Marginalia begins with a narrator contemplating the infinity of the
Borgesian Library of Babel, one that is and is not embodied by the
World Wide Web. One reading of that story can lead to utter despair,
at least for authors. It is the embodiment of the infinite monkeys
typing Shakespeare. What has been and will be written, the monkeys
(and hence machines) could produce (although the monkey would pay a
higher price in repeated stress injuries).

But the narrator has made a discovery. Technology that enables him to
make his mark upon these pages. He has discovered social bookmarking
and social annotation, which has allowed him to annotate this already
written world, and then to share these annotations -- opening up the
possibility of not just gaining some power over the infinite (assuming
that's possible) and communicating his little missives to others. He
is writing his stories by talking to himself while pacing the halls of the Internet.

There are two versions of this story that offer much of the same
content but that are essentially different.

The first version uses (and was inspired by) Diigo social annotation
software, a browser-based plugin that allows users to annotate live
web pages and make them public. The story itself begins with the
discovery of this technology. A kind of elation over possibility that
is always dogged by a fear of erasure, of being engulfed by the chaos
of content that amasses in this Library of Babel.
This version lives here:

Changes to the latest version of Diigo (version 3) have corrupted this current version.

The second version uses custom built javascript to simulate Diigo
annotations on any web pages. These web pages cached versions.
The second version is here:
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/07Fall/marino/index.html
The reason for the second version is one of the constant tropes of New
Media: archiving and preservation. While I don't know the future of
Diigo or even the web pages I annotated (indeed some of them live in
the Internet Archive already, a.k.a the Wayback Machine), I do know
that these pages will run on most browsers for the foreseeable future.

To publish this story in New River Journal and to assure that the
notes would be visible, I had to get some help building a standalone
annotation system, one that is, ironically, not social. The pages had
to go from living, breathing Web pages to copies.
And such is the battle that we word soldiers must wage as we make our
pretty little marks upon these ever-shifting pages, which blow away
like sand at the slightest breeze.

Additional info on the story is here:

Mark Amerika's work -- that includes the seminal net art trilogy GRAMMATRON,
PHON:E:ME, and FILMTEXT, as well as experimental artists books,
cult novels, video and films-- has been published and/or exhibited widely
including the Whitney Biennial of American Art; the Institute of Contemporary
Arts, London; the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Black Ice
Books; the Walker Art Center; the FILMWINTER Festival, Stuttgart; transmediale, Berlin;
and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, where he will have a
retrospective in the fall of 2009.

Amerika is a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at
the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is the founder and publisher
of Alt-X and the electronic book review.

More information about his work is available at http://www.markamerika.com

FILMTEXT 2.0

FILMTEXT 2.0 is an elaborate work of net art that investigates emerging
forms of electronic literature in relation to interactive cinema, live
A/V performance, games, and remix culture. It remediates formal experiments
from older media like film, video art, and the visual/metafiction novel. This
is partly why we decided to use technology that enabled us to a) build a
serious library of audio/visual assets for the "reader"/interactive
participant to remix as part of their own journey through the site and
b) create a customized interface for reader-triggered narrative performance.

As with much of the metafiction published in the 60s and 70s, the work
self-consciously refers to its various technological adhesions and the
prosthetic aesthetics that are often at play in the construction of
electronic literature. There are even self-contained "text readers" that
deploy some of the early instances of the "codework" writing style that
suggest how authors "tell target" their source material for emotional
manipulation. In FT 2.0, this is generally achieved by defamiliarizing
the early action scripting language that enabled early versions of Flash
to create unique animation effects and behaviors.

Swiss new media artist/researcher Stefan Müller Arisona works with real-time multimedia
systems and live multimedia composition and performance software. His audio-visual
performance narratives have been shown and performed internationally. Currently a
post-doctoral researcher at the Chair for Information Architecture of ETH Zurich, Switzerland,
his research includes the development of the Soundium multimedia performance platform;
(with Steve Gibson) as well as mathematical modeling for the performance of musical
gestures and interactive software systems for urban design and simulation. He is co-editor,
with Randy Adams and Steve Gibson, of Transdisciplinary Digital Art - Sound, Vision and the New Screen

The work he performed at the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference
in Vancouver, WA is a 21st Century reenactment of The Exploding Plastic Inevitable
a seminal multimedia work that was originally created and performed by Andy Warhol
with Lou Reed's The Velvet Underground and Nico in the 1960's.
More information: San Francisco Performance of Exploding, Plastic
& Inevitable at Swissnex

Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable

Since Steve Gibson and I are going to present the Exploding, Plastic
& Inevitable show (also accompanied by a live audio and visuals
workshop) during the conference, it might be best to give some background
for the software used there.

Authoring tools we're using

• audio: Ableton Live
• visuals (Steve): Modul 8
• visuals (Stefan): Soundium, see below.

Steve may have to add a few things, he did a lot of custom stuff for for other projects, such as Virtual DJ.

At this point I can give more information about the custom software Soundium:

• Soundium is a research multimedia authoring and processing framework. It has been used for many live visuals performances and several digital art installations. However, it is not really an "end user product" and requires a quite a bit of multimedia processing knowledge in order to use it.
• written in java and c++, and based on open source software: linux, gcc, x11, ffmpeg, etc.
• available for free download
• further infos are at: http://www.corebounce.org/wiki/Soundium/Front
  
• a publication list is available at: http://www.corebounce.org/wiki/Main/Publications

Alan Bigelow combines images, text, audio and video to create interactive
web-based digital fictions that address contemporary issues including
philosophy, religion and the uses of mass media.

His work has been published and/or exhibited at Turbulence.org; Los Angeles
Center for Digital Arts; Freewaves; Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center;
The New River; and E-Poetry 2007.

A Professor in the Humanities Department at Medaille College in upstate NY,
he was recently a visiting online lecturer in Creative Writing and New Media at
De Montfort University, UK

What They Said

Work Description:

What They Said (2008) is an online work which is a commentary on
mass media and its use of authoritarian messages, both outright and
subliminal, to influence culture and political will. The work is
created in Flash and uses a synthesized combination of text, images,
video, and audio; its interface is a hybrid of television and radio
visual elements intended to enhance the user experience and require
their participation in the viewing of the work.

What They Said is meant not just as a commentary on mass media, and
how it is used, both intentionally and by media programmers' blind
acquiescence to current political paradigms, to distort meaning and
manipulate citizens worldwide. It also suggests our own culpability,
as the ones who turn on the media devices and listen to the messages.
We bear some responsibility for the perpetuation of these messages,
and we are the ones, if we have the will, to turn them off.

To progress through What They Said, the viewer must first turn on
the media "device." They then use a slider, reminiscent of an
old-style radio channel indicator, to "read" the various messages.
These messages--instructions for work, family life, cultural beliefs,
and aesthetics--are archetypal in nature and use a linguistic
double-speak favored by many governments, present and past. The
viewer's choice of messages is random, snatched, using the slider,
from the static ether visually (and auditorially) presented in the
piece. When the last message is read, the piece automatically
generates a short closing visual followed by a subtitle. Total
viewing time is approximately five minutes.

Media:

This work, like all my other work, was created in Flash, with imported
files that were edited in Sound Studio and Photoshop. Flash is a very
resilient and robust application that is relatively easy to learn and
remarkably obedient to the unusual demands of digital storytelling.

Right now, the most interesting challenge to me (other than creating
new work!) is how to move online Flash works into the mainstream of
gallery shows. In the United States, at least, it appears that many
galleries are not used to considering online works as representative
material for exhibitions; when asked, though, many are intrigued and
ask to see the work, even when it is not within their usual call for
submissions.

Part of their reluctance to accept web works/Net Art is the difficulty
of pricing such work for sale. Rhizome.org has a revealing interview
with Aron Namenwirth of artMovingProjects on this topic
( Interview with Aron Namenwirth of artMovingProjects)

Exploring transmedia public narrative that moves between Twitter, Blog, and paperback,
Jay Bushman creates multiple pathways to retold narrative in his Loose-Fish Project
that was featured at the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Vancouver,
Washington.

Bushman is a Los Angeles-based filmaker/new media story-teller whose work also
includes the short film Orson Welles Sells His Soul to the Devil , which was
screened at Film Fest New Haven and the Berlin Film Festival, among
other venues.

