rights under European law to object to derogatory treatments of their work and to be acknowledged as the original creator. In others, for example Talk City's Star Wars Chat, the provider of the communication service claims the copyright to all material communicated. If you write a script for a new Star Wars film and send a copy of a scene to your friends on Talk City's Star Wars Chat, then according to the terms of service you no longer have the copyright to the scene -- Talk City owns it.
I will give examples of the intellectual-property-related parts of the terms of service for some of the Internet communications services run by the large media and computer companies who hope to dominate the Internet publishing business. I will describe some of the problems of running a virtual community whilst preserving, as far as possible, the rights of authors, and I will suggest ways to resolve these problems.
I will end with a cause for optimism, the history of the terms of service for Geocities. Yahoo!, the owner of Geocities, was forced to rewrite the terms of service as the result of a protest by Geocities members, and Geocities now has unobjectionable terms of service.
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/6161
mjfm @ hplb
. hpl . hp . com
Art, Life And Character: @Expectations
Kit Reed
A novelist based at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, USA
In which I tell about how I discovered the mother of all MOOs, moved in and got involved the way you do in the life of any small town. Every small town is its own soap opera and this one is endlessly fascinating. As a novelist, I am deeply interested in the stories communities write for themselves. I transform what I see, but I draw from life. The complexities of MOOlife seemed to me as intense as life in the physical world. My new novel, _@expectations_ is about the tensions between the two. I'll read a short passage from _@expectations_ (Forge Books, September) as a springboard to discussion. It's about a woman who moves into a mythical MOO called StElene and falls deeply in love with a man she's never met. And what happens when he disappears from StElene and she goes out looking for him in the physical world.
http://www.focus-consulting.co.uk/kreed/reed.html
Continuity Questioned. The Whole is More Than a Sum of its Parts
Frank Schaap
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
This paper will focus on how online role-players (co)create the illusion of a continuous and particular identity for their character. For this paper I will draw from the material I have collected during a two year ethnographical study on one particular role-playing MOO. Role-players on MUDs and MOOs are faced with a world made out of text, in which their character and its performance must also be wholly textual. Playing an online role-playing game can be somewhat likened to partaking in an interactive novel, however there is no true narrative, no narrator as such and players can (re)act pretty much as they see fit in a particular situation.
In online role-playing games the narrative is necessarily plural and fragmented, divided up over any number of concurrent "tiny-plots" and chance encounters between individual characters, not destined for any kind of goal, or telos, like the singular "narrative" at the beginning of this sentence might suggest. In this jumble of related and unrelated, directly experienced and unknown machinations of a social virtual world, players perform their characters as whole, well integrated and continuous personalities.
By examining some textual and narrative conventions and experimentations deployed by role-players to conjure up a singular and continuous virtual body for their characters, I will look at how this allows for a continuous and convincingly gendered identity to be installed for their characters.
http://people.a2000.nl/fschaap/
Collaborative Cultures: Renaissance Manuscript Compilations on the Web
Dr Jill Seal
The Perdita Project, English & Media Studies, The Nottingham Trent University, UK
"The Perdita Project, Early Modern Women's Manuscript Compilations" is an interdisciplinary research project funded by Nottingham Trent University and the A.H.R.B. until 2002. It will provide a database guide to over 400 manuscript compilations by early modern women -- miscellanies, commonplace books, autobiography, devotional writing, account books, medical and cookery receipts ö and will be a research tool for historians and literary scholars.
Finding and gaining access to manuscripts is notoriously difficult. Our aim is to enable research into and rewriting of the literary history of the early modern period by shifting the focus from the printed canon to a broader conception of literature and its contexts. By using the Web to do this we are also expanding our understanding of what is literature today. Working with early modern manuscript compilations in electronic media has thrown up some interesting similarities between the two. Both often involve collaborative creativity -- sharing, editing, revising, compiling -- questioning the validity of the finished product, blurring/destabilising the roles of author and owner. In this paper I will explore these similarities and discuss their significance.
Our collaborative methods of working (peculiarly suitable for research on collaborations), as well as our proposed Web-based publication, have aroused suspicion in some quarters and problems in copyright. I will point to a few assumptions within copyright law and examine their shortcomings with regard to both manuscripts and electronic media.
Our concern for a standardised way of searching the database is shared by many Web-based academic projects. Categorisation, whilst necessary for any catalogue/research tool, forces interpretations on manuscripts based on such categories as author and function. I will discuss the various conclusions other projects have reached and our own proposed way forward.
http://human.ntu.ac.uk/perdita
Hypermedia as "Intertwingling": Generic Cross-Dressing, Intermedia, Maps and Mirrors
Hazel Smith
Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of New South Wales, Australia
This paper argues that hypermedia is now the main vehicle for formal innovation and cultural exploration in contemporary writing because it allows an unprecedented "intertwingling" (interweaving and intermingling) of different genres, media, and concepts. Hypermedia realises many of the ambitions of the modernist avant-garde, but in postmodern ways which reflect the hybridity of contemporary culture.
