| |
active/onBlur: an interview with Talan
Memmott
conducted by Mark Amerika
|
MA: This year
we had trouble labeling our competition. We settled on the
term New Media Writing which is kind of like one of those
generic boxes of cereal you buy in the grocery store, you
know, the white box with black lettering that says "Wheat
Flakes" or the cans of beer that simply say "Beer." Being the
neologistic wordsmith that you are, could you help us out here
-- i.e., what do you call the kind of writing you do and does
it apply to others too?
|
TM: Nomolectic
electrature? Appliterature?
Oh, there are so many
terms out there... I think the title "New Media Writing" is
acceptable precisely because it is so generic. If you go with
any of the many terms for this stuff -- hypertext, cybertext,
hypermedia, web.art, net.art, etc -- you open yourself up to
varying, sometimes highly specific interpretations of the
term. I mean one man's web.art is another man's hypertext. New
Media, as "white box" as it is, at least does not suffer from
this. Where some of the more specific terms leave out or
inflate certain aspects of the media/um, the generic "New
Media" does not.
It is very difficult to put a tag on a
media/um that is more than one.
For my own work, I
have used rich.lit, though I don't stick to this and I don't
make any claim that the term is appropriate across the board.
Really, all the terms generically indicate a creative cultural
practice through applied technology.
|
MA: What got
you interested in experimenting with writing on the
web?
|
TM: A number
of things...
First, I work in the web-development industry
so I am always online or writing code. You learn a lot about
information architecture and interface design when you develop
corporate websites. So, working with Percepticon developed the
skill set. At times, I must admit -- I am a code-aholic. But,
I see the code-aholism as part of my overall writing practice.
There are a couple of levels to what I am doing. There
is the theory/fiction work like "Lexia to Perplexia", the more
hypertext fiction work (which is still at least quasi-theory)
like "Lolli's Apartment", and some regular old experimental
fiction. The straight fiction work is not so much interested
in the web beyond distribution, whereas the other types of
work exploit technological aspects in their formation -- from
the narrative to the structural.
I started
experimenting with creative applications in 1996. I
immediately saw potential in the web at that time and was
making little pieces to build my skill set and explore
narrative structures. The narrative experiments are actually
an extension of earlier interests in writing. As to the web,
what I first recognized and wanted to explore was the
complication of FACE and SPACE that the browser window
presents. I was intrigued not so much by technological bells
and whistles as by the window as a space for text and image.
There was a lot of carryover from my earlier experiences
making installation art, as I viewed the space as something
like an empty gallery. So, in terms of writing this presents
the complication that you are not writing on a surface, but
writing in a space.
I think what interested me most
was how the web brought together a number of practices for me,
and that it was a pretty wide-open venue for further
experiments in narrative construction.
|
MA: Your
work, like so much of the best new work emerging on the net,
puts into play a renegotiation of the image/text relationship.
Do you see yourself coming from a more visual or literary
background -- or are these distinctions meant to fall by the
wayside?
|
TM: My
definition of text includes images. I have said before that I
kind of stick to the ol' post-structuralist adage -- the
world is text. I came to writing through visual art but I
always used writing in my visual art. I've been a painter,
performer, created installation and video, written and
directed plays -- there was always writing. Writing is a
constant, as any medium forms a kind of writing. In many
regards I am a media nomad.
When I think of the term
hypertext I take an open view. Hyper, of course, means "to
excess"; in regards to text, I read it as something like:
every medium leaves a mark, every cultural practice
produces a form of writing. It is a question of
application -- in relation to the written word, hypermedia
techniques allow for extended functionality that increase the
narrative value of an image, lifting it from its previous
illustrative state. The alphabetic can be made animate, ideo-
or diagrammatic as well. The interface itself can appear as
ideogram with huge narrative potential.
As far as
distinctions between the literary and the visual -- they can
remain, can be ignored, they can fade. As a writer/artist they
are borders to be played at, walls to graffiti, climb, or
tumble.
|
MA: Does the
distributed network of web artists whose work is readily
available to you influence your own practice? It seems to me
that all serious web artists are, first of all, serious web
surfers, no?
|
TM: I would
doubt anyone is creating work that is not influenced by the
work of others. There is a lot of great work out there from
all over the world. Great publications, organizations, lists
... trAce is evidence of how writing on the web is a global
phenomenon. What is most amazing to me is the diversity of
work and I think this is one of the reasons it is so difficult
to give the media/um a name. Every writer/artist deals with
the technology differently, creating not so much a personal
style but an individuated form. So, even within specific
genres of creative web-based works you have many voices.