The Loose-Fish Project

The goal of the Loose-Fish Project is to use various web-based media --
ideally free or low-cost -- as a platform for telling stories adapted
from classic and public domain works. Ideally, the fictional story
content becomes embedded in the non-fictive world of the wider web.
One way of describing it is like an Alternate Reality Game, without
the Game portion. The media for each story is chosen to mirror or augment
some aspect of the story.

Loose-Fish #1: "The Good Captain"
http://www.goodcaptain.com
"The Good Captain" is a science-fiction adaptation of the Herman Melville
novella "Benito Cereno." Since the story relies heavily on the realtime,
flawed POV of its main character, the medium I chose to use was the web
service Twitter. Twitter limits its users to updates of 140 characters of text.

In writing the story, I relied on an adaptation method that I use regularly
-- I downloaded a public domain e-text version of the original story, and
pasted it into Microsoft Word, increasing the font to 16 point and the
line spacing to Double, then printing out the story on three-holed punch
paper and putting into a binder. The large text and double-spacing allowed
me to focus on the line-by-line, beat-by-beat of the original, and the
facing blank page is where I wrote the adaptation of. That text was then
entered into a specially formatted Word document, using a monospaced font
and tweaked margins so that 140 characters of text took up exactly 2 lines
of text. When the full story was written, this text was transferred to an
Excel spreadsheet, where each grid equaled one story update. Once the story
began, I would copy a spreadsheet cell into the Twitter interface and update
the main page http://twitter.com/goodcaptain anywhere from 8 to 15
times per day. The full story took four months to unfold.

Users of Twitter have many ways of getting their content. The best -- for
purposes of this story - are desktop-based clients that display a feed of
the user's friends. Embedded in between these updates, they would get a chunk
of story. Other users can get their Twitter messages on their phones via text
messages or via IM. This was less successful for the story, as these users
tended to mute their Twitter responses while asleep or while doing other
activities, and not go back through their cache.

One thing that using Twitter for a storytelling mechanism required was a more
frequent restating of the given circumstances of what was going on. When
giving the full text to a couple of friends for comment, they read the whole
story in one sitting, and commented that there was a lot of redundancy. But
what might look like half a page of text on a page would actually dribble out
to readers in the course of two weeks.

Another interesting thing that I encountered was that many readers apologized
to me because they were unsure if they were "reading it correctly," which I
took to be a by-product of expanding storytelling to an unfamiliar format. For
these readers, I put together a paperback book version of the story --
( http://www.lulu.com/content/2322661 ),
a downloadable PDF, and a version for the Amazon Kindle.

Born on a farm in rural Nova Scotia, Montréal-based writer and artist
J. R. Carpenter creates innovative web-based works that combine graphic images,
information and words to create narratives of life, adventure, and community.

Her work has been published in the Electronic Literature Colection v.1 and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art; Montréal Museum of Fine Arts; Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum; The Art Gallery, Tasmania; The University of Maryland; and Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland.

Her print novel Words the Dog Knows was published by Conundrum Press
in 2008

Entre Ville

The most important authoring tool used in the creation of Entre Ville is the
pen.The main interface was drawn with a pen in a notebook in 1992 while I was
apartment-hunting in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, the neighbourhood
Entre Ville is set in. I saved the physical notebook because I liked the
drawing, though I had no idea what if anything I'd ever do with it.

I also used a pen to write the poem, "Saint-Urbain Street Heat," which Entre
Ville is based on. I almost always write with a pen first, before editing on
the computer. In particular, a Japan Sailor fountain pen. "Saint-Urbain Street Heat"
was written in 2004 during a record-breaking heat wave in Montreal. I went down
to Vermont to escape and wrote and rewrote many drafts with the Japan Sailor
in a hammock with no computer access. Although I did eventually edit the
poem slightly in Microsoft Word, I think the poem retains a certain structure
that might have been quite different if I'd been working on the computer all
along.

The poem "Saint-Urbain Street Heat" was published in an online journal based
in the UK called NthPosition in August 2005. The response was overwhelmingly
positive, so I decided I wanted to do more with the text - expand it into an
electronic literature project. I borrowed a video camera and started shooting
footage in the network of back alleyways referred to in the text.

In the fall of 2005 I was commissioned by Oboro, an artist-run center and new
media lab in Montreal, to create a new web based work for the 50th anniversary
of the Conseil des Arts de Montreal. The commission included a month's worth
of time in the Oboro New Media Lab, which is where I edited the 17 Quicktime
Videos included in Entre Ville. I edited in FinalCut Pro and used Cleaner
to export and crop the videos - approximately half are cropped to unconventional
shapes.

As I was editing the videos I uncovered the old notebook with the line-drawing
of Mile End apartment buildings that I'd drawn in 1992 when first moving into
the neighborhood. I decided this would be the interface and planned all the
rest of the content around it.

I used a now ancient version of Photoshop to splice the notebook drawing
into small sections so that they could become roll-overs. I also used
Photoshop to process all the other interface images. Some images were
made from scanned objects, but most of the interface images were derived
from digital photos taken expressly for this project, and/or video stills
taken from the footage shot for this project.

For the web implementation I used Homesite, an old web authoring tool that
has since been absorbed into the Dreamweaver codebase. I prefer the text
only web authoring environment of Homesite and have been using it for so
long I see no reason to change. When I first started making web-based work
there were no WYSIWYG editors and I never got used to them. I spent a number
of years working in the software industry and came to loathe the version
release sales model. Since then I have been working entirely independently -
I have no money to update software and do everything possible to avoid
software solutions.

In Entre Ville I use a number of found, recycled and re-purposed DHTML and
javascript scripts. I enjoy hunting down scripts, adapting them, and patching
them together. This recycled and collaged sensibility is in keeping with the
visual aesthetic of the work. It's also part of the do-it-yourself culture that
first attracted me to the internet. I learned everything I know about coding
from "View Source" and continue to enjoy figuring out new scripts by taking
them apart and putting them back together again.

The text of the poem "Saint-Urbain Street Heat" appears in an < iframe >
overlapping the notebook drawing. It scrolls with a DHTML script that I've
used in other projects. The main interface component, the notebook drawing,
uses a simple image rollover script to call up popup windows containing
Quicktime videos and other subsections of the poem. Other small images
float around the notebook drawings in relative position < div >. A number
of these small images, as well as a few text areas (such as the description line
under the main title) are nested in data arrays set to display randomly, so
that whenever one views the page one sees a slightly different combination
of images and texts. I intend this to mimic the way the neighbourhood always
looks a little bit different every time one goes out into it.

I have been told over and over again that Entre Ville should have been made
in Flash. I have no interest in Flash. For one thing, I like the idea that
the internet is all made out of text. I'm a writer so I want my texts to be
text in internet terms. I also like the vagaries of HTML, DHTML and javascript.
I aim for cross-browser / cross-platform compatiblity, scaleablility and graceful
fails. It seems important to keep in mind that everyone will see things
slightly differently - because of their browsers and platforms and also because
we are all human beings.

Marjorie C. Luesebrink, who writes under the name of M. D. Coverley, has been
creating electronic literature since 1995. Her work has been published by Eastgate;
The Iowa Review Web; New River; Salt Hill; The Salt River Review;
Cauldron & Net; Artifacts; and The Blue Moon Review.

Using words, images, animation, and audio to interface complex narratives of history,
culture, and myth, she has created a series of hypermedia novels that include
Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day and Califia, a story of five
generations of Californians. (published by Eastgate in 2000)

Marjorie Luesebrink is a Professor at School of Humanities and Languages,
Irvine Valley College in Irvine, California, where she teaches creative writing.

Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day

Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day - is a CD-ROM - based, extended
narrative in hypermedia. Because of the complexity, it was conceived and
written, from the beginning, with a variety of software programs. The most
stubborn problem, all along, however, was trying to find an overall authoring
program that would continue to be viable and supported. The following notes
were written in fall, 2002. They account for several years of struggle -
attempts to get Egypt written on some kind of secure platform. Since
2002, of course, Director has seen a couple of new versions and has been
sold to Adobe, a company that is not keeping it current as they have
another creative Suite (which does include Flash - but not Director).
And so, despite significant effort, Egypt exists on a platform
that will not be supported in the future.

Egypt is an extreme example, of course, because it uses text, sound,
image, flash panels, animations, elaborate architecture, and so forth.
But the search for semi-permanent platforms is endemic in Electronic
Literature.

Toolbook Version

As I look at the Toolbook version from 1998, I am struck with how antique
it seems a mere four years later. The small screen resolution contributes
to this - but more indicative for me is the awkwardness of the navigation
and flow. Part of that effect is due to my own lack of expertise in the
medium - but I had already done most of Califia by that time, and I
remember I was still struggling with authoring features that did not lend
themselves easily to a long, fictional narrative and ready access to a large
database of material. My experience has been that the navigation
structure is one of the most difficult aspects of writing hypermedia
narratives.

The differences between the Toolbook version and later versions is most
vivid in the employment of the graphics. My ideas about what the graphic
environment needs to contribute to the overall "text" has evolved over time.
In 1998, I was still hesitant to allow the graphic elements to support
themselves. But in order to allow the graphics a greater autonomy, they
need to be not only background and local color, information and orientation,
but also to embody the essence of the structure and context. This Toolbook
version is a good example of graphics that are not fully integrated into the
concept of the whole. [The change from a white background to a black one
(later) was occasioned by my testing of Califia and problems with
the background color for that novel. White is very harsh for a long piece
- and off-white tended to fight with the brilliant colors that are so
characteristic of Egyptian art. So, the subsequent versions with black
backgrounds not only changed the look, but dictated a different set of
graphics.]

If one reads the beginning of the narrative, however, the text seems to
start out much the same in all of the versions. However, the opening
sequence has been altered slightly, but significantly, to reflect what
has come to be a change in the entire direction of the plot. In the
Toolbook version the narrator begins her journey in Cairo and proceeds
upriver to Aswan. In the later versions, the journey is downriver -
Aswan to Cairo. Moreover, in the early versions (Toolbook, HTML, and
DHTML) - the Jeanette/Ba narrator is alive (both symbolically and really)
and she comes to Egypt to participate in the Osiris drama as a
helpmeet/witness for her brother. In the Director version, we discover
that Jeanette is probably already dead, and that her Ba, Ka, and Akh
are reunited in the process of accompanying Osiris on his journey
downriver and through the symbolic underworld.

The use of hieroglyphs as navigation features is only rudimentarily
developed in the Toolbook version. One major problem was finding
a hieroglyphic font that would produce robust glyphs and could be
imported into another program. In the end, I bowed to necessity
and made separate .gif and .jpg files for each one - but at the time
of the Toolbook version, I was still trying to avoid that.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HTML and DHTML

Oh dear! I find it very hard to think about these versions, since
they are obsolete before even being born!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Director/Shockwave

I have been grateful to Barry Smylie, Jim Andrews, Deena Larsen and
other hypertext writers for their explication of the process and
thinking that has gone into their works. It's far easier to move
on to the next problem than it is to write about the labyrinthine
details of construction. The Director/Shockwave version that you will
access on this disk is not only unfinished, it is at the very stage
that the multi-media artist junks the whole thing and starts over.
In the new version which emerges, the features that need to be there
will stubbornly remain, and the jetsam of several exploratory drafts
will be pruned out. The process of starting over is particularly
important in this case, because I was learning Director as I went along.

for M.D. Coverley's complete paper, click here

Steve Ersinghaus is a digital artist, fiction writer and poet. He is the author with
Carianne Mack of 100 Days: 100 drawings 100 poems; Stoning Field;
The Life of Geronimo Sandoval; a novel in hypertext, and the hypertext poem
That Night, forthcoming in Drunken Boat.

The 2009 100 Days project, a collective of many artists, is currently in progress.

Steve Ersinghaus earned his Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Texas-El Paso.
He teaches writing, literature, and new media at Tunxis Community College in
Farmington, Connecticut.

The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, a novel in hypertext, took
approximately four years to complete. I had originally begun the work
with a fairly conventional plan: to write a book-based novel. I began
with an image, two people talking by a river in southern New Mexico, and
quickly realized that the novel and its characters wanted a different
form: the novel needed a form appropriate and implicit to the voice of
its first person narrator/hero, Ham Sandoval.

I found the form with the help of Eastgate Systems' Storyspace.
The initial image of The Life of Geronimo Sandoval became not
merely a place to begin writing the novel but an episode within a larger
narrative that could appear at any appropriate time given Ham Sandoval's
method of storytelling. Storyspace because the appropriate tool to
explore Ham Sandoval.

Storyspace is hypertext authoring software. I would also call it an
authoring framework. It provides not just the requirements of a word
processor or a means of reading and presenting hypertext, but an
environment for creating, organizing, revising, visualizing, and
distributing hyperlinked works. I could also write the previous
sentence this way: Storyspace can be the proper tool for works of art
that demand hypertext as an implicit form. What Storyspace provided for
Sandoval was a means of finding the voice and logic of the narrative.

In Storyspace's work environment I could find sequences and sections
swiftly and accurately and work with multiple writing spaces
simultaneously. With Storyspace, the writer may employ a variety of link
types to the text as well as control how links behave under certain
conditions. Storyspace provides map, chart, and outline views that
provide flexible means of examining narrative space. Keyword
assignment, search facility, and the ability to import other digital
media into the environment make Storyspace a powerful creative tool with
ample aesthetic possibilities not just for the study of technology but
of the human lifeworld.

Susan M. Gibb holds an A.S. degree in English from Tunxis Community College
and is currently supplementing with courses based in Creative Writing, and New Media.
She is a writer of fiction as well as non fiction and poetry, has served as editor of otto,
the Tunxis literary journal, and has produced and edited a traditional archery magazine sold in
the U.S. and abroad. Her workshop session on "The Hypertext Effect: The Transfiguration of
Writing and The Writer" was presented at Hypertext 2008 in Pittsburgh, PA.

She is always working on hypertext projects using Storyspace and Tinderbox software
and exporting for presentation online, has published some work on her website,
Hypercompendia, and is currently participating in 100 Days: Summer 2009,
a collaboration of individual artists producing a work each day for 100 days. Susan Gibb also
writes online on her websites dedicated to Literature, Writing, Hypertext, New Media forms,
and life's "story moments."

My introduction to hypertext was in a contemporary fiction course and there
was a bit of resistance to what appeared to be a jungle of story. However,
it intrigued me enough as a writer to want to master not only the reading
but the writing of narrative into the hypertext environment.

With the Storyspace program offered by Eastgate Systems in mind,
I prepared by planning out what I felt was the perfect story to be told in
hypertext. Paths is a story of a couple who fell in love in college and
who may or may not have ended up together. What other medium could so entwine
the coulda's, woulda's, and shoulda's of such a basic choice in life?

Once I got the Storyspace software, it was a matter of transferring what were
basically four paths of stories into the format. Very, very easy to do. Even
though the manual is one of the best I'd ever encountered in its pointed
instructions and illustrations, the software was so well arranged that it
wasn't necessary to consult except for specific maneuvers.

I soon realized that the structure I had envisioned for the story was not
using Storyspace to its optimum performance capabilities with its
opportunities for exploration into time and character. The excellent Map
View was the best to work into as it enabled the placement of the parts
within the whole. All the originally planned links were severed and I let
the stories flow into each other from more natural intersecting points.
Past and present have no certainty in this narrative and the interplay of
memory and perspective opened a playground for true character development.
75 writing spaces -- or text boxes -- stretched into 300, all because
the event of hypertext invites the author to tarry in an area of the
mind that might otherwise be kept from the reader.

I am working on more in the Storyspace software and find that as with the first
effort, the format focuses on what is vital to a very small portion of story without
hindering the creative flow. Particularly in editing, I've found that the writing
improves as it seeks the most concise yet imaginative manner of telling a tale; each
box of words being self-contained and asking the writer, as much as the reader,
to linger a bit, just as does the form of a poem.

The full journey of writing in Storyspace has been documented in my
Hypercompendia weblog and can be read at Storyspace Index

Originally from England, now living in Dublin, "arts explorer"
Dylan Harris is a poet and software engineer whose print and multimedia
poetry has appeared in print and online.

I'll write a poem using pen, paper and beer. I'll use Sound Forge,
Soundtracker Pro or Audacity, depending on reverb, to make an MP3
recital. I'll assemble a videocast using the recital, photos processed
in Studio Artist (I like it), text in Paint Shop Pro (windows fonts)
or the Gimp (unix fonts), in GarageBand (simple) or Final Cut Express
(complex). The videocast is posted using iWeb.

Except for videocasts, I prepare web pages using Windows Notepad,
because it doesn't exclude things its designers didn't expect.

William Harris (1926-2009) taught classics at Middlebury College in Vermont
for thirty-two years. A sculptor, composer, and poet, when he retired in 1990,
he worked with computers -- compiling an electronic Latin dictionary,
Humanist's Latin Dictionary, that was published by Centaur.

During the ensuing years, Harris created Humanities and the Liberal Arts a website
that is in itself a narrative of a Vermont life spent in the study of the classics
and the making of art. In an online essay about his life he wrote:

"I am still surprised how much varied thinking went into that website.
In high school I was bookish, I eagerly perused Jowett's Plato and
fastened on Hippias the Elean with pure delight. He wove his cloak,
made his sandals, composed an ode to commemorate the race he
won, and sang it with his own lyre in hand. Plato looked askance at
him, but I was delighted and got his message immediately: Do
everything you can yourself, in short become what would eons later
be called a Renaissance Man. In this age of specialization there are
costs to all this but I held to my ideal firmly. The proof of the pudding
is found in the materials in this website, which people often remark
has the mark of the work of a Renaissance Man. Yes, that is what I
always thought a teacher should be like. a person interested in more
than his discipline, a citizen of the ideas of the world."

In recent years, Bill Harris created a series of evocative electronic poems
and image/text works. "I want a poem to be meditated, not read through," he writes
in his essay for Authoring Software. "So by taking it off the page and
making it a variable field of words, I think we are trying something new and
something possibly very interesting."

A World War II Veteran, Harris, who had been battling cancer for several years,
died at the age of 83 in February 2009.

Hyper Poems

Authoring is done through MS "marquee" program, which was introduced
in early version's of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Deprecated because of
difficulty of web spiders to scan a moving text, it now works on IE 5/6, on
Netscape 7, on iCab for Mac and elsewhere, and is retained for legacy files
on Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Firefox.

My primary concern is with text and what can be done with it in a poetry
medium. We often think of poetic text as composed first and permanently
written in ink or etched in stone, missing the possibilities of a poem in fluid
text medium. Here I have used a very simple program which has often been
used for minor and even frivolous purposes. I hand code my material for html
as I always do, so I have complete control over the primary level. The poem
is not written out first and then transferred into the motile form, but written
line by line on the screen as I compare contrasts and inner meanings for
each group of two or three lines. But the order of the lines is not changed,
only the internal organization of each line as it confronts another.

The Microsoft program offers a short list of variable elements, including speed
of horizontal travel, right and left, a possible but useless up and down, a frame
delay, and some screen color possibilities. Using just the text basics, I can
concentrate as an author on the content of my text, avoiding complex
programming and some of the problems which complexity involves.

This would sound all too simple except for one factor. Since the lines of
text are uneven in length, this affects the scrolled repetition which is thrown
into its own seeming quasi-programmed a-synchronicity. So lines will
never match up as with the first reading, they will continue to get further
and further away as individual components from my "ur text". Thus the
reader is given more and more discrete projections of recurring poetic
motions, which in a ten line piece with perhaps three nodes of
meaning or "events' per line, will be displaying to the reader's eye
about twenty groupings of words continually appearing in different
conjugations.

Thus each poem is continually evolving out of its own internal history,
which at times may give a very different appearance to the whole display
on the screen. The first appearance will be even like any text. Next some
lines will start to go in different directions, and some will have a different
programmed speed while others re-speed themselves later. Later, as a
surprise, groups of words may possibly arrange themselves to the right
and left of the screen leaving the center empty, or they may all
congregate centrally before starting to wander sideways. The interesting
thing about this variability is that as the poem progresses, more of the
text obeys the internal patterning generated by the running program,
and less and less the initial pattern which I have set up.

In the last twenty years, our visual comprehension of momentary
chunks of text has developed to a remarkable degree. A tenth of a
second on a typical TV display will give a real sense of a picture
or of a chunk of advertising wording. Everything has speeded up as
we learned how to scan rather than to read, how to intuit ideas rather
than investigate them. Look at the slow text sections of an old silent
movie and you will see the difference in reading speeds in less than a
century.

A desire to break out of the fixedness of text appeared already in the
later 19th century, when Mallarmé in his "Coup de dés. . . . ." tried to
imitate something like fortuitous reading on a printed page. In the world
of Dada words appeared everywhere, in designs and by pure chance,
always suggesting that they were loose and mobile in some sense.
But little could be done with real mobility until we moved into the electronic
age; these new HyperPoems which I have been working with are the front
fringe of a very different new set of sensibilities.

Some people who have been heavily schooled to be linear, cannot "read"
these new motion poems, which are as if one were walking into a flowering
meadow and standing a moment taking it all in bit by bit. There is no order
but just what you see, and your eye will rove rather than classify as it
moves from edge to edge. When you come back tomorrow there will be
changes in the meadow and also in your perception, because all is in
change as Heraclitus well said. So the walk in the meadow or the perusal
of a HyperPoem for several minutes might be considered as an investigative
essay in changeability and variety. It could be in the world of nature, while
in these poems it will be in words and text.

I want a poem to be meditated, not read through. So by taking it off the
page and making it a variable field of words, I think we are trying something
new and something possibly very interesting.

Born and raised in Canada and currently living in Menlo Park, California,
Robert Kendall is an e-poetry pioneer, who has been creating interactive
multimedia poetry since 1990.

His book-length hypertext poem, A Life Set for Two, was published by
Eastgate Systems in 1996, and his hypertext poetry has also been published
and exhibited Internationally including The Little Magazine;
Iowa Review Web; BBC Online; Cauldron & Net; Dodge Poetry
Festival; the Second Annual Poetry Video Festival, Chicago; Manhattan
Cable TV; and the Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia.

Kendall's printed poetry has appeared in Rattapallax, Contact II,
River Styx, New York Quarterly, Barrow Street, and Indiana Review.
His print work, A Wandering City, (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) won the
CSU Poetry Center Prize.

He is co-developer of Connection Muse, an adaptive hypertext authoring system
for Web poetry and fiction, and his articles and essays about computer technology
and computers in the arts have been widely published including in PC Magazine,
PC Computing, Poets & Writers Magazine, Leonardo, Electronic
Book Review, Cortland Review, Kairos, and Purdue University Press.

Robert Kendall is the host of the website Word Circuits and Director of the
Electronic Literature Organization's Electronic Literature Directory.

Since 1995, he has taught hypertext poetry and fiction through the online
program of the New School University in New York.

Pieces

I created this work in Flash. It makes use of drag-and-drop functions and
transitional fades that very few other delivery systems can create. The
method I use for text-handling is not the one normally employed by Flash
authors. All the text is stored in an XML file, which is read by the work's
SWF file at runtime. This means that I can edit or expand the text of this
work freely without having to recompile the SWF file. I can also easily
organize it into paths and sections/lexias. It's very difficult to work with
large quantities of text in Flash, unless you put the text into external XML
files in this manner.

Pieces is the first step in a large-scale project from which I hope will
eventually emerge an X-Literature XML specification--an XML format that will
allow me and other authors to create complex Flash works solely by creating
content in XML that will be rendered by a Flash-based X-Lit Player. I will
be working in conjunction with the ELO to work out the details of the X-Lit
spec itself. In conjunction with developing a preliminary version of the
spec, I am also building an authoring tool in AIR (a new programming IDE
recently released by Adobe) that will let people create Flash works without
having to use or even own Flash. My XML format currently handles only text,
but ultimately it will also handle graphics, video, and audio, and will
store elements defining animation, interaction, styles, and interface
elements. Preliminary details about the project, which is in its very early
stages, are available at http://www.wordcircuits.com/xlit

Prior to working in Flash, I used the Connection Muse to help create most of
my Web work. This is a JavaScript-based authoring system for adaptive
hypertext, which I codeveloped with the French computer scientist,
Jean-Hugues Réty ( http://wordcircuits.com/connect). This system allows the
components of a hypertext to respond dynamically to a reader's progress
through the work, changing links and content to suit the current reading
situation. Many of the features of Connection Muse have already been
incorporated into my XML format, and I hope eventually to port all the
system's features to the X-Lit authoring system.

When the X-Lit spec, player, and authoring tool are fully developed they
will allow an author to store in a single XML file all the text and pointers
to external media content for complex hypertexts, interactive pieces, and
animated works. Features not supported by X-Lit can still be implemented
directly in Flash, so an author won't lose any functionality by using the
system, even if it doesn't directly support all desired functions. I'm
excited by the prospects of this system and its new approach, and I hope it
will someday see wide use.

Denver Colorado Native Deena Larsen has been a central voice in
the writing and understanding of new media literature.

Her seminal hypertext, Marble Springs, about the lives of women in a
Colorado mining town, was published by Eastgate Systems in 1993.

Her work has been published by Eastgate; the Iowa Review Web;
Drunken Boat; Cauldron and Net; Riding the Meridian;
Poems that Go; The Blue Moon Review; and New River.

For many years, she hosted forums and workshops for the eliterature
community, and she currently hosts the website
Fundamentals : Rhetorical Devices for Electronic Literature

Pines at Walden Pond

I have used a lot of authoring tools, but if I have to choose only one,
let it be Pines at Walden Pond, which I did with Trellix.
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/deena/pines/

Trellix was/is an early software for the web--before Dreamweaver.
It allows users to show node maps and trails between nodes.
The squares and lines on the tree are generated from Trellix.
I spent a day at the Trellix office and betatested their software
by putting Pines together. It went surprisingly fast--this was the
only work that I have ever created where I actually spent more time
composing than I did re-coding and re-editing and bug fixing.

For more information about Deena Larsen's work, visit
http://www.deenalarsen.net/

Welcome participants in Computers and Writing 2009 Online Sessions!

I'd like to begin by introducing myself. I'm Judy Malloy,
a poet who works at the conjunction of hypernarrative, magic realism,
and information art.

My work has been exhibited and published internationally including
San Francisco Art Institute, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, Sao Paulo Biennial,
the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston Cyberarts Festival,
The Walker Art Center, Eastgate Systems, E.P. Dutton, MIT Press,
The Iowa Review Web, and many others.

A pioneer on the Internet and in electronic literature, since 1986, I
have created a series of innovative hypernarratives works published
by Eastgate and on the Internet, including its name was Penelope
and l0ve0ne, the first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop.

In 1993, I was invited to Xerox PARC where I worked in Computer Science
Laboratory as the first artist in their artist-in-residence program.
In 1994, I created one of the first arts websites, Making Art Online.
(currently hosted on the website of the Walker Art Center)

My recent work includes where every luminous landscape,
included in the 2009 Future of Writing Conference at UC Irvine and
recently selected for The 2009 E-Poetry Fesitval to be held in Barcelona in 2009;
Concerto for Narrative Data, Iowa Review Web, 2008;
The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen,
exhibited in Visionary Landscapes as part of the
2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference
and Revelations of Secret Surveillance, a work of new media poetry,
magic realism, and information art that employs metaphor, history, narrative,
and annotated references to disclose the potential for harassment, control, and
covert censorship inherent in covert surveillance and techno-surveillance.

I am the editor of Women, Art & Technology, (MIT Press, 2003)
and the host of Art California in partnership with the
California Studies Association.

For this Conference, I am contributing commentary on my recent work
of new media poetry, where every luminous landscape.
The Authoring Software Project also includes commentary on
Afterwards, created for Authoring Software during the
2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference.

where every luminous landscape

where every luminous landscape is a work of new media poetry that
is composed of a series of composite screens of visual text. Parallel
narrative trails lead to different parts of a narrative told by
Dorothy Abrona McCrae, a Bay Area Figurative painter.

Informed by successive layers of Dorothy's life and art and by my own life as
a poet -- who at one time bicycled around the New England country side
with watercolors and sketch pad; at a later time created a series of small
paintings, photographs, and texts that were presented in "card catalogs";
and who now (on crutches for over ten years) walks the hills of California
with my notebook and sketch pad -- where every luminous landscape is
composed with interlocking texts that, as I did in creating the card
catalogs, I/the reader shuffle and reshuffle until the effect is exactly
what is desired.

The work uses elements of DHTML to create an array of frames that were scripted
with HTML, CSS, and Meta Refresh tags.

The interface is a variation of the interface I designed for the opening section of
The Roar of Destiny. (1995-1999) To navigate where every luminous landscape,
click on the text in any of the displayed lexias (hypertext stanzas) and/or wait for
the text to change. (Occasionally there is a "timeout" on one or more
of the lexias. Use "reload" to fix this.)

Rather than (as I have in some other works) offering the reader parallel paths
of text --in which the navigation/exploration between the unseen paths is an integral part
of the work and of the reading experience -- in this work, the words of all the paths
and their relationships to each other, are more clearly visible.

Afterwards

I usually begin with the idea of the narrative or poetic situation that I want
to convey. Over the course of over twenty years of writing new media literature,
I have developed a series of authoring structures and interfaces
that work together with the text, and these systems are utilized to create the
architecture and interface that convey each new work. But, after making the
decisions about what the words relate and the basic architecture where the
words reside, I create structure and content simultaneously, so that they evolve
together. In general, my aim is to compose literature where the interface does not
overwhelm poetic narrative, and the whole is somewhat seamlessly integrated
into the World Wide Web where it resides.

The words: In a series of conversations and parallel thoughts,
Afterwards chronicles the relationships of three couples: the young
couple Tina and Jerry, who are unsure whether to begin a serious relationship;
Gunter and Gwen, who in their lives have at times between unable to separate
reality from virtual reality; and the recently married couple, Dorothy,
a painter, and Sid, a curator. The work takes place immediately after
Dorothy and Sid's wedding celebration, and thus the narrative reflects
the aftermath of a wedding.

How the work was created: Afterwards was structured using hand-coded
HTML in the Narrative Data Structure (NarraStructure) system that I first created
and implemented for the three voice narrative, Wasting Time.
(published on disk in After the Book, Perforations 3, 1992)

In Afterwards, to portray moments of intimate shared conversation and
parallel thoughts, I used HTML frames and Meta Refresh tags to produce a series
of episodes of narrative text that at times simulate conversation -- the
words of each speaker appear slowly in separate columns -- and at times connect
static columns of words that simulate parallel thought patterns.

I keyed the collected episodes that comprise the work using graphic icon squares
that I first used in the 1995 web version of Uncle Roger.
For Afterwards they were color-coded -- ie to follow one couple, the reader
clicks on one color of squares in the interface. This use of color to follow
different characters was an interface approach I first encountered in
Cathy Marshall's work at Xerox PARC.

The work is multi-sequential in that beginnings are accessed at the top of the
array, and the end of the array offers closure. Although most of my work is
designed for laptop screens because I believe that laptops work best for in
depth computer-screen reading, Afterwards, which is a relatively short
work, was designed for optimum viewing on a full screen.

Working like a poet-composer, I prefer to hand script HTML rather than use
a commercial tool because for my work I find this method allows the kind of
control of the look, feel and structure of the work that most closely
approximates my vision.

Australian-based net.artist, Mez Breeze has been creating of Internet-based
code poetry and poetic game interventions for fifteen years.

Her work had been exhibited widely, including ISEA; ARS Electronica;
The Metropolitan Museum Tokyo; SIGGRAPH; The Brooklyn Academy of Music;
New Media Scotland; Laguna Art Museum; Alternator Gallery, Canada;
HTTP Gallery, London; and Postmaster Gallery, New York.

She was JavaArtist of the Year 2001 and in 2002, she was the winner of
the Newcastle Digital Poetry Prize.

Poetic Game Interventions [V.1]

I began my MMOG interventions in the 90's using the
_Everquest_ game interface 2 project/interject in2 the conventional
game-chat stream by riffing off other players chatlines and reworking
chat sections via poetic manipulations. I'd also mangle logs of these chats
and project them into a wider networked sphere by reposting them to various
email list forums.

I'm currently extending this type of poetic intervention/textual reworking of
game_text during my time playing World of Warcraft. My latest
intervention is titled "Twittermixed Litterature" and involves
WoW characters ["toons"] on the Bloodscalp Server standing in
Ironforge [an in-game location] + live remixing [in_game] chat that
occurs between players and guild/character names that rotate past.
I then remash these lines [+ any feedback I receive in-game from the
players themselves] into a live Twitter stream, making a multi-access
channelling or [as I labelled it in the press releases]: "Twittermixing
prefound identity marker texts from live-time character actions in
World of Warcraft" and "MMO Voyeur Aggregationistic Rem(H)ashing

Software tools used: Written in the Python programming language,
and depends on the Python libraries PyGame (for rendering graphics)
and BeautifulSoup (for reading HTML).

Narrative Units

Interface/authoring tools are an interesting question to me...
For the last three years or so I've worked almost exclusively within
a command-line interface. My code editor is Vim. Like many CLI users,
I find it efficient and simple - it allows me to think through the
keyboard without a lot of hunting and clicking with the mouse to interfere.

From the perspective of media practice, I see the interfaces I use while
working as very much a part of the work. Here is a screenshot of Narrative Units:
http://ethanmiller.name/media/images/uploaded/narrunits_.png
which may explain more visually than I can articulate verbally.
I think the relationship, on the one hand, may have to do with the
parameters/biases imposed by software: Programming languages and
plain-text/code editors offer relatively more freedom of movement
than 'wizards' and options panels (more possibilities for errors isn't
a bad thing either).

Beyond that though I think a plain text interface in the context of a
visual/auditory/networked practice speaks to the soft borders between
those forms and the codes that run through them. The relationship, say
between code that creates an image, the image file, and how it's represented
on a screen, is complex and fascinating. The transformations all happen through
'languages' which are comfortably represented in plain text. I guess, for me,
keeping my working interface within the confines of plain text, while creating
visual/auditory work, keeps me situated within that "boundary" area that I find
so interesting.

Lost One

For your blogbase, I will mention my piece Lost One, which has not
been released but was first publicly read at the Open Mic & Mouse, The Future
of Electronic Literature Symposium (sponsored by the Electronic Literature
Organization and Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities),
University of Maryland, 2 May 2007.

This piece was written in the interactive fiction system nn, which is also
unreleased. I developed nn as part of my dissertation work at the University
of Pennsylvania. The system is itself written in Python. nn is currently a
research system -- good enough to prove some points that I have been trying
to prove, but not complete and stable enough to be useful as a released piece
of software. I hope to release nn within about a year, but it is proving difficult
to find time to work on it.

I'm most interested in writing e-lit in programming languages that are capable
of general computation. nn falls into this category, while also providing
specific facilities for varying the narration of a story independent of what
the underlying events are.

I can supply you with information about other pieces of mine if you like. I have
also written electronic literature in Inform 6, Perl, Python, Processing, HTML,
and the Windows 95 help system. In the last case it was not, of course, because
I was interested in the capabilities of that authoring system.

Writer and code artist Judd Morrissey creates electronic literature, performance
art, and site-specific installations.

His My Name Is Captain, Captain (in collaboration with
Lori Talley) was published in 2002 by Eastgate Systems, and he was a recipient of a
Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers' Grant in 2006.

His work has been exhibited and published Internationally including Visionary
Landscapes: the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Vancouver, WA;
The Iowa Review Web; Eastgate; E-poetry 2005, London; Cerisy 2004, Normandy, France;
Computers and Writing 2004; Language and Encoding, University of Buffalo;
p0es1s: International Exhibition of Digital Poetry, Germany; the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago; Rockford Art Museum; Chicago Cultural Center; Mobius,
Boston, MA; and the DeCordova Museum.

Judd Morrissey is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago in Writing, Art and Technology Studies, and Performance.

He is a founding member of the interdisciplinary art-making and curatorial collective,
OPENPORT and an Associate Member of Goat Island performance group.

The Last Performance [dot org]

Project Information

The Last Performance is a constraint-based collaborative writing,
archiving and text-visualization project responding to the theme of
lastness in relation to architectural forms, acts of building, a final
performance, and the interruption (that becomes the promise) of
community.

This project was conceived in response to the work of the
Chicago-based performance collective, Goat Island, (of which
I am a part) and their decision, after 20 years of practice,
to create a last performance. The electronic work is evolving over
two years in parallel with the creation and performance of the
company's final performance work, The Lastmaker.

The structure of the project is taken from my research with Goat
Island into double buildings, a phrase we are using to describe spaces
that have housed and survived multiple historical identities, with a
specific concern for the functions of churches, mosques, and museums.
The central structure of The Last Performance is a virtual dome, based
on the cupola of a particular Croatian double building, a construction
of circles within circles consisting of 4,680 glass lenses. The lenses
of the cupola have been transposed as compositional spaces that will
be populated until the dome is complete. The dome writings are also
processed as source material to create a constantly evolving textual
landscape.

Technical Framework

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, Drupal

I wanted to situate The Last Performance [dot org] in relation to the
overall dialogue and data-flow of the web as an evolving collaborative
space -- to engage "web 2.0" as a site for composition, a readymade
environment, a foundation for responsive practices. It was important
to me that the project be more or less transparent with current
open-source web standards and protocols.

For the basic functionality of this project, I used the PHP/MySQL
content management system, Drupal. This enabled me to rather quickly
lay a foundation for handling participant accounts, session tracking,
built-in RSS aggregation, content tagging, and many other useful
and/or ubiquitous features. The overall visual architecture and textual
processing is handled using PHP for database queries, parsing and
re-composing, and mathematically determining the (CSS) positioning of
elements based mainly on the geometry of circles. Some text imaging is
also done with the gd graphics library for php. Many of the individual
pages are HTML files using Ajax to communicate with PHP.

For some time, I have been working mainly with an integrated set of
web-based languages, so this project continues to extend this
approach. For writers or artists interested in experimenting with PHP,
I recommend the MAMP / LAMP / WAMP applications for a very quick and
easy development environment.

Under Language and Deep Surface

Since the turn of the century, I've been working exclusively in Flash, with
an increasing emphasis on code-intensive, object-oriented projects.

Also important are various tools for generating 3-D images and animations,
including 3DStudio Max and Poser, tools for converting text to artificial
speech, such as TextAloud, and the sound library at Freesound.org

My most recent projects are:

"Deep Surface" http://www.smoulthrop.com/lit/ds

"Under Language" http://www.smoulthrop.com/lit/ul

My headlong dive into ever more elaborate code structures has brought my
work closer to the thermocline between e-lit and computer games. Both the
most recent pieces have explicit game features, such as end-of-play
conditions (game over), and scoring systems. You can probably tell that I
spend much time in my day job (which, oddly enough, happens mainly at night)
teaching aspiring game designers how to think with code.

Withal, I remain a compulsively verbal artist, and can't shake the type off
my boot blocks, even as I seem compelled to invent "new disorders" of
writing (as I recently heard John Cayley quote Derrida).

Flash remains a convenient choice for many things -- though it bears noting
that ActionScript 3 demands significantly more patience and attention than
its precursors, and turns casual scripting into something much more like
industrial-strength programming. Adobe seem to assume that graphic
designers and application developers will be happier if their tools clearly
delineate their job functions (i.e., the designers are discouraged from
touching code). I think that's a terrible development for ARTISTS.

In the future, I'd like to build with materials that aren't Adobe -- using
things like Processing, especially the excellent RiTa system from Daniel
Howe at Brown, or a fascinating utility called Dasher, which is a gestural
substitute for keyboard input. Also on my do-list are Inform, the venerable
authoring system for traditional interactive fiction, and of course,
HTML-JavaScript, where I still have deep roots.

Velvet

As a visual + sound artist working also within the form of the artists' book,
I understand net art as a virtual extension of a much older physical tradition
of self-published artists' books. I began working with narrative/poetic artists'
books in the early 90's and began experimenting with Director in 2001 as I was
able to incorporate motion and sound into the mix. I moved thereafter to the
Flash programming environment because it affords a better possibility for
compressing video, still images, and sounds to sufficiently small sizes for
web publishing without sacrificing the aesthetic integrity of the media.