The paper examines some of the innovative forms with which "hyperwriting" can engage. These include intensive cross-dressing of different genres; "cyber-colour" schemes based on heterogeneity rather than homogeneity; performative modes consisting of discontinuous juxtaposition between speech and writing; the screen rather than the page as creative unit. Different kinds of interface between sound, image and words in hypermedia are also discussed-including the "semiotic exchange" which occurs when each medium takes on the characteristics of the other.
The talk also suggests that the formal possibilities of hypermedia provide a unique way of exploring culturally progressive ideas about place and subjectivity. The migrations between different genres and media can also convey, in complex ways, migrations between disjunct times and places. And in hypertext -the site which is no-place-it is also possible to break down any unified concept of subject or place and rearticulate them into a "hyperscape". A hyperscape is new kind of space, created within hypermedia, which is highly interconnected but discontinuous, global but also local. It is a labyrinth composed of multiple maps and mirrors.
My discussion will particularly refer to two collaborations for which I wrote the hypertext: Wordstuffs: the City and the Body with Roger Dean and Greg White here,
and Intertwingling with Roger Dean at Overland Express site http://www.overlandexpress.org.
The Moving Word (On Techno-Aesthetics of Digital Literary Objects)
Janez Strehovec
Researcher, Theories of Cyberculture, Slovenian Ministry of Science and Technology
The following paper deals with the digital literary projects put on the Web which introduce moving and touchable words that couldn't be read alone and could exist only within "cyberwindow" of computer's screen. First of all with the Java generated poetry and mixed means literary projects (designed and written by Komninos Zervos, M. Amerika, J. Cayley, Goldsmith & Paulsen, Miekal And, Mork & Stenslie, et al.) we are facing a kinetic and visual text consisted of the visual, moving and tactile words-images-bodies. Such literary objects in 3-d writing space are shifted from the literature-as-we-know it and even from the traditionally coded hyperfiction (written by M. Joyce) to the new digital literary praxis off the page, beyond the book and even beyond Concrete poetry based on visual effects. A stress is laid on kinetic, visual and tactile relations of such total-data-work of art (put on the intersection of typography, visual poetry and mixed-means art installations) rather than on the normal syntax and functions of representation. Entering the world of digital literary objects our eyes are being deterritorialized; the view is set on the moving axis between unstable up and down, left and right, front and behind. "Technical word-image-body" demands "technical", artificial even machinic perception in a sense that our eyes are put everywhere beyond their attachment to the body. Due to the crucial turns and shifts which accompanied these projects author introduces the following key-concepts in his paper: word-image-body, total data work of literature, "technical perception", literary real time, real nearness, impossible readable object, perception within limited time, process-oriented literary work of art, text as VR, moving witness. Main references that the author of this paper takes into account are not just the authors of cyberspace textuality like E. Aarseth and M. L. Ryan but also the writers dealing with the issues of the word in its contrast to the whiteness and silence -- M. Blanchot and E. Jabes.
janez.strehovec@guest.arnes.si
Internal Rushmores: Bakhtinian Relations of Word and Image in Web Authorship
Craig Stroupe
San Jose State University, CA, USA
This presentation concerns the challenges of describing and teaching the hybrid literacy of Web documents that mingle verbal and visual elements. It examines how and why some word-image hybrids can produce dialogic convergences of generic and cultural categories, while other such combinations represent merely simple, direct, illustrative relations of the alphabetic and iconographic. This presentation employs the literary and cultural theory of Mikhail Bakhtin to discuss the words and images of Greg Ulmer's Web essay "Metaphoric Rocks: A Psychogeography of Tourism and Monumentality" and to reveal the "Modernist," narrative effects possible in word-image compositions for the Web.
Written on behalf of a faculty research group, Ulmer's essay is ostensibly addressed to the Florida Tourism Commission and proposes an unlikely vision of a "Florida Rushmore" constructed in a sinkhole outside of Gainesville. Ulmer imagines a kind of underground, holographic drive-in movie theater where tourists take advantage of techniques of composite photography to construct mythic, national images out of the faces not of dead presidents, but of "figures with whom_ [the tourists] identify-figures that represent their "personalized" or internal Rushmores." Ulmer intersperses the text with a variety of images. The dissonant juxtapositions of these images with the text and with one another trace Ulmer's very deliberate misunderstanding of the conventional, cultural distinctions between academic-critical and state-promotional discourses, creating a dialogical tension between these usually divergent languages and intentions.