I think it is not only natural to be influenced by the
work of others, but also that we are all (any/every "user")
influenced by the vicissitudes of technology, the environment
and general economy of the network. I think "Lexia to
Perpexia" is evidence of my own attachment...
|
MA: How does
one get from Lexia to Perplexia? Or, to put it another way,
why this work and why now?
|
TM: On the
surface the title is a statement concerning a move from
"hypertext" to "hypermedia" -- the complicating of literary
models. But the arguments of the piece are more complex and
diverse than that -- to some extent it is a piece about
ontological complications that occur by way of attachment to
the Internet.
When I began work on "Lexia to
Perplexia" in November of 1999 DHTML was starting to appear on
the web. The ability to overlap text, image, any object on the
page alters the concept of the document on the web, and with
some additional JavaScript, the sheet -- the imagine sheet
that is the screen -- is puncturated rather than
punctuated. I saw a lot of potential here in complicating the
literary page/screen argument. Part of the perplexion of Lexia
to Perplexia is in the stratification of the content, that the
narrative experience of the piece is distributed between the
text and image, and extended to the User/Reader in the form of
an "application" that is operated rather than consumed. In
that regard, it is interesting to note that much of the
content is in reference to the process of attachment to the
application -- a tangential description of the action of the
user.
With a document that is acted upon,
unfolded, revealed, opened rather than read, full of holes to
elsewhere, hiding secret inScriptions, filled with links like
mines and traps and triggers -- we are no longer talking page
or screen, but appliance. Navigating the Lexia of "Lexia to
Perplexia" is kind of like getting a new device and trying to
figure out how the heck it works ... Perhaps the "Lexia to
Perplexia" User Manual is the content of the work itself --
encrypted, only partially translated like some of the
instructions from IKEA, only inter-hyperactive. There is a
confusion of ontological, literary and technical application
-- perplexia.
|
MA: At one
point in "Lexia," the writing goes:
"I, User, exit
this for that --
sorted,
compartmentalized,
archived.
RE:organized -- stacked, a
body with
organs elsewhere.
The de:parted body rests,
no longer
active/ onBlur;
0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0
(the
flat line string thread woven
into linen wrapped
'round)
The User is laid flat and dried into
bands of
jerky --
isolated, while A.exe indexes and
pre.pares
the packets."
...wherein you once again take the
language of code and turn it into degenerative prose. The User
almost sounds like a drug addict except here she is maybe a
code-addict? Or: to put it another way, Do Androids Dream of
Arbitrarily Corrupted Sim.Stem Folders?
|
TM: Yes,
that text is from the section titled "Ka Space: encryption
>book< of the dead". There is a fundamental pun here ...
Osiris of Egyptian mythology is more accurately named Ausere.
In a simple, frivolous manipulation of the name you come up
with "A User". On top of this we have an attempt at
constructing something akin to the "Body Without Organs" of
Delueze and Guattari misread through an attachment to the
Egyptian funerary text, which is the theme of the section.
A.exe is simply Anubis. The "Body" that is constructed here,
as stated in the cited text, is not exactly like Delueze and
Guattari's -- it is "a body with organs elsewhere," in
reference to attachment to the Internet apparatus and the
distribution of "being" across it -- as data, as pixels, as
energy...
I suppose this text could be read in the
context you propose at both the Deluezean level and as applied
to User attachment to the Internet. If we replace desire with
addiction, the term "packets" is variable. The "Body Without
Organs" as written by Delueze and Guattari in "The Body
Without Organs," makes direct reference to drug addiction, as
the section of "A Thousand Plateaus" is primarily dedicated to
Antonin Artuad.
|
MA: This
year's trAce/Alt-X judge, Shelley Jackson, says of your
award-winning work "the reader's first pleasure will probably
be a visual one. This is a gorgeous piece. But the visuals
though beautiful are not only decorative but syntactical. Some
of Memmott's most elegant arguments are made visually, through
the logic of layout and the grammar of the link." That's
actually a wonderful way of putting it -- and I'm now
wondering if you would elaborate a little bit on your digital
rhetoric, that is, the way you use the screenal interface to
create visual metaphors that syntactically make your
critifictional case?
|
TM: I am not
surprised Shelley Jackson recognizes these attributes as her
own work is super-smart and an inspiration. But I am always
happy when some of the formal intent gets through.
As
far as a digital rhetoric goes -- I am not sure I can
elaborate too much. I could get into all the little
theoretical tidbits but it would clog up the server or I'd
bore everyone off this page. But I think the recognition that
images and interaction are used in a syntactical sense is
significant. As I mentioned earlier, the interest in the
window as a narrative space, neither screen nor page, is what
drew me into making work.
In "Lexia to Perplexia" there
is an apparent integration between the interface concepts and
the subjects of the content that forms something that is truly
an application. I have tried to extract just the text from
"Lexia to Perplexia", and it suffers from the lack of
diagrammatic and dynamic attributes of the "content
application" as "mise en scene". The hypermedia work succeeds,
I think, because of the way its formation was integrated with
the writing process. Much of the functionality arises out of
early notes and was developed alongside the writing, so early
on there was a sort of branching -- this sort of
diversification develops into the environment of the final
application.
|
MA: I know
part of your background is as a musician in a punk rock band
and part of it is in obsessing over contemporary theory. This
reminds me of the work of another writer, the late Kathy
Acker, although in Acker's work the punk influences are more
apparent, that is, she appropriates the punk attitude and
remixes it into her narrative architecture so that it's right
in your face -- whereas with your work the theory seems to
take prominence, and I'm wondering where is the punk in your
work?
|
TM: My punk
days were early on. I played in punk bands from '79 to '82 --
I was a teenage punk. I did recently try to relive those days
by forming a band called YOINK but that was short-lived. But,
I've played in bands all my life -- Short Order Cooks, Sloppy
Kafka, Peabody, Jack the Ant ... Anyway...
I studied
with Kathy Acker in the early nineties. She convinced me to
take my writing seriously. I don't see the punk coming out in
my writing in the same way as it does in her work. And, you
are correct in recognizing that theory is in the foreground of
my work. There is, I think, in my work a similar pirate
intent. The heavy neologistic play and abstraction of context,
plus the infusion of theory leads to a nearly unreadable text
that is quasi-academic, yet outside the academy. Of course,
the unreadability extends in all directions, and is further
complicated through hypermedia ... The text is subversive by
subverting itself. There is perhaps something punk in that.
Maybe web-smart rather than street-smart? I think it is a
little more jazz than punk for me.
My obsession with
theory started in art school. Like I said, I come to writing
through fine art. Thinking about it now, one of the first
things that made me move from visual art toward writing was in
fact Kathy Acker's essay in "Art After Modernism." That text
made me start to consider the theory/fiction hybrid in visual
terms as it was made up of textual descriptions of paintings.
But, I got hooked on Derrida, Delueze and Guattari, all that
stuff at a time when I was primarily painting and doing
installation work. I think of my own work as informed by these
authors but not in any real rigorous sense. I call my work
theory/fiction, or in the case of LUX -- ficto-critical art
history, because the practice is generally creative rather
than exclusively critical.
|
MA: I keep
waiting for more sonic fictions to scream across the network.
What role do you think sound will play in net art development
and, for that matter, how will net artists of the narrative
persuasion bring their work into live performance spaces?
|
TM: Sound is
starting to catch on, though not so much in a hypermediated
sense. I see/hear a lot of audio readings, but there is not
too much in regards to sound in a narrative sense. I know the
visual poet Jim Andrews has been working on something called
VisMu, in which the User interacts with objects to play and
manipulate, different scat riffs. I think this work offers an
interesting audio narrative experience for the User.
As far as performance space, we can think of it in
terms of cinema, theater, and installation ... or, lecture. I
think "Lexia to Perplexia" could only have been performed as a
lecture at Incubation. The content was ripe for chalkboard
talk ... Some possibilities for theater could be plays
performed simultaneously in various locations, which share
characters from remote casts; or, plays in which the dialogue
is submitted from users attached to an application that has
nothing to do with play -- the dialogue could be read from
monitors set up like teleprompters. Just some thoughts, but I
have been thinking about theater lately.
|
MA: One of
the many rich terms that come up in "Lexia" is bi.narrative.
What is bi.narrative? A yes/no undecidability that challenges
the interactive Other? A story that goes both
ways?
|
TM:
Basically the term is used to indicate the dual conductivity
between local and remote agencies.
In the appendix to
"Lexia to Perplexia" ("Delimited Meshings," from the
forthcoming "Cauldron and Net") I make the claim that the
success of the Internet mythos is based on the rejection
(dis-play) of the projection (exe.tension). I refer to that
snippet here because I think it represents something of what I
mean by bi.narrative. I think I have used the term in "Lexia"
to represent a degree of reciprocity in the conductivity
between agents. A certain, intertimate consensus ... It refers
as well to the hidden narrative, the odyssey of our encoded
[Secret(ed)] agents through the Internet apparatus -- allowing
a sort of formal protagonist for the projective/rejective
(there and back) mythos that defines, and is a seductive force
of the Internet. I diagram this in some of my other pieces by
doubling the Lacanian interpentrating triangle diagram from
the seminars -- placing the gaze on both sides. In "Lexia" I
think I insinuate this by the heavy horizontal of the
interface -- plus, there are a few direct diagrammatic
references to the Lacanian diagram.
|
MA: In your
web-rich textuality, you tend to blur the distinction between
hypermediation and hypermeditation. The reader is asked to be
patient, to resist the click-happy mentality that we now
associate with web-surfing. One can't help but wonder if this
isn't part of some political strategy -- but then again, maybe
it's pure formal play? An investigation into the
potentialities of a new cyberpoetics?
|
TM: I think
in "Lexia" there is a conscious attempt to represent the
"click" or any cursor action as a complication of the text.
There is quite a bit of writing in "Lexia to Perplexia," but
it is often prematurely obfuscated by User interaction. This
is a fundamental formal aspect of the piece. I agree with the
term hypermeditation -- there are only 10 pages in the work,
yet each page is excessively layered. So, one dwells on a page
-- unfolds and unpacks the screen, opens and occupies a space
-- rather than being relocated by the click=link association.
There is potential here for poetics and narrative, as well as
critical applications.
|
MA: How is
coding your web-critifiction similar to constructing an
artificial intelligence? At one point in "Lexia" you say
"<HEAD>{FACE}<BODY>,<BODY>FACE</BODY>"
and attribute the encrypted data to a certain "Sign.mud Fraud"
-- it's as if language in web.space has become totally
liquefied, burnt-out, and overprocessed. The binary remix of
DJ Metastrophe from his latest release "Cig.Monde Fried"?
|
TM: What you
see there, the {FACE},FACE is the result of some thick
premediation of an appropriated fragment from Freud's
"Civilization and its Discontents". The placement of the face
as between the head and body, and between the body and the end
of the body is first a sort of lateral Cartesian pun. As well,
faciality is intentially mis-, or displaced -- alternative
zeroes, terminals of subjectivity -- variables. Which falls in
line with the parsed signature of Sign.mud.Fraud...
The encoding is multi-layered. There is the code-base
of the application, which certainly participates in the
narrative construction of the work through interactive
functionality. The code-base also bubbles through to the
surface, to the superficial narrative -- the readable text --
by what you have called "overprocessing." A source like this
may be parsed, which is a sort of subjective encoding, edited,
and re-written 10, 15 times before completion.
The
notion of the text being "remixed" in not that far off from
the actual process, as the appropriated text is reduced to
something akin to a "sample" ... Hmm, and my own definition of
my own term Metastrophe -- a doubling of a doubling that
produces a single coupling in dual local spaces -- produces a
sort of noise in the text that could be mistaken for
"scratching". Of course we're all "hard-disc" jockeys...
|
MA: Is
"readability" an issue to you?
|
TM: I think
readability for me is mostly based upon how I feel about the
hypermedia object's relationship to my intent. By all means
there are cryptic elements in my theory/fiction work, but I
think there is a level of coherency in the language
construction -- by this I mean the neology may be baroque but
it is not completely frivolous. So much of the content occurs
through interaction -- text is revealed, objects are
manipulated -- that it seems to be more a question of
inferability than readability -- tracing the outlines through
insi(g)nuation and simulation.
|
MA: Besides
being a net.artist, you also edit BeeHive, a major online
hypermedia publication, which is a part of the Percepticon
group, a successful web strategy and design company out of San
Francisco. How do all of these roles,
artist/editor/entrepreneur, play off of each other? Does it
all melt into one pseudo-utopian writing practice, or must one
make clear time-management decisions by constantly
re-prioritizing projects to get all the work
done?
|
TM: There
are times where it can be somewhat utopian. Most of the time
it is a constant juggling of time committments. BeeHive is
quite a bit of work. Many design hours, the editorial, the
curatorial, production, promotion ... I love it. I am honored
to be publishing the work. Luckily, BeeHive is part of
Percepticon or I am not sure it could be produced. The company
is heavily committed to the idea of quality content on the web
and I think BeeHive has done well for the sort of publication
it is. Lately I have been able to delegate the poetry
curating/editing to Ted Warnell, who joined the BeeHive crew
at the beginning of volume three. Not only did this free up
some time for myself, but I think it added a new flavor to the
poetry content in BeeHive.
Percepticon is always busy.
It's a glorious rat-race. Then there's my own work ... Since
BeeHive publishes regularly and I can't very well negotiate
deadlines with corporate clients based upon my writing
deadlines, my own work is where the most rescheduling occurs.
I work on a lot of stuff simultaneously. Right now, I am
working on three or four things but they all have variable end
dates. Its kind of like a horse race where each horse has a
different finish line and the competition is not to see who
finishes first, but to finish in the proper sequence.
The good thing is, if you don't know San Francisco,
there is a thing here called "Peets" -- aged Sumatra!
Coltrane, a cup of Peets, and I'm ready to write.
|
MA: How does
one run (away from) an Exe.tension?
|
TM: I
suppose this is where I am asked to define the method that
produced the term. Simply, the use of "exe" as a prefix rather
than a file extension makes the term readable in a literary
sense. This does not mean it is defined by its homophonic
similar -- extension. The "exe" prefix differs from "ex" (out)
by its reference to an executable, an application. Tension as
an executable. When applied to extermination, producing
exe.termination, the context shifts from an end to a
continuation, toward something I call in "Lexia to Perplexia,"
"terminal hopscotch".
| |