I work with Final Cut and Quicktime Pro for video editing, Adobe Photoshop for
image editing, and Logic and Audacity for sound editing. Currently, I combine the
raw materials from these programs using Flash, and with javaScript and actionScript
I can customize the users viewing environment, incorporate interactivity, and
program randomization features to break from traditional linear narrativity

For the piece Velvet specifically, my goal was to produce a highly
interactive environment which was very personal in nature and which immerses
a user inside the mind and identity of the artist for the exploration of
states of mind, dreams, and memory. I was also interested in incorporating
as many media as possible - text, still images, sounds, & video - and to do
so using a diverse body of work from over the past 15 years of my active
art-making. The interactivity plays a significant role, not only for
navigation, but for the generation of meaning. Velvet was designed
with a non-linear narrative in mind, with an overarching structure in place
that allows for a degree of authorial direction amidst the user-determined
sequencing.

Born in British Columbia and based in London, Kate Pullinger writes for print,
digital media, radio, and film. Her recent work includes the multimedia graphic novel
Inanimate Alice and the networked narrative Flight Paths.

Her works of fiction have been published by Phoenix House, Bloomsbury, Cape/Picador,
Five Star, and Serpent's Tail. She co-wrote the novel of the film The Piano
with director Jane Campion, and from 2001-2007 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.
Her new novel, The Mistress of Nothing, is in press in the UK by Serpent's Tail
and in Canada by McArthur & Co.

Kate Pullinger currently teaches on the MA in Creative Writing and New Media at
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

Flight Paths

We've been working on Flight Paths for around five months now, and a lot
of that time has been taken up trying to figure out how to make it work.
Despite massive advances and changes on the web over the past few years, it
still remains fairly complicated to create an open access site that can
include multimedia.

The first version of Flight Paths went up in a WordPress blog, with the
add-on of CommentPress, the widget created by the Institute of the Future of
the Book that allows us to foreground comments on the right-hand side of the
page, instead of buried beneath each post. While this seemed like a good
idea at the time, this widget was actually created for people to comment on
works that were already written; CommentPress works best when you've got a
draft of a text that you want to allow people to comment on paragraph by
paragraph. It doesn't work so well when the project, like Flight Paths,
is being created afresh.

At the same time as working on the public face of the project, Chris and I
have been busy in the background making links with other organisations,
collecting submissions from interested people, creating our own submissions,
visiting the supermarket in Richmond to make recordings and take photos and
videos, interviewing the journalists behind the original project, etc etc.

After a few months, it began to become clear to us that the wordpress blog
wasn't really the right venue for this project - a blog is a blog, even with
the fab CommentPress widget - and what we are trying to do is not create a
blog. Neither of us are natural-born bloggers, and this project isn't about
writing a blog. Around this time, Netvibes, a homepage application that we
had both been using, launched Netvibes Universes, and this seemed like the
ideal platform to move 'Flight Paths' to - we'd always wanted to be able to
curate the web for this project, to be able to collect things from all over
the web, as well as collecting submissions. The Universe does in fact work
well as a curatorial platform, although, inevitably, we've had mails from
some of our contributors saying they can't get the Universe boxes to open.

However, quite apart from whether or not the Universe works across various
browsers and operating systems, another issue for us is where to house the
discussions that arise out of the submissions and from the various issues
and themes behind the project. With the CommentPress widget the blog was
almost okay for discussions, though we have never used the blog as a blog
and have always manipulated the posts, using the Table of Contents the
CommentPress widget created, trying to keep numbers of posts to a mininum in
order to stop entries from being buried in the blog archive. This was quite
labour intensive, and also counter-intuitive -- again, trying to make a blog
resemble something that isn't a blog -- so recently we've decided that, for
discussions, we should use a forum. We've put a forum up in the Flight
Paths universe, and are currently pondering how best to organise it.

All of this has been slow and time-consuming; I've found I've needed ages to
ponder it all and get my head round how best to make this project work
online. Doubtless we will continue to tweak it as it grows.

I have come to believe that authoring systems are the problem, not the
solution; the short answer to what authoring system I use is: I don't.
The authoring system should be smashed -- to smithereens. Let the
smithereens loose. What I use is not an authoring system but an
ecosystem for nurturing feral smithereens.

This means: the object of attention is (surprise): the object. Authoring
is not something you "do" in an "authoring system" -- as opposed to
some other habitat of the object as encountered by the reader; authoring
is just something naturally there, as a normal function of what an object
does. It is not something you turn "on" but something you might decide
to turn "off". "Playing" is not something that you do in some separate jail
called a "player" or something you do inside that prison otherwise known
as "web browser window", it is something the object naturally does. In
place. Feral. Loose on the desktop, perhaps. Or if it's in a specific place,
a place that you made -- the place is itself an object. Everything is an object.
Including zero.

In this environment there is no boundary between "playing" and "authoring".
There are only objects that behave. Some behaviors modify the object,
some don't. Some behaviors modify other behaviors, some don't.
Some behaviors I had to code myself, most I didn't.
The concern is not authoring, but doing: What does the word object do,
what can you do to it, with it, for it (or even against it.)

An object space. An open object space. Generic enough that I don't
have to write all the code, but open meaning I can write my own
code and insert it into the space so there is no boundary.

So, of course there is "a system"; I'm not supporting my poetry
in an environment I programmed 100% myself in machine language
from bare metal -- no one would do that. The object system I use
is called Squeak. You could argue, I suppose, that there is no real
difference between Squeak and an authoring system, but most authoring
systems are not so generic. The list of packages which have been
produced in Squeak is quite broad, resembling a scaled-down list
of packages available for a generic operating system. The Squeak
"World" could easily serve as the main GUI desktop for an operating
system, as Gnome or KDE does for Linux.

This is just a snapshot. For a more serious write-up, I still stand by
"Questions about the Second Move", which appeared in Cybertext Yearbook
2002-2003, and for the technicalities, "Hypertext in the Open Air: A Systemless
Approach to Spatial Hypertext", (pdf) from the Third Workshop on
Spatial Hypertext at Hypertext '03.

Vniverse and slippingglimpse

1-Why did we use Director for Vniverse and Flash for slippingglimpse;
or, what is the relationship of interface/content to the tools we used?

V: VNIVERSE: Our original thought was to use VRML, or to make an installation,
to actually seem to move in a three-dimensional star space-to turn to look at different texts
as you turn in space and trigger the stars. Perhaps, today, were we at Brown or someplace
with a CAVE, it would be possible to work out such a piece for a CAVE.

But in fact in 2000, we used Macromedia Director because it was the most widely
used multimedia authoring tool at the time, and it was what Cynthia was using
in graduate school. The biggest problem was drawing the constellations, getting
the lines/diagrams to be dynamically generated whenever anyone rolled over or
clicked a star.

The biggest ongoing challenge is to make sure our projects are up-to-date and
viewable as hardware and software changes at such a fast pace.

SLIPPINGGLIMPSE: The main reason for using Flash for slippingglimpse
was so that we could dynamically animate and visually layer text on top of videos.
Director can't do it. You can track motion and layer text on video in Processing,
but Processing requires a Java applet on the viewer's machine that is not as widely
adopted as the Flash player, and we wanted the project as accessible online as possible.

As well, Cynthia was interested in learning Flash. However we wished to do things
that Flash barely supports, certainly not Flash 7. Fortunately Flash 8 came out
just in time to do our project. There is a new bitmap API in version 8 that
facilitated the motion capture script. We continued to have problems with how
many pieces of text we can use at once. Doing multiple things at once and drawing
them is something Flash 8 is still pretty clunky at. Therefore we had to break
down the poem text and select something like 10 to 15 phrases ranging in length
from 1 to 7 words to be dynamically chosen and drawn in the full-screen
(water as reader) mode of the piece.

2-How has our use expanded new media practice?

V: VNIVERSE: To our knowledge it hasn't, but we believe the Vniverse
interface is capable of being generalized. At a reading at U. California Santa Barbara,
an audience member felt it was a widely usable data visualization. It combines diagrammatic
structures with text in a pleasing way.

We feel the most interesting aspect of the programming is that the whole program happens
in one frame, and therefore time is generated via coding and not a timeline.
Sticking to one frame allowed us to dynamically generate the animations of text and
of constellations, as opposing to predetermining and then animating them. We wanted
to create a space that would allow infinite possibilities for interaction and not
one where we had to predict how users would interact.

SLIPPINGGLIMPSE: We haven't seen any other video-based Flash pieces
with dynamic layering of text elements. We have seen motion capture programming
in performance and installation work, but not much online and rarely with text.

3-What is the relationship between the print work and e-work;
or, what is the relationship of interface and content?

SLIPPINGGLIMPSE: There is an ecologic-philosophic practice of threeing
(described in Paul Ryan's book, Video Mind, Earth Mind) that is related to the
three-mode structure of slippingglimpse. In this digital poem, we aim to give
equal weight to two kinds of language: to weight natural languages and human readers
equally with non-human languages-and non-human readers. The computer is, of course, a
non-human reader; but, in this piece, so is the water-and the water, as well, is a
non-human text, a text affected by gravity, by chaotic attractors and catastrophic
changes in state, patterning itself, resolving its interior motions into forms that
continuously renew. These forms are called chreods.

In slippingglimpse, water (in the 10 ocean videos) is the first reader.
We track the water reading by using motion capture coding that assigns the
text to locations of movement in the water. The metaphor is that the water's
motions provide a scanning, as our eyes scan text. This aspect is best read
in the full-screen mode.

In turn, in the scroll-text mode, the poem-text tracks, or reads, image/capture
technologies by sampling and recombining the words of visual artists who use digital
techniques. It combines their words with Strickland's own-and with words from an old
folktale, The Passion of the Flax, which explores the very oldest capture
technologies, such as harvesting plants for food and flax for paper.

Completing this "round-robin" of reading, image-capture videography-and-video-editing
read the water's flow pattern, reading for and enhancing these patterns to which
dynamical systems return even as they continuously change. The high-resolution mode
shows the chreod patterns best.

With respect to V: Vniverse and True North, versions of question 3
were posed in Jaishree K. Odin's Iowa Review Online interview
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/strickland/stricklandinterview.pdf

Born and based in England, writer/new media writer Sue Thomas
founded the seminal trAce Online Writing Centre in 1995. Her online
writing projects include the The Noon Quilt, a collaboratively-created
new media "quilt" of art and writing and the online forum Writing and the
Digital Life that explores digital technologies, writing, and lived
experience.

Published by Raw Nerve Books, Overlook, The Women's Press and Five
Leaves, among others, her print works include the cyberspace travelogue
Hello World: travels in virtuality; Correspondence; (short-listed
for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel) Water;
and Wild Women: Contemporary Short Stories By Women Celebrating Women.
She is currently writing The Wild Surmise, about relationships between
cyberspace and the natural world.

Sue Thomas is Professor of New Media in the Institute of Creative
Technologies and the Faculty of Humanities at De Montfort University.

Hello World: travels in virtuality

I fell into LambdaMOO in 1995 and knew immediately that it would change
my creative life for ever. Until then I had written text, but at Lambda
I could actually live in it, be made of it, and travel along it. I had no
idea what would happen as I began to learn how to be an artist of the MOO,
but I hung out in The Living Room ( @go #17 ) making a nuisance of myself
with Francesca da Rimini (Gashgirl) and other members of the Australian
feminist performance group VNS Matrix, and experimented with virtual presence
at a number of online events which exhorted participants to be ready to sit
by their computers for hours at a time ("Bring sandwiches" said an invitation
email) and playing around with our identities until everyone's heads were
spinning. I was writing all the time, but it wasn't a book, it was a life.
Entire days were spent typing, and I often turned on a capture file to log
every interaction, every conversation, every line of code. I built rooms,
emotions, and people. I morphed from one persona to another and swam around
in a mess of ego, mine and others, learning not just who I really was but
also who I really might be.

I wanted to write about LambdaMOO but I didn't know how. For several years
I tried to write a novel set there, but it was banal and embarrassing,
demanding enormous footnotes explaining to the reader exactly how it
really is possible to sit in a virtual hot-tub ( @go #388 ), have virtual
sex, or communicate telepathically. In the end I gave up - indeed, I gave
up writing altogether in despair at what seemed to be the limitations of
words. But it was only temporary. About a year later I had a revelation
when I realised there was no need to wrap the whole experience up into
fiction. What I needed to do was write about it as nonfiction. After all,
it was indeed very real, not just to me but to hundreds of others who
spent part of every day in text-based virtuality. Those imaginative
people at Raw Nerve Books picked it up and were enthusiastic about
providing a webview as well where I could add on all those extra
elements that only come to you after a book has gone to print, and
so in 2004, nine years after my first visit to LambdaMOO, Hello World:
travels in virtuality was published in hard copy and I, at last,
felt I had got to grips with my virtual life and could finally relax.

@go #388
The Hot Tub
The hot tub is made of molded fiberglass: on three sides a bench will
seat five comfortably (and ten who are friendly), and on the fourth
side there is contoured couch for one luxurious soak. There are two
rubber mounted buttons here. You may push either the right or left
button. The rising sun puts a rosy glow on everything. The
underwater light is on. The bubbling jets are on.
You see thermometer and Hot Tub Bar here.
Aaaahhhh! The water is at that perfect
temperature where you can just lie in here forever.
Splash!

Materials
Hello World: travels in virtuality is made with object oriented
programming via the LambdaMOO Core; lots of post-its and small notebooks;
manuscripts created with A4 paper and inscribed by nice black pens
(medium tip) then typed up in Microsoft Word; ink, print and paper via
Raw Nerve Books; PDF downloads; Typepad blogging software, and the user's
imagination.

I am now working on The Wild Surmise, a study of nature and
cyberspace which aims to bring the virtual and the material even closer
together -- http://www.thewildsurmise.com

Screen

Probably my most interesting work, from this perspective, is Screen.

When we were moving the Brown Cave from the SGI/Irix machines to
IBM/Linux machines, we knew we had to do major work to translate
the piece. So we decided to start over from scratch, creating an
approach to literary work in the Cave that became the basis for the
Cave Writing software project that continues today.

Here's a SIGGRAPH sketch on the initial work:
http://www.noahwf.com/texts/nwf-caveWriting.pdf

Here's the website with some information on the current effort:
https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/wdm/cave+writing+resources

And, in terms of my writing, you might be interested in these sections from
my forthcoming book that talk about the platforms used for story/game RPGs
and how they shape the experience:
http://grandtextauto.org/2008/02/05/ep-32-role-playing-games/

http://grandtextauto.org/2008/02/06/ep-33-an-example-star-wars-knights-of-the-old-republic/

Finally, yes, the Software Studies initiative is quite connected to these questions.
We're hoping to have a meeting next year to discuss the platforms/software used by
elit authors. I'm really looking forward to hearing more of what you find.

Dreamweaver is the central program I use for digital projects, an apt name for work
that goes a-dreaming, and everything seems to end up there. I also use an old version
of Photoshop, mainly for sizing photographs, and an array of smaller programs.
It's not the technology that interests me, and certainly not the interrogation of code,
but how language finds itself somewhere else, and sheds its limitations.

The Way North was originally titled "The Idea of North," as homage to an old
CBC radio broadcast by a genius named Glenn Gould. I chose "The Way" over
"The Idea" to indicate movement that's not only in the head, but kinesthetic too,
actual walking.

The project's theme is climate change, the importance of which I suggest visual
artists and poets haven't touched yet in any meaningful way. Focused on the
folkways of the Inuit People, whose culture has been the hardest hit, their
experience is one indicator of the future distress this planet is facing. A
northerner by temperament, who exiled himself in a southwestern desert for
23 years, The Way North is also a celebration of finding my way home.

I call the genre of my digital work, Digital Literary Art, which is the dream of
combining text and image begun during the Upper Paleolithic on cave walls
and itinerant rocks, and realized here primarily with text: how to write it
across and down a monitor; how to work it into a larger vision of itself.
There are also photographs, some sound, and animations, with text boxes
triggered by hidden links. In fact, all the links are hidden, my request being
that the reader caress the page to see what opens up.

I am a first-generation digital literary artist. Having grow up in front of a typewriter,
I was dragged to the computer, where I now comfortably live. For now at least,
what holds the two paradigms together is the keyboard, whose basic layout
remains the same. Like the land bridge that once spanned the Bering Strait,
we have something solid over which fingers walk and minds leap, so far.

Antoinette LaFarge
Mark Marino