Ulmer's verbal text is, in Bakhtinian terms, highly double-voiced and stratified, and that internal dialogism among the words allows for a sense of independent play among the collective body of accompanying visual texts-all existing within what Bakhtin would call a disputed zone between languages. These images, therefore, comprise an alternative, parallel text which doesn't simply follow the verbal text, but rises and falls independently on these same dialogical waves of discursive contention.
http://online.sjsu.edu/stroupe
Dr Linda Marie Walker
Electronic Writing Research Ensemble & University of South Australia, Adelaide
& Dr Michael Tawa
University of New South Wales, Sydney
In "Éloge de la Fadeur", François Jullien considers the privileged place of the insipid, or the bland, in Chinese thought. The bland opposes the savoury. Because it is not limited by any particular flavour, it is able to transform itself without end. Given its neutrality, the bland, like plenitude, contains all possible things, and allows them to communicate. "In carrying us to the limit of the sensible, where the sensible effaces and reabsorbs itself, blandness takes us to an experience of 'the beyond'. But this overtaking does not open onto another world - a metaphysical world, cut off from sensation. Rather, it deploys only this world (the only one) -- but released from its opacity, rendered virtual, made available -- without end - à la jouissance."(1)
The bland, the insipid, the banal. These characteristics operate, in Chinese poetry, music or painting, by way of distention, dilation and détente -- rather than tension, contraction and articulation. What is privileged is the inarticulated -- the tenuous, the vague, the flat, the featureless, the evanescent, the faded, the limpid, the unctuous. What is sought is atmosphere, not form; detour not access. What is valued is reserve, silence, the absent, the withdrawal of form. But this withdrawal is provocative. Detour gives access to the interminable return of form.(2)
The bland promotes, drives, propels. It puts in motion the forwarding of form, there where the form withdraws. This double gesture, this ambiguous play of opposites, initiates an endless production whose texture and whose gesture are simultaneously advent-loss, appearance-disappearance. Ambiguity. Play of appearance-disappearance. Interminable transformation of one in the other, of one as the other of the other. Altereity of the same. Atmosphere of the bland. These motifs weigh heavily on what it might means to make, to write, to be in community, to be the community that is this writing, this making. If writing is community, then writing is the commutation of community -- always already in the midst of being made, always already in the midst of producing, always already in the midst of arriving - "released from its opacity, rendered virtual, made available - without end - à la jouissance".
1. François Jullien, Éloge de la Fadeur (In Praise of the Insipid),
Paris: Editions Phillipe Picquier, 1991
2. Le Détour et l'Accès, Stratégies du Sens en Chine, en Grèce, Paris: Grasset, 1995
Karen Belinda Wheatley
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
www.performance is an investigation into the relatively new phenomenon of online performance. In the year 2000 my play Scheherazade's Daughters will be performed in real time in AtheMOO, and I would draw on this experience to address some of the following questions:
Can such an event be classed as performance?
How can the audience read the space and the performers themselves?
Interactivity is an important part of such an event, but why? And what would happen if this element were to be ignored?
Are there techniques that writers of such scripts need to be aware of? For example
how can you control a script that must, by necessity contain blank areas for interaction with an audience?
If there is no requirement for any performer to be of any fixed gender or race, what effect is this likely to have on the politics of performance?
What future, if any, is this kind of event likely to have?
One Eye Winking: The Art and Science (@#$%^) of Online Facilitation
Nancy White
Full Circle Associates, USA
The promise of online interaction spaces, or as some call them, online communities, is that hearts and minds can span across time and space to engage and connect. For writers, the text-based world would seem a natural. Yet creating and facilitating online interaction environments continues to be more complex and, in some cases, more difficult than one might anticipate. Add to the stew the complicating webs of culture and identity, it becomes anything but clear. What are the human elements and how do we help them coverge for a group's purpose?
To foster environments conducive to a group's purpose, we need to understand and apply tools and techniques of online facilitation. This paper will describe an evolving taxonomy of online interaction space facilitation, it's relationship with space design and provide examples with case studies and lessons learned: both painful and joyful. Facilitator competencies, methods of learning online facilitation, resources and personal reflections will combine to both assess the current practice of online facilitation, and speculate how it might evolve.
Helen Whitehead
trAce Online Writing Community, Nottingham, UK
What is the one ICT skill that we need to teach today's five-year-olds so that they will be able to make full use of the wired workplace of the future? The answer is not keyboard skills, but clear diction -- by the time these children enter the workforce, keyboards will be obsolete.
But while skills may go out of fashion, concepts will not, and the ability to innovate, to be creative, to use the imagination, will be as useful in the future as now, for both work and leisure.
Our future writers are starting their training now in the exciting and fast-developing world of technology. The trAce junior section, Kids on the Net, aims to encourage them, with world-wide collaborative projects, online initiatives, and real workshops and projects in schools, libraries, community groups and festivals.
I will demonstrate some of these projects and introduce the writing of the children in our international Web community. The future of writing is in their hands -- or their heads.
Leonie Winson
Freelance Web Designer and Writer, Line and Form, Derby, UK
The Internet is one of the most powerful means of communication, ever to hit an international audience. With forces pushing governments and Internet bodies towards a more controlled arena, do we risk cutting out a large part of the world population from taking advantage of the power of an electronic podium? Not everyone has the ability to polish their prose to perfection. Not every homepage is going to rival Shakespeare but if we allow censorship and aesthetic opinion do we loose the organic power of the net. However, if the Internet is to be taken seriously is there a place for every "This is my Home Page" and "Meet my Cat". As a cyber citizen and hyper novelist my sympathies are firmly on the side of none censorship. Yet as a reader I'm often frustrated by too much noise and not enough content. My paper would explore the tension between quality and creative freedom and try and find a middle ground